A driving song set to the tune of Donna e mobile (almost)

Written after driving down the M6 onto the M5 and watching a taxi that had almost gone past the slip road, decide to stop in the centre lane, wait until the inside lane is clear and then do a right angled turn across that lane onto the slip road.  A lorry swerve all over the lanes as the driver struggles with a stubborn bottle cap and so on and so on and so on.

All well behaved in this picture

Morons are out today,

Lots more than yesterday,

I think that I must say,

They should be put away.

-

Keep clear my braking zone,

Please all just go on home,

You are not fit to roam,

Put them all away,

All away,

All away,

Put the morons all a-way.

The World According to Snafu - Security Cameras

Why do people bother with security cameras? How often have you seen a police copy of the footage taken from a security camera and even with the villain staring straight into the camera, you would have no clues as to whether or not it was Adam although the fig leaf would be a clue. The image quality is often so poor, that you can easily see the modus operandi, something that is already painfully obvious from the broken locks or other damage. Who the perpetrator is still remains a blurred indistinct mystery. We are often shown on TV and in movies how the police enhance an image and end up with a recognisable culprit, but that is fantasy. If you build an image from certain sized blocks of detail, there is no way you can take those blocks to pieces and get any more detail from them, any more than you can make a Van Gogh painting reveal any more detail than Vincent put into it in the first place. If you have security cameras for anything other than a deterrent, you need an image that reveals enough detail to make an indisputable identification. It is has been possible to buy an HD video recorder for under thirty pounds for some years now. A cheap camera that will produce the same kind of image a High Definition TV can display, so why haven’t security cameras caught up with present day standards? Even modern smart phones have better cameras on them than most security cameras, so why are they still so expensive and so rarely upgraded. A few more lines of detail could solve an immense number of crimes at a stroke. A few years ago we had a spate of car break-ins and our immediate neighbours lost some stuff from their car, so we both decided to put up some security cameras. The images were sort of Ok, but I was disappointed with the results. The cameras that came with the recorder kit, were too narrow an angle for one position, so I bought a more expensive one to cover that position and it produces images which were acceptable. The other cheap cameras worked OK in daylight, but even with their built in infrared lamps were pretty poor at night and fitted in well with my previous views of their use other than as a deterrent. Not only do they give a dim blurred image they make dark blue clothes white at night and pink in daylight! In the end I decided to upgrade all the cameras after a strange incident. We had a call from the local police. They wondered if I would mind letting them have a look at the footage from my camera for a certain date. I had no objection, so a few days later two police women came and had a look at what I had found on our system, it was not much and during the protracted business of extracting the recording from our DVR for the date they wanted, the darned thing crashed and refused to co-operate with the police. I apologised for wasting their time and told them I would get them a copy of the dates when I had persuaded the cranky thing to start working again. I was able to eventually get the dates they wanted but it was a vague darkened blur, something I had already pointed out to them it almost certainly would be, even when found. They duly returned a few days later to see what I had found. They had removed their shoes on the previous visit to preserve our carpets from their large standard issue police woman’s boots, but this time one asked if I would mind her leaving her boots on. She explained that the darned things were so difficult to get on and off it would be quicker if she could just slip on those blue overshoes you see in crime dramas, which she had in her pocket. So I agreed and we looked at the CD I had produced, decided it was not a lot of good and taking it with them for further examination took their leave. As the booted policewoman removed her blue overshoes, I remarked that I had only recently had to wear those, whilst cleaning out the house of a deceased relative. At which point the second officer exclaimed, ‘I know who you are!’. Not something you want to hear the police to say, however innocent you are. It turned out that her mother and father were the people who had been really helpful dealing with the property I was sorting out as executor to my brother in law’s estate. They had a key my late brother in law had given them and whenever we were not able to be there had let in estate agents and such and had generally been very helpful in keeping an eye on the place for us. It is a small world. Apart from the coincidence of the local police being related to our friends in the town where my brother in law had lived, the whole incident had made me aware that our security system was not so secure, in fact it was to put it bluntly, a load of poo! So I decided to upgrade, put my money where my mouth was so to speak. Having slated the industry in general I was beholden to act and so I bought a new DVR and after that had bedded in, I got some new higher definition cameras. The new DVR is great, you can search for a particular date and time and it does not go into a sulk and refuse to cooperate. Now we know what our paperboy looks like and who it is that keeps delivering all those nice shiny new leaflets for us to put straight into the recycling bin. One of the unwanted things that outside cameras do is record spiders. This does not happen in the day time because the webs are invisible, but at night when the infrared lamps turn on, they glow brightly and you can capture miles of footage of spiders busily building a beautiful web, which sadly I will have to destroy the next day. These new high definition cameras are brilliant, they produce a really sharp image and I have chosen wide angle lenses which capture more of what I want to keep secure. Whilst we were away on an extended visit once, someone attacked the hinges on our patio doors, but fell short of removing them before we got back, so one view is of those doors and the detail is brilliant, we can see next door’s cat in crystal clear reproduction as she prowls our garden in search of prey. She seems to have finished off all the frogs now and is looking for something else to exterminate. We can also watch the progress of the fox who craps on our front lawn, something we had hitherto believed to be the cat and so cleared her of that crime. I can also look at my cameras whilst anywhere, using my smart phone, so I do not even need to be home to see who is breaking in. The strange thing about high definition cameras are some of the things you see that you would otherwise miss, like this incredible footage.

I wondered why this violent blizzard was not heaping snow on the cars, until I realised it was not snow at all, it is fog. The bloody cameras are microscopes! The minute droplets of mist are illuminated by the infrared lights and look for all the world like snowflakes. Oh well, so much for high definition cameras.

Spring is springing

It looks as if spring has arrived at last in England.

Because it has been a warmer winter than usual, some plants are well ahead of others and we have had snowdrops in different parts of the garden for over two months now. Likewise our daffs are coming and going at different times, instead of all together.

Elsewhere, the waters are receding, allowing those poor distraught victims of the flood to try to recover what they can from their ruined possessions. We live near the headwaters of the Thames and the water meadows have been flooded as usual, but for longer than usual and now the rain has slowed down a bit and allowed us to experience whole days of dry * weather, the grass is appearing again here and there. 
 *Dry is a relative value, some days it has only rained for a few minutes, or has missed us by a few miles.

The water meadows near Cricklade

So hopeful signs all around for an end to the wettest winter on record.  We have even had some sunshine and I snapped this picture to prove it.

Look, blue sky!

They are doing some building work in a small town we visit from time to time which is about thirty miles from us. If you look closely you will see a poor man trapped up the eighty foot ladder waiting for something to do. It must be quite peaceful and warm up there inside that greenhouse-like cab and he is obviously relaxed and settled in for a long wait.

Looking closely you can see his feet.

Catchup part… I’ve lost count… Back again to Summer 2013

Microlights and Helicopters 
For my birthday two years ago, my number two son bought me one of those experience presents which was for a flight in a microlight aircraft. When I went to redeem it, I discovered that there was a weight limit, which to my shame I exceeded and so was not able to take the flight. Instead I exchanged the voucher for a helicopter flight which was the same price, therefore both finding an acceptable alternative and discovering what my number two son spent on my present. This delayed the time for the flight by several months.

The helicopter flight I wanted was to take place from Mapledurham, an attractive private estate that is old enough to have been mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086 AD). It is on the river Thames, with a slightly less ancient water mill and grounds adjacent to the river. The estate hires the old cottages there for holiday lets. Many years ago we had spent a holiday there and so we knew how to find it and the flight was going to take me from there over to Highclere Castle, the place where a lot of the filming was done for the Downton Abbey TV series. This did not excite me so much as simply being in a helicopter, not being a follower of that series.
Kingsclere is a place I used to pass by on route to my work when my office had been moved to Basingstoke which is fairly close to Highclere so I knew the area quite well. During that time there had been a lot of road works going on around Newbury, the town I passed through before bypassing Kingsclere. A lot of disruption had occurred whilst they built the new bypass and in the process had to cope with Swampy, the professional protester, who made the process a lot longer, annoyed a lot of commuters and achieved nothing but notoriety for himself.

Swampy and co being evicted from their favourite tree

The road which was built despite protests

As a result of the constant problems with my route, I had explored a number of alternative routes in an attempt to avoid all the congestion and had even gone as far as Highclere to escape the jams, but mostly I had roughly followed the route that Hazel and Fiver took on their epic journey from the Sandleford burrow to their new home on Watership Down. Mind you, it only took me about ten minutes by road to get from the Sandleford Link to the road running past Watership down, where you could see the ‘iron tree’ mentioned in the story, but rabbits cannot drive so it took them much longer.

Meanwhile, back to the helicopter flight, like most of these experience flights, they only fly during certain months and if the weather conditions are right, so it took several more months to find a window where I was both in England and almost in time for my next birthday the flight was on. You have to phone the day of the flight and twice I had been informed it was cancelled until finally that July, it was all systems go. This is fairly rapid progress for this kind of thing, where people have been known to wait two years or more for a similar experience.
It was my first time in a helicopter and so another thing to take off my bucket list and it was brilliant. I got an upgrade so that I could sit next to the pilot in the front of the machine and had a really great view of the ground we were passing over. As we rose up from the farmer’s field being used as a temporary airfield, Mapledurham House became visible and we headed off towards Highclere.

Mapledurham.  The house is in the background and the water mill is almost dead centre.  
Click any picture to enlarge

The view below my feet

On the way we passed over Greenham Common, once an RAF and American airbase used by nuclear bombers. Greenham Common had a lot of press many years ago because of the protest marches and demonstrations the CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) had held there.  Most of the time they were quietly peaceful and were largely run by a group of women who were rightly alarmed by the current Cold War attitude towards nuclear weapons. However, on occasions the protest became newsworthy when they became closer to riots than protests. The protestors had created a big campsite close to the site, which they occupied for several years.

Peacful demonstrators being urged to allow the car through

Greenham Common at the height of the protests

Many years later when this had all died away, when I was commuting past Watership Down, my route also took me past this site. In the intervening years the airbase had closed down and the site had become a business park but to my amazement, two of the protestors were still living in a caravan outside the gates. They would write protest notices on bed sheets and hang them on the fence, with a new slogan every now and then. I am not sure why they hung on to the site, since nuclear weapons were long gone by the time I used that route. Eventually they had to go because the local council put in a big roundabout where the caravan had been and they finally moved on when there was no longer any room for their caravan.

My view of part of Greenham Common as we flew over these bunkers

 After passing over Greenham Common, we circled Higclere Castle several times allowing us to take pictures and then returned to Maple Durham.

Highclere Castle

The other side of Highclere Castle

Newbury Racecourse

 I enjoyed the trip and took reams of pictures and on the whole felt that a microlight trip would have been somewhat less comfortable. Still if I want to fly like that, it seems I must slim down a bit!

Still catching up. Summer 2013, so long ago…

Over the last few months of 2013, I started to relate our adventures in Canada and the USA, where we went for our bi-annual trip to visit cousin Kaybee in Canada and The Son (TS) and family in the USA.  I had to do this retrospectively because once we returned home we were incredibly and unexpectedly busy and Blogging went out of the window for some months.   

We had arranged the timing of our trip to the states last year, so that it would bring us back home just in time to go on my old firm’s reunion and so the next weekend after arriving home, we were off to Bletchley Park where we had all booked into a nearby hotel.  Originally Bletchley Park was a private house in some large grounds in Buckinghamshire not too far from London, Oxford and Cambridge.   Because of its location it became the secret establishment for the codebreaking branch of British Intelligence in 1938.  During WWII the teams there broke the German and Axis force’s codes regularly from 1940 onwards. By 1944 there were about ten thousand staff working on the site and it is estimated that the war was shortened by approximately two years by their work. It is now a large museum of early technology related to codebreaking and computing.

The original house at Bletchley Park

Click on any picture to enlarge it

The Germans used a device known as an Enigma Machine and all their top security military communications were encoded via one of these machines. 

A three wheel Enigma Machine

To decode a message, you needed another Enigma Machine and the settings for the source machine.  Both code books and Enigma machines were kept in great secrecy by the Axis forces but eventually an Enigma machine was captured by the Polish Underground and brought to England. The codebreakers were now in a position to decode the German’s messages and only needed the key to the settings used by the Germans.  This was changed at midnight every night and so every day the codebreakers had to work out what the new settings were.   Since there are 158 trillion different possible settings, this was impractical to work through all of them, but using a machine built to run through a range of possibilities and a great deal of intuition, the team at Bletchley managed. The machine, called the Bombe, was designed by the mathematician Alan Turin and it is an impressive piece of electromechanical engineering.  It consists of a bank of drums that could be interchanged and set up to imitate the possible Enigma settings.   

The front of the Bombe, showing the interchangeable wheels. It is as tall as I am.

The operators then worked through enough different settings against a received message to eventually produce legible German text when the settings were put into a captured Enigma machine.  A working model of the Bombe still exists which, when operating, makes the most astounding din as the wheels and rotary connectors spin round.  It took about thirty minutes to produce a result, but not every result was correct, so the teams worked continuously until they obtained a result. 

The back of the Bombe, with the inspection panel open

Whilst there were Americans involved, and the Americans did eventually capture a German submarine complete with an Enigma machine and code book, unlike the implications of the movie Enigma. Most of the donkey work was done at Bletchley and the decoding of the Lorenz machine, an even more complex encoding system than the Enigma, that was used by the German high command including Hitler was done exclusively at Bletchley.  They did have some help from the Germans for this machine, since a German operator re-sent a message without changing the codes, giving them a great deal of help in identifying how the Lorenz code was set up.

The much more complex Lorenz Machine used by Hitler

Some of the best brains from members of the Allied nations caught up in the war, all worked on the means of decoding and analysing encrypted messages and the first digital computer systems were developed there to speed up the process.   In those days and for several decades after the war, in the UK, the Post Office was responsible for all telecommunications around Great Britain and overseas where both wireless and telecoms staff were at the leading edge of technology. This was borne out by the fact that Colossus, the first ever digital computer system, was built by Tommy Flowers, a Post office engineer.   The only comparable level of advanced technology around at the time was radar. The first electro-mechanical system was not fast enough to keep up with the data being read off teleprinter paper tape, so Tommy Flowers designed an electronic machine to do it.   It contained 1,500 thermionic valves (tubes in the USA).

The reproduction Colossus, complete with bored operator

Some of the 1,500 valves on a panel at the back of the machine

In terms of actual active components in the Colossus, whilst 1,500 was an unprecedented amount of valves at the time when a radio would usually have four. Colossus was the most complex electronic device of its time.  Today, your average smart phone will have several billion active devices, that is transistors, the modern replacement for the valve. Even a bog standard phone will have several hundred thousand transistors in it and both kinds of phone are small enough to fit in your pocket, so Colossus was not very complicated by today’s standards, but it was both the first and the fastest for the time and very impressive.  

A selection of ancient valves

A short discourse here on language regarding the US use of the word Tube.  The Tube is something you ride in under the ground in London, also a tube is the thing a toilet roll is wound on; a valve is something that only allows something to flow one way.  A thermionic valve only allows electricity to flow one way…QED valve is the proper name for these thermionic devices.

The cylindrical red one on the left hand side is an EF50. After the war, these were sold off in their millions and for amateur radio enthusiasts they were a boon and were to be found in all sorts of equipment, both commercial and home made.  When a teenager, I managed to get hold of a box of around fifty or so and spent a happy few weeks using them as airgun targets.  They held together long after being riddled with pellets and so could be used time and again.  Glass valves, whilst exciting because they made a bang when you hit them as the vacuum imploded, only lasted for one hit.  

These made a great air gun target

Whilst Alan Turing was heralded as the brains behind the Bletchley team, and he was amongst other fields of endeavour, a brilliant mathematician, he was not the only smart cookie there and people like Tommy Flowers, Bill Tutte and Gordon Welchman, plus many others contributed to the overall success of the establishment.  Many were never acknowledged because of the intense secrecy surrounding the place. All staff, however humble their role, were sworn to secrecy on pain of death (literally).  It was not until after the 30 year rule lifted the secrecy from much of the work that took place there, that people were able to say what they had done during the war. Many were so ingrained in the spirit of secrecy that they never revealed what they did and took their secret to the grave.  One of the stories we were told by the guides taking us around was that they had two elderly visitors there once, who, when they saw the places where they had worked, only then discovered that both of them had been part of the Bletchley team during the war.  They had kept the secret even from each other during sixty years of marriage and it was a revelation to them both.

Another blast from the past for me, this was the kind of oscilloscope that we used in my college way back in the 1960s when I was studying electronics.   So heavy it had to be placed on a trolley

Altogether a very interesting place to visit, especially for geeks and technophiles like myself and my erstwhile colleagues and we lingered over the ancient technology much to the distress of TBH and the other wives, who soon discovered where the coffee and tea was served to rest their tired feet.

That evening we had a Chinese meal together.  The following day we had originally booked another night in the hotel in order to explore the neighbourhood.  Unfortunately we had a lot to do as a result of my late Brother in law’s death, so we cancelled the hotel room and returned home a day early to start sorting out his affairs.  This unexpected and unwanted task took care of the next six months.  

The world according to Snafu - Another curmudgeonly rant.

Sea salt.
 Recently a firm in the UK has gained the right to name their product as coming from their local strip of sea and anyone else now using that name will be breaking the trading rules of the EU. The seawater they use to make their product is subject to ocean currents and wind, and consequently is arriving from many other parts of the sea. So as long as it happens to pass by their inlet pipes, they can now claim it is their exclusive brand of sea salt. So why become so paranoid about other people using that location name for seas salt that comes from water which may have come from anywhere, what is so good about it?
Surely the main component sodium chloride is what makes it salt and any kind of salt must be largely that. But there seems to be a myth that sea salt is better for you than any other kind of salt. How? Any kind of salt is not good for you if you add too much to your diet no matter where it comes from. So what makes sea salt good for you? If it comes straight from the sea, then whatever is in sea water will presumably be present too, therefore sea salt may have other mysterious ingredients that make it good for you. So what is in the sea besides salt? Well apart from minute traces of minerals, like iron, copper, zinc and gold and so on, which are always present in sea water, there is all that pollution we keep hearing about which is killing off sea creatures. Therefore there must be that nasty stuff, plus all the dead sea creature corpses in various states of decay, to say nothing of the lightly processed effluent that is released into coastal waters and of course this particular sea salt manufacturer is not too far from a couple of nuclear power stations that release their coolant water into the sea further along the coast, possibly adding a trace of uranium and other isotopes into the mix. To remove all these extra pollutants and make it safe to consume, they must remove all the impurities and produce pure salt. Isn’t that what non sea salt consists of? So tell me again, why is sea salt good for you?

Elastic bands.
Some time ago there was a campaign in the UK to stop the Post office from using red elastic bands to keep their bundles of letters together, because the posties were simply dropping them in the street and they made an unsightly mess in our residential areas. This was the case and a friend of mine had a large elastic-band ball he had made by simply picking up the hundreds of red elastic bands he encountered when walking his daughter to school. The campaign worked and we no longer see red elastic bands in the street. Just brown ones…

Another New Year

So here we are another year has come around and it is 2014. When exactly did the New Year start?
We celebrate the start of the New Year at midnight when the date changes, but that is a moving target, being at different times around the world. Large territories are artificially put into time zones, so that in some places, you can celebrate New Year, walk a few yards and an hour later celebrate it all over again. Why do we herald in the New Year at night? Traditionally we measure a day by taking the time from when the sun is highest in the sky and measuring the hours until it reaches the highest point at noon the next day, showing the world rotates once every 24 hours. Curiously if you measure the time at night, midnight to midnight looking at a fixed star in the absence of the sun, you find midnights recur at intervals a little less than 24 hours apart. This is a real effect and is known as sidereal time. It is useful to astronomers but no one else as far as I know.

Many New Years ago I was a technician in a radio astronomy research station and we had several clocks on the wall, one set to GMT, one to East Coast USA time and one to sidereal time. We were working with Florida University, hence the USA time and we were astronomers, who mostly work at night. On that project, we were listening to Jupiter which broadcasts radio signals that sound like surf on gravel.   Follow the link to hear the sounds.  No one knew why then but it turned out Jupiter has a magnetic field and as the inner moons orbit, they generate these signals in their upper atmosphere.

Anyway I digress, here it is 2014 and another year is started and we all agree it started at midnight on the last day of December. This was not always the case, the old year ended on the last day of May and April the first used to be the first day of the new year, but this was changed some time ago. However, accountants and bankers do not seem to have caught that news and continue to start their financial year on April fool’s day. I suppose they call it April fool’s day since they all get a whopping bonus every year from our money. Once upon a time, knowing the exact time was not so important and everyone set their clock by looking at the sun and calling it midday when the shadows were shortest. In England this was never a problem, even though in the far west of Cornwall, they were setting their clocks about ten minutes later than those folks living in East Essex. It really did not matter, but as transport got faster and trains became able to traverse the country in less than a day, time tables had to be adhered to. If they were not using a standard ‘railway’ time, the eastbound train was going to collide with the westbound train because they would not be at the passing place at the right time. To make sure this never happened, well not too often anyway, the whole country started to use the same time as London. So now we all agree when midnight is and we all celebrate the New Year at the same time in the UK. Mind you, if you are not a night person, you could celebrate at any convenient time, by finding the right foreign radio or TV program on the Internet and go to bed an hour or maybe two hours early. Always useful if you are one of those unfortunates who have to work on New Year’s Day.  So a happy 2014 to you all and happy blogging.

PS if you are still wondering how sidereal time works, see if you can follow this diagram.

 Because we are moving around the sun day to day it is a little further around before it get overhead. The star at midnight still appears to be in the same direction because it is so far away the change in position over one day is infinitesimally small.