C'est Magnifique...

-

Just watching with interest a BBC TV documentary about the final stages of the rebuilding of Notre-Dame de Paris; the monumental exercise in heritage conservation started in the wake of the fire that nearly destroyed the cathedral in 2019. The attention to detail, the craftsmanship and the fidelity to the original medieval construction techniques the various teams of conservators and artisans are bringing to the project is immensely impressive, and serves to emphasise the phenomenal skills that the original builders themselves possessed and brought to the original construction of the cathedral in the twelfth century. The first time I visited Notre-Dame was back on our first holiday in France in 1983; we were blown away by the place then, and I look forward to a revisit when the building's renovations are complete.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Of Feedback & Wobbles

-
Image
Many years ago I came up with an analogy for poorly damped feedback loops. The feedback loop that prompted this frankly tart analogy was indeed a horror. Anyone who remembers shame-faced their first attempts at clutch control resulting in the good old kangaroo launch across the lights only to stall in the middle of the crossroads will have some idea of the kind of data transfer lag involved in said system. The analogy I made was that of a large blancmange. Untouched, a model of stasis and eminently stable and predictable; but prod the bugger and the resultant chaotic behaviour needs a very complex physical model and some very decent computing horsepower to predict its outputs, if at all. The system in question was a large and complex audio-visual display at what eventually became 'The Electric Mountain' in Llanberis. We were ultimately contracted to maintain the thing having been witness to and peripherally involved in its installation. Certainly not involved in its des...
Read more

A Time of Connection

-
Image
I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...
Read more

Little Camera, Mini Phoenix

-
Image
Well - the latest mini-project is sorted and ready for testing: the above is an EBay find that, even though costing not a lot, was nevertheless in a pretty sorry state when it turned up the other day. The camera was a cheapish point & shoot 35mm camera made for GAF by Chinon way back in the mists of time. I fancied it because I've been on the lookout for simple auto-exposure street film cameras lately: something to just capture stuff, firing from the hip; so to speak. This one one was jammed solid, although a cursory look showed that the shutter and aperture blades seemed to be working OK. It was just that the film transport mechanism was pretty much locked solid. I did the usual thing and took off the bottom plate to see what I could find. Not being familiar with this camera, I took some time to work out just how the mechanism should work, in the absence of any online information to give me a clue. After a bit of head-scratching and disassembling, I figured it out and with the...
Read more