Author Archives: qsf

18 feet of fun

There’s an old joke amongst motorhome and campervan owners that everybody buys three vans, in a kind of Goldilocks process.  

Your first one is probably something of an impulse buy, and after you’ve learned its limitations (in size, bed dimensions, interior layout, number of berths, or whatever) you then over-compensate, and so buy something that doesn’t work for you in some other way.  It’s only on your third van that you have sufficient experience to trade off all the various compromises in a way that works for you.  

This is such a common process that I’ve seen articles entitled “How to buy your third van first!”. If you manage to do this, by the way, consider yourself lucky.  Buying such vehicles, if they’re even vaguely newish, can be a ridiculously expensive business (only made at all palatable by how well they hold their value after purchase).  But if you want to increase the cost even more, do it three times, with the vendors/part-exchangers wanting to make a profit on each transaction!

I’m afraid to say, though, that we managed to fit the stereotype perfectly, and in January we swapped our second van for our third one.  And while we’ve always had fun in all of our vans, we’re delighted with this latest incarnation.

At just 5.4m long, it’s only a hand’s breadth bigger than a long-wheelbase Range Rover, and though it’s the most expensive vehicle we will probably ever own, it is at least considerably cheaper than the Range Rover, which may have seven seats but I gather doesn’t even come with a loo!  (As my friend Euan Semple would deprecatingly put it, it’s just an SPV: a single-purpose vehicle.)

Anyway, for us, this length was important.  You see, different people use their campervans or motorhomes for very different things, and until you have one, you may not know what you enjoy most, and hence what the key criteria are for you. If you plan to drive to Portugal or the south of France and spend a couple of months living in it each year, moving only occasionally, then you probably want something much bigger: something more like a holiday cottage, with comfy sofas, an oven and a television.

But we want a vehicle that’s good for exploring: something we can take into the middle of a village, or deposit in a Sainsbury’s car park, without inconveniencing others or standing out like a sore thumb.  Our first van, based on a long-wheelbase VW T5, was great for that.  But we soon discovered that we preferred smaller campsites to bigger ones, and these often provide fewer facilities, so we had to be a bit more self-sufficient, and we exchanged the VW for something bigger.

This one was still only 6m, which is still very much at the smaller end of the scale — but we found that we treated it rather differently.  We might park it outside a town and cycle in (which meant carrying the bikes).   We might have to search a bit longer for a suitable parking space.  And we’d be less likely to take it on a day trip somewhere, because it didn’t feel like a drop-in alternative to a car.  So, though we had some wonderful trips in it, after a year and a half, we swapped it again.

And this time we bought pretty much the smallest van we could find that still had the facilities we wanted. This lopped two feet off the length, and, I discovered only after we owned it, three feet off the turning circle. I hadn’t really considered this as a key factor, but it’s wonderful.  Now, we may still be bigger than most cars, but we’re quite a bit smaller than most Amazon delivery vans.

In the above photo, you can see that we basically fit into standard parking spaces, and I still find it hard to believe that inside our little tardis, there’s a compact but comfy double bed, a small but functional kitchen, an exceedingly good hot water and heating system and even a little wet-room loo/shower.  Yes, gentle reader, you could be parked next to us in, say, this car park at the Carsington Water visitor centre and have no knowledge that one of us is reclining on the bed reading while the other enjoys a hot shower!

And though this lacks the spacious seating and expansive table of our previous van, it does have something that was new to us: a fixed bed across the back of the van, always there and always ready to flop into, which doesn’t require you to rotate and fold seats, unroll mattresses, unpack duvets, and then reverse the whole process the following morning.  So transitioning from having a place to sleep to having a thing you can drive around is much quicker and easier.  Even on a single day trip, you explore a cafe and an art gallery, have lunch, and then enjoy a little siesta in a comfy bed before venturing out again in the afternoon.  Heaven!   A permanent bed takes lots of space, but underneath it, accessible from the back doors, is a big boot space, in which we can carry things like inflatable kayaks, anchors and outboard motors: something that was much less convenient in the previous van, for all its extra length, thanks to its emphasis on maximising daytime living space.

No van is, of course, perfect, and this certainly wouldn’t work for everyone, but we’ve owned it for a little over 120 days, and I realise that I’ve already spent 22 happy nights in it over that time, despite purchasing it right in the middle of winter!  I think that’s a good sign.  For this particular Goldilocks, at least, it’s just right!

 

Are you being a fuel fool?

Petrol pump handleI’ve been driving an electric car for about a decade now, but because we also have a fossil-burning campervan, I do still occasionally need to visit one of those dirty, smelly, legacy refuelling stations, so…

If you use a site like PetrolPrices.com, you can find out roughly how much fuel costs at the various petrol stations near you.

This is handy. But it’s not really what you want to know, is it?

You actually want to know whether it’s worth driving 10 extra miles to fill up your tank at a cheaper location, given the extra time and distance involved and the fact that your tank is already half-full at present. It’s not always easy to translate a potential saving of 2.5p per litre into a number that means very much. Will it, for example, help pay off your mortgage, or just let you buy an extra chocolate biscuit when you get there?

So, in a burst of enthusiasm this morning, I threw together a little calculator to help with the maths:

Are you being a fuel fool?

Feedback and bug reports welcome!

How daft do they think we are?

Our bathroom cleaner announces in large letters that it removes ‘up to 100% of bathroom grime and limescale’. I suppose there could be a more meaningless claim, but really…?

Still, perhaps it’s actually a disclaimer to avoid legal action from those who believed that it would remove more than 100%.

Can Quentin get Quantum?

Like many… shall we say… classically-trained computer scientists (i.e. old ones), I have only the vaguest notion of how quantum computing actually works.  My understanding of the various topics can be best pictured as a cloud-like set of probability distributions which doesn’t exhibit any very high peaks!

So I was quite taken with Grant Sanderson’s latest video in his ‘3Blue1Brown’ YouTube channel, which does lovely graphical illustrations of mathematical concepts (each of which tends to get viewing figures measured in millions.) It increased my knowledge considerably of the kind of algorithms one might be able to run on a quantum machine.

“But what is quantum computing? (Grover’s Algorithm)”:

 

(Direct link to YouTube)

GPT

I liked this funny and perceptive 5-minute film about AI, by Ari Frenkel. The more you’ve played with ChatGPT and the like, the more you’ll probably appreciate this.

(Direct link to YouTube)

Curiouser and curiouser

Amongst the more bizarre aspects of the Trump tariff announcements last night were the figures he came up with for the tariffs being charged by other countries.

Even people who are as unfamiliar with economics as I am wondered, “Where on earth did he get those from?” They didn’t seem to bear any resemblance to reality. And while lies are part and parcel of most Trump announcements, the numbers had to come from somewhere, surely?

Well, it turns out that’s because they’re actually not to do with tariffs at all. These are not extra costs being imposed by other countries. They are simply a measure of the trade deficit that the USA has with those countries. Or, to put it another way, the degree to which US citizens want stuff from your country more than your citizens want stuff from the US… that’s how much we’re going to punish your country.

The FT has more details and an appropriate dose of incredulity. As they point out, suppose your country sells lots of bananas to the US… Well, bananas don’t grow in the US, so Americans can’t buy them locally. But we’re still going to impose tariffs…

“The numbers [for tariffs by country] have been calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers … based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating,” a White House official said, calling it “the most fair thing in the world.”

Faster horses

Henry ford 1919.

I do like collecting quotations.  Here are some of the references to them on this blog, and I also have a collection of favourites here.

But one thing you quickly discover, if you dig a little deeper, is that a large proportion of the most popular favourites cannot be traced reliably to the people to whom they are commonly attributed.  

And here’s the latest example I’ve found… If you’ve done anything related to innovation or product design, you’ve probably heard Henry Ford’s famous comment:

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse!”

This is pretty well-known, but, once again, there seems to be very little evidence that he ever actually said it.  There’s a nice examination of the story on the Quote Investigator site.

If you’re like me, for some reason, you find this slightly disappointing.  But it’s hard to work out quite why.  Is it because, if we agree with a sentiment, and we then find that Henry Ford agrees with it too, it somehow validates our opinion?  “You know, Henry Ford agreed with me on this…”

 

Anyway, I’ve written about this before, and you can find further discussion of this idea by clicking on the image below.

Gell-Mann Amnesia

My thanks to Kit Hodsdon, who, responding to yesterday’s post, pointed out that there was a name for a phenomenon related to something I discussed there: the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.

This term was first coined by Michael Crichton, and to quote the Wikipedia page linked above, it describes “the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.”

The page is worth reading for more info. For example:

‘The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is similar to Erwin Knoll’s law of media accuracy, which states: “Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.” ‘

And what about the name? Crichton said he had once discussed the effect with the physicist Murray Gell-Mann “and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have”!

Very Artificial Intelligence

Regular readers might assume that I spurn all things AI-related, and this is not the case. I do use and occasionally derive benefit from the tools that tend to come under this all-embracing phrase du jour. But it does sometimes seem as if, for general questions, the LLMs can throw up wrong answers as often as right ones, and, like others, I then feel a compulsion to point this out. I had one week recently where three different ‘AI’ systems, in three completely different contexts, gave me three answers that were demonstrably wrong on key points.

So it’s important to know the answer before you ask them a question, in which case…

The real problem is the certainty with which assertions are made. There’s no expression of doubt, no humming and hawing, before the response.

Having been listening on my recent travels to the wonderful audiobooks of Patrick O’Brian’s stories, I thought it would be fun to ask ChatGPT about archaic naval terminology – did it know what was meant by ‘Three points off the larboard bow’.

It started with a cheery phrase along the lines of “Ah! Nautical terms! Always a source of interest.” and then went on to give various bits of authoritative information, even with helpful diagrams, but including the assertion that ‘A point in this context is one-eighth of a compass’s 360 degrees, so one point is 11.25 degrees.’

Mmm. Do a little calculation and you’ll see the problem.

I’m paraphrasing slightly, because when I went back to copy and paste the exact text, it had conveniently lost its history, and when I asked again, it made no mention of the ‘one-eighth’. (There are actually 32 ‘points’ on a compass, so the 11.25 degrees bit was correct. Four points are 45 degrees.) It’s a worrying thought: perhaps the system could detect that I was surprised and go back and cover its mistakes!

Anyway, it did get the rest of it right. ‘Larboard’ is an old word for ‘port’, which was abandoned in the mid-19th century because it sounded too similar to ‘starboard’. If yelled from the mast-top in the heat of battle in a gale, I guess this could cause problems. So ‘three points off the larboard bow’ means (roughly) 34 degrees to the left of the direction in which the ship is pointing.

Many, many years ago, when a couple of the projects I was working on started to get some press coverage, I remember noticing that, in general, every single article about my work contained errors. (There were a couple of exceptions — the Economist was one — but they were notable for their rarity.) These were generally unimportant mistakes, and they were made by well-intentioned journalists working for reputable papers back in the day when they could afford to do real research but who were, after all, humans. It was an important lesson for me in my youth: you can detect the errors in the things you know about, but remember that every article you read about anything is probably similarly flawed.

This is why I think it is important to keep taking note of the times we can detect wrong answers, because they will also happen in places that we cannot so easily detect. I wonder if adding more human-like phrases to the output of LLMs will enable us to take what they say with a pinch of salt, too? (Sea salt, of course.)

Time warp

I realise that I should be slightly more cautious about my use of phrases like ‘today’ and ‘this morning’ in my posts, since quite a few of my readers receive them by email the following day. In the days of the Trump regime, phrases like ‘The news looks a bit better this morning’ have a very limited lifespan!

Ah well. Here’s yesterday’s (or the day before yesterday’s) Matt cartoon:

Peace for our time?

How very strange to wake this morning thinking about Starmer and Trump – as Churchill and… Neville Chamberlain.

I’m sorry Neville, you really didn’t deserve that!

I didn’t think about either of them for long, though, because I’m in my campervan looking at Lindisfarne (just visible in the background), where I’ll be heading after breakfast, when the tide falls low enough to expose the causeway.

The bed is across the back of the van, which meant that I could quite literally open the window and look out at this view without my head leaving the pillow.

Peace for the time being, at least. And the news is more encouraging this morning too.

More coffee-pot nostalgia

For those who read this blog and haven’t yet exhausted their enthusiasm for Trojan Room Coffee Pot nostalgia, Peter Leigh has just produced what is perhaps the best video about it yet, on his ‘Nostalgia Nerd’ YouTube channel.

(Direct Youtube link, for those reading by email)

You’ll have to get busy skipping YouTube ads, but it’s very nicely done.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser