A bygone era

N, HO and O gauge

Sorting through stuff during Ali's Major Spring Clean I uncovered the above remnants of a bygone era. My own N gauge Treble-O-Lectrik by Lone Star which would be collectors' pieces if only they were in good working condition. The next by Triang and KitMaster both from my father's extensive railway room layout. And finally a piece of Lima O gauge stock which I think my father had purchased for a future but was never-to-be outdoor layout.

My parents had invited a young man A to Sunday tea. He was the son of the lead elder in my parent's church, and would in due course go on himself to become the present lead elder. He is also a major character in another story. Oh, cruel memories! Now my father often sneaked off to the the railway room of a Sunday afternoon, much to the chagrin of my mother who thought Sundays should be family days, and I would shortly follow suite and so we would be entrenched until my mother called up the loft staircase "tea time!" But on this occasion it would not have been decorum to so disappear - instead my father asked A if he would like to come and see the model railway. A declined. What an anti-climax! What a revelation into the mind of this young man - I mean, who, in their right mind, would decline such an offer? What a recrimination on church leadership! Did this mean you could not reasonably be a model train enthusiast and a fully committed Christian 100% for God? At the time the choice was obvious for myself. Model trains ruled, OK?

And, just to prove that I do not spend all my time side-stepping figuring how to pose the continuation of my Gunpowder post, here's the lake looking downstream from the Blessington bridge, the photographer having been conveyed there by his trusty bicycle.

 

Gunpowder, band-wagon and lot: Part 1

 

This post has nothing to do with Guy Fawkes or gunpowder except insofar that strong personal beliefs can lead people to do whacky and horrendous exploits. Many of these, thankfully, are relatively benign but they can still adversely affect innocent peoples' lives. And every so often a belief will culminate in something as severe as a plot to overthrow a government.

Some examples include the flat earthers, holocaust deniers, possibly even the more extreme pro-Trumpers. What about so called Christian outfits like tele-evangelist Benny Hinn, Bethel Redding, Hill Song? Or the whole Charismatic movement with its emphasis on "spiritual gifts"? Or creationists, atheists. Don't get me wrong here: I am not condemning or condoning any particular belief: let each man be fully persuaded in his own mind. But I notice that each of these entities use a mix of peer pressure, playing on emotions, mass hysteria, exclusivity, suggestion and even hypnosis to promote their ideologies, even if unwittingly. 

Sometimes labelled "radical", "extreme", "cult" or "conspiracy theory", they can be recognised through non-sequiturs and other nonsense appearing in their teachings. An example in a recent search for sanity I happened upon in a YouTube video The #1 reason evolution is impossible saddened me because the #1 reason, though thoughtfully presented, was flawed from the outset as any Physicist would tell you. Just scroll down the comments.

It has been said that we humans have a God shaped hole that yearns to be filled. Perhaps there is more in this than meets the eye. Just as a dog likes nothing more than to play catch, perhaps the need for religion is just a part of the make-up of every human which has evolved over millions of years as a sort of defence mechanism to give us some sense of meaning to life or, if you prefer, was placed there by the Creator as a proof of existence. The idea is explored in more detail here. After all, about 84% of the current world population identify with a religious group and that does not include atheists (who also take their position on faith). And 75% of US adults identify as Christian. Can they all be wrong? Well, actually, yes - if it be that humans are born with this need no more or less than being born with two legs. And if so be, it does not follow necessarily that God exists.

And so I come to relate the sad case of the Irish Dodo...

(to be continued in Part 2)

More lump and beautiful Devon

The final touches on that bowl I found in a lump of firewood - the elegant punctures rule this bowl out for wine drinking, but turn it into a knitting yarn bowl. I cannot vouch for the two small holes in addition to the spiral - but that's how they are.

And now in mid Devon again, running barefoot through sticky mud in Hunkin Wood and my favourite Culm river meadows and enjoying the daffodils.

 

I found this in a lump of firewood

 

Just as Michelangelo must have seen David inside a block of white marble, so this bowl came out of an odd piece of firewood which otherwise I would have thrown in the boiler. The photograph hardly does it justice: the grain patterns are beautifully complex and it is silky smooth to the touch. Whereas the firewood out of which it arose was rough, ill-shapen and full of knots.

Is this a picture of the human psyche? That something so profound could lie inside a rough exterior? If so I would hasten to point out that both firewood and bowl are of the same material, and each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. 

Cold

Sunday afternoon, sub-zero temperatures, the lake beginning to freeze, a run around the Kings River loop 9.2 miles. Others on walks complained of slippery conditions but barefoot I had good traction.

Five pixels?

The great thing about playing down birthdays is that there are approximately 364 un-birthdays in a year and on one such day an unassuming brown cardboard package was placed in front of me at lunchtime here by my resident daughter, whilst across the table my resident son was videoing me on his cell-phone and telling me to open it. Which I duly did and, wow! A Pixel 5, a gift from my children here and far-and-wide and their respective partners. Wow! And thank you all! 

What more shall I say? Time would fail me to tell of the wonders this piece of kit can perform: well actually I have hardly had a chance to find out yet. Doing the connect-your-new-Pixel-to-your-old-phone-and-transfer thing was simple and successful except, as expected, it left out the GPS mapping and tracking app Oruxmaps that I use when hiking and running. Because "it has been removed from Google Play because it violates the payments policy" so it has to be installed directly from the Oruxmaps website. And then there was the deal about it maybe not tracking in the background, but I managed to navigate through all that. So yesterday I took my new toy on a run to confirm that tracking is, indeed, working correctly and checked out some of the new camera features.  

There are two main cameras in addition to the front facing selfie camera. The "x2" option, I am informed, is a software enhanced digital zoom. I'm a bit wary of digital zooms so I'm hopeful that the software enhancement does its bit.  You can click on these images to view full size, but doubtless "full size" will not be the full native resolution because Google pics downgrades one's photos on the free account I have.

Wide angle camera

Standard camera x1

Standard camera x2

Panning to left to include Mullaghleevaun

Love hate Python

There was Visual Basic 6 (VB6)... and then there was Python.  Both are interpreted languages (i.e. they run from a high-level script rather than being compiled into machine code). Both claim to be easy to program with and both have a huge following. Python is current whereas VB6 is no longer supported.  Python is free whereas Microsoft have made VB6 neither free nor available but say that it is superseded by VB.NET.  But these are very different languages. Having sharpened my teeth on plain BASIC (e.g. BASIC PLUS in college days, QuickBASIC running under MSDOS) I progressed to VB6 which I used extensively for creating test software to exercise electronics I have designed in the course of my work.

In case I ever have the privilege of helping homeschoolers here with teaching computer science, I figured I ought to learn a current language. I did a bit in C# a few years back for a work project and, whilst C# is a very powerful language (meaning you can do certain complex things with minimal coding), I found its syntactical gamut too much for my poor brain. So, what more suitable to up-and-coming programmers than Python, or so I have been told?

Many years ago I authored some QuickBASIC code that would display prime numbers in a square spiral.  The essential part took a mere 20 lines of script, and here's the output, limited to the VGA 640x480 screen resolution of the day with each integer represented by a single pixel. You can click on each image to zoom in.

The point of the program, apart from being an exercise in graphical output and being cool, is to highlight the mainly diagonal line patterns that prime numbers arranged in this way make. Anyway, this became my first Python challenge.

Here's the output of my Python code - a bit prettier because now each integer is represented by a 4 x 4 pixel square. Value 1 is plotted as a blue square, otherwise primes are red and non-primes grey. The essential part was almost 100 lines of code and took a long time to code. OK, so I am a novice but even so...  I tested it with three different algorithms for finding the primes - the fastest involved saving the primes in a Python list.

And here's the same in VB6.  It was so much easier to do the graphics part in VB6.  Python graphics is anything but intuitive and seems to employ the longest path to achieve the least credible results, whereas in VB6 you simply drag and drop graphic widgets and then click on them to open their respective code space. That they are event driven is taken for granted unlike Python.

Oh, and although no-one on ever claimed VB6 was fast, without pausing to do animated screen redraws I found my VB6 code ran about twice as fast as with Python.  I tried different prime algorithms but found the VB6 code ran fastest by dividing each integer numerator by all the denominators from 2 up to the square root of the numerator, which for large integers involves many more test divisions than did my Python code. That VB6 was still significantly faster says something in its favour.

And then, although Python is an interpreted language like VB6 or QuickBASIC, it has no native integrated development environment (IDE) so testing and debugging entails constant swapping between your chosen text editor (I used Notepad++) and the command line.  Although there are 3rd party IDE's and I am currently investigating Microsoft "Visual Studio Code" which, surprisingly, is free.

So do I love Python? Well, not yet, certainly! 

Face masks forever

It's not that I think face masks are totally ineffective in preventing the spread of Covid-19. But probably they are more of a statement of conformity and a reminder for others to "keep their distance" than having any real benefit. It's pretty clear that they do not stop all emanation of droplets from the wearer's nose or mouth but arguably they might direct airflow to the sides and thus away from... well that depends on where the objects of contamination are standing...

And then there is the argument that a mask will harbour nasties and thus exacerbate the problem. I've spoken to a qualified nurse involved on the front line and she pointed out that medics should replace their mask every 2 hours to mitigate this effect, thus clearly admitting this problem. Meanwhile the rest of us indefinitely re-use our single-use masks.

There is a considerable degree of absurdity about the whole issue of face masks.  There is also a deal of misunderstanding like a neighbour I noticed mowing her rear lawn whilst wearing a face mask. Or a cyclist passing me wearing a face mask. Presumably they mistakenly think it will protect them? But I reckon the following examples take the absurdity ticket.

I happened upon a Youtube video of Gustavo Dudamel conducting Mahler's Adagietto from Symphony No. 5. to an empty outside auditorium. All the musicians were not only socially distanced but also wearing face masks! In that video there were only strings and a harp but take a look at these pictures below that I grabbed from the internet. An apt comment on one web site was: How useless , ridiculous and humiliating for the poor musicians who are ready to accept these inhuman conditions in order to keep their job and continue their passion.

Note some but not all examples seek to cover all the exit holes as well as nose and mouth. You have to at least give these ones 10/10 for effort, even if there is little chance of any efficacy. 

Turkey Tail

We are in Willand again and I have been set the task of collecting Turkey Tail fungus (TT) which, I am told, has desirable medical properties and is plentiful. So I added this task to my existing tendency to go for runs, barefoot. Having visited the pop-up cafe in Bridwell Park to buy cake from their Covid-19 takeaway service and finding that at present they welcome folk to exercise in their private grounds (hoping it will increase sales of cake), I added this place to my run-list and discovered the seemingly one and only instance of Turkey Tail in the whole of this part of Devon. 

nicely rotted timber, but no TT

remains of Culm Valley light railway

rotten wood, fungus, but I think it's not TT

An ideal habitat, but could not find TT

Beautiful, dead, inaccessible, no TT

Ha! Some bracket fungus, but not TT

A stag in Bridwell Park

My former swimming place, note the noose

Noose from other side (how did I get there?)

Could this be TT?  Apparently not

or this?

wrong shape

might be, but we erred on side of caution

certainly not

Ha! At last! We harvested this

Strange pyramid in Bridwell Park

This monument was strange, ugly and out of keeping IMHO. My research yielded only one hit which claims that some 250m east of the house stands a pyramid composed of stalagmites, which incorporates a trefoiled piscina. I reckon the piscina (a shallow basin placed near the altar of a church) had been removed and there was no sign of a church nearby either. Mysterious.  The marquee in the background was part of the "pop-up cafe" before Covid-19 came along.

The lake at Bridwell

More TT

Please don't let me miss Autumn this year

 

Beech avenue, Manor Kilbride

Last year I apparently missed it. So even though it was overcast (contrary to the weather forecast) I ventured out with the intent of making it to the Sally Gap and the two Bray Loughs (far left in map below). Alas I ran out of time and was cold anyway so took my photos and hurried home. To lamb chops and apple pie (not together) courtesy of my beloved daughter (one of them).  Here's a link to more photos.

33 miles, elevation gain 720m

The end is nigh

 Moore's Law is the empirical observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two year and it has approximately held true since it was proposed in 1965.

It is driven by the economics of the insatiable demand for ever increasing electronics complexity and the steady reduction in feature size in the fabrication of silicon chips (integrated circuits).

In 2013 Robert Calwell vowed the end would come in 2022, maybe even 2020, with the herald of 7nm and even 5nm feature size.

And today the BBC has announced that Apple's new flagship iPhone 12 will incorporate the "A14" processor with 5nm feature size - the chip's transistors have been shrunk down - the tiny on-off switches are now only about 25 atoms wide - allowing billions more to be packed in.

These electronic chips use "solid state" technology, i.e. they have no moving parts which makes it sound like they can never wear out, will last forever short of physical damage. Alas, such is a dream. I am well used to using Flash and other types of non-volatile solid state memory (chips) in my work and I am all too aware that the specification documents mention a lifetime of sometimes as little as 100,000 re-write cycles. When software is running at GHz speeds this many can clock up quite fast!

Chips are made by first growing a very pure silicon crystal, slicing it into wafers, and then diffusing into it a photographic pattern of known amounts of certain impurities that give the silicon its required special electrical properties. Diffusion (the intermingling of substances by the natural random movement of their particles) is both the essential mechanism and Achilles' heel of solid state chips.

Back in college days I was told that the lifetime of a solid state circuit was limited by diffusion - what can be diffused in to make it work can, by the same token, diffuse out and self destroy it. OK, it is diffused in at high temperature where the particles are in much stronger random movement, so what may take seconds to diffuse in might take many years to diffuse out at room temperature. But the smaller the feature size, the more likely that diffusion defects can occur - the particles have less distance to move.

The aging problem is discussed in this paper - so I am not just imagining it!  Many people regard their cell-phone as a consumable item, with expectation that it be replaced after a year or so. Those people may have limitless bottoms to their purses but I, for one, am happy enough with my Pixel 2 and have no desire to shell out to upgrade it. So I'm hoping that all those billions of transistors inside will not diffuse into randomness too soon. All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.