Observations from a Hill

Following on from last night's exasperated economic sigh, I was reading - again in last week's New Statesman - an interview with author Dan Wang's take on America's changing role in world politics under Trump: the courting of Russia and China and the focus on AI as the future of the American economy. The interview was long and detailed and his conclusions too wide-ranging to summarise in the few words of tonight's post, but some key points are worth picking out of it. The underlying faith in AI as the next US gold rush is largely based on the performance of Silicon Valley over the past several decades: a tech bubble on the west coast that functions almost as a separate national entity, unlikely to continue indefinitely as the physical and economic constraints of the semiconductor industry, software bloat and the voracious hardware demands of AI really start to bite. The truth is that the industry will hit a physical capability and manufacturing capacity brick wall, ...

For the most part, I've often felt like a lone voice in some sort of Biblical wilderness, quacking on about the reasons why the world - well at least the human race - appears to be in constant self-destruct mode, economically. Economics, as I've always maintained, is not a science. At best, it equates to some manner of astrology or quack medicine, and like both is rooted in centuries past: attempts by ill-equipped minds to explain the unexplainable. I was reading a cover piece in this week's New Statesman by Ed Conway, which rang so true with my long-held belief that economic dogmas - which come and go in long periodic cycles - are nowt more than fictions concocted by the uninformed and blindly optimistic to attempt to explain the vicissitudes of the market economy. We know only too well the vagaries of trying to predict the behaviour of the world's climate. And predicting the fluctuations of economies is, like predicting the weather, at best an educated guess. The clos...

Here we are again in messing-around-in-the-workshop-land. Yesterday I decided to make a replacement for the most trivial of kitchen-things: the kitchen-roll holder; which in our kitchen had hitherto been an inverted toilet roll holder that I jury-rigged a couple of decades ago as a quick and dirty job and which has remained, irritatingly [mea culpa] since then. Anyway, I thought I'd just knock together a couple of bits of flatwood and some dowel to cobble together a freebie solution to this rather banal problem. Finding out that I had no drill-bit size to allow the only dowels in my possession to work in my imagined scenario, I decided on what might be considered to be the nuclear option instead, opting to shave the offendingly-large stick down to a more manageable dimension in order to fit the only hole size I could drill. Then I thought on, as you do, and decided to turn the spigots on the dowel on my old man's old Myford ML4 [blog posts passim] metal-turning lathe. I might a...

OK - pictured  is my repast tonight of leftover roast chicken tacos. This is not really one of my normally gratuitous food post throwaways as this particular recipe is a revelatory one to me. I really wish I could have come up with something so simple, cheap, quick and tasty myself, but I didn't. I caught this one on 'Saturday Kitchen Best Bites' yesterday, cooked by a guy called Miguel Barclay, whose online cooking channel is characterised by the basic philosophy of making 'tasty, easy, wholesome meals for a quid apiece'. All I can say is the boy can really cook. This little number took me less than half an hour to prep and cook and was as tasty as anything I've ever eaten. The key to his style is the concentration of as much flavour as possible in the shortest time with the fewest and cheapest of ingredients, using a few crafty, chef's techniques to achieve the aim. Just head to the BBC Food website and search for him for the recipe. Just remember to get a...

OK, following from last night's teaser, I said I'd riff on the success or failure of good ideas, and that one of the great ideas that didn't make the grade was the Apple Newton: the MessagePad, from the early-mid 1990s. I have to say I loved the device, despite its obvious shortcomings, and even foresaw using it as an integrated part of a suite of show-control programming gear for theatre presentations, turnkey visitor installations, museum displays, and so on. Unfortunately the device's tenure on this earth was short-lived and for one good reason: handwriting recognition, or rather its piss-poor performance in that department. It was a great idea pulled up short by the immature hardware available. Apple tried to run with this one before it could walk. Three years later, we were producing a piece of software that sought the opposite goal: to straighten out the shortcomings of contemporary hardware and make it do what no-one else had thought to do properly. We took a sim...

The nicety [there's that word again] that determines the success or failure of a truly great idea is timing. Timing either of technical or market readiness; get either wrong, and no matter how truly groundbreaking your concept is, it will drown at birth and you will live to ruefully see it resurface as someone else's cash cow product. I know from personal experience, as I've mentioned before in these pages. Get the timing wrong and you will fail, no matter how good your idea or product. This diversion was prompted by a small piece on Medium about the Apple Newton [which I loved at the time of its introduction], which failed on both counts; however I'm too knackered to carry the thought much further, so I'll come back to that train of thought when I've had a good night's sleep. I'll leave you with the above picture: the sunset from Fairview Heights this evening. It really was as spectacular as it looks in the image. It serves to highlight that 'succes...