Observations from a Hill

As the weather beats an unseasonal tattoo of hail and sleet against my window, dragging us unceremoniously back into the depths of winter even as the bluebells are starting to bloom, I've managed a degree of internal warming due to the pictured pot of an experimental mushroom curry I made this evening. I started out, as usual, following someone else's recipe path and then, as always, found a virtual fork in the road to follow instead. I didn't hold out much hope for this one, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised at the lightness of the result, and pleased at the extra kick I'd given it with some whole fresh green chillis. All in all, not half bad for a kitchen oddments special. I've just opened a bottle of cheap claret, and I might just hazard a bowl of tobacco before I settle in for the evening...

When it comes to selling green tech and energy generation to the general public, I would say we've been using the wrong narrative to convince people with limited resources to buy into the the new low-carbon revolution. Everything hitherto has been framed in grand gestures and bleeding edge technology, none of which is affordable to most of us. £30-40k for a car? £10k for a solar installation? Heat pumps, ground source, passivhaus, triple glazing and the rest of it spell a second mortgage [if you're lucky enough to own your own place] even given any available grant support. Couple this with the largely shaky trustworthiness of pretty much global private outsourcing in the provision of the stuff, and you have a pretty solid recipe for general apathy regarding adoption, leaving the uptake of green tech to the fashionistas-with-the-dosh who oh-so-want to demonstrate their green creds in offsetting their otherwise ludicrously energy-profligate lifestyles. A re-framing of the basics ...

...But Oddly Normal... I'm not oft given to wistfulness: introspection and reflection, yes; but wistfulness strikes me seldom and strangely, as was so this afternoon. And the unlikely trigger for this impulse is pictured: a rather unremarkable old pigskin case of mine. This camera bag I bought on a day out to Coventry some forty-eight years ago, when Jane and I went to see the iconic Coventry Cathedral - the only time I've visited the place - and have a wander about what is actually a far more interesting city than most imagine. Like so many places, it was despoiled in the 1960s and '70s by the increasingly powerful road transport and planning lobby that tore so many of our cities and towns apart in the service of the motor vehicle at the expense of local populations and history alike; but in common with so many of these, Coventry has a rich history behind it to be discovered within its precincts. My response to digging out this simple camera case, though, was on  the surfa...

Mission critical. First define your mission, then define the points of criticality where failure would be potentially or actually mission catastrophic. Outline those breakpoints and define failsafe exit strategies to escape any potentially catastrophic error in the execution of your mission. These sorts of checkpoints are second nature to the kinds of human activity and exploration such as space travel, where the margins for error, particularly in cases such as the current mission to and from the moon, are vanishingly small; and where there is an almost total reliance on computers and software to achieve the safe passage of machine and crew there and back. Nasa and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory know this utterly: their standards of software control are second to none. They operate under conditions of multiply redundant software systems that fail safe and delegate to the next tier of machine control by default. In the days of the Apollo missions, software was small in scale and largely ...

  I've expressed doubts about modern space exploration programs and the underlying motivation behind most of them in these pages probably many times, now; but the Artemis mission has rekindled in me some of the wonder that I first experienced when the first astronauts made it to the Moon back in my early adulthood back in the late sixties. From the start of this mission, there has been a real sense of voyage to it, not mere remote, robotic interference, but exploration in the truest, most human sense of the word. And the key here is the word human, with all its manifest and manifold semantic depths laid out in the form of one actually quite simple quest. The complexity of science and technicality underpinning that quest cannot be ignored, but the goal of the enterprise, ultimately, is still simple and visceral: '... to seek to find and not to yield...' . Which is so unlike the billionaire tech bros and their dick-waving contests and colonial instincts: this mission is foun...

We went over to Nantlle today for a wander around the old slate quarries there. We hadn't been for I guess a good thirty years, although I wrote about the place in these pages last year . It seems that at long last, there is some public admission that there is a major contamination problem in one of the upper quarries of the group, something we two were aware of some forty years ago. It is also the reason why no-one who buys the Nantlle quarries can ever get past first base in developing the place for leisure use for the general public: the cost of cleaning up the quarry in question would simply be prohibitive and could not attract any serious finance so to do. Pictured is an example of signage on the site that never existed before, in the days when the unitary authority simply glossed over the serial failures to complete any sale of the site to commercial third parties, all of whom ran a mile when the truth of the contamination and its scale became manifest at each successive surv...