Category Archives: General

Waste not

On Wednesday I was part of a group that visited Thalia Waste Management, a substantial local domestic-waste-processing and recycling facility, and it was most interesting.  

Quite apart from seeing some of the machinery and getting a feel for what actually happens to the stuff in those bins you leave on the kerb, we heard some humorous stories. They told us, for example, about how the machinery which processes food and garden waste from our green bins is sometime brought to a grinding halt because somebody has used them to dispose of old garden tools and machinery.  It’s garden waste, after all…!

I wrote last year about ‘The Recycler’s Confession‘:

We have left unrecycled those things  
which we ought to have recycled;  
and we have recycled those things  
which we ought not to have recycled.

and wondered which was the greater sin.  

Well it turns out that the residents of most of Cambridgeshire can recycle much more than I realised.  

In the past, we couldn’t recycle black plastic containers, for example (because the optical systems used to distinguish plastic types couldn’t cope with it), but that’s less of an issue now, mostly because there’s a lot less black plastic used in packaging (for this reason). Also, in the past we were told not to recycle cellophane film, so for 20 years or so I have been carefully tearing it off the front of my Parma Ham packaging.  This, I discover, is no longer needed.

But in the UK the rules do vary widely from place to place.  This is partly because of the different recycling facilities available now, and partly because of the availability of, or economic viability of, those facilities available when the contracts were signed with the local authorities.  In my local area, the rules for Cambridge city and South Cambridgeshire are different from East Cambridgeshire, even though the waste is processed in the same location.  Peterborough is different again.

So the chap who was showing us around recommended RecycleNow, a handy site which lets you type in your postcode and search for exactly what can and can’t be recycled in your area.  Most useful.

Overall, the visit was an encouraging experience, but I was considering the waste which still goes to landfill, despite the impressive efforts of Thalia and others.  I wondered whether perhaps, one day, it will be economic to go back process some of the materials that aren’t economic now, in the same way that the slag heaps from mines can yield up new treasures today when we discover that demand for some element suddenly makes them worth re-processing.  

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that, one day, someone will invent a car battery for which polystyrene is a vital component!

 

 

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Checking out the competition

Google has just announced the launch of the Bard chatbot, its competitor to ChatGPT, and I, no doubt like many others, immediately went to compare their performance when asked some of the key questions of our age:

ChatGPT 3.5

The blog "Status-Q" is written by Neil Gaiman, a British author known for his works in the fantasy genre, including novels like "American Gods," "Neverwhere," and "The Sandman" comic book series. Neil Gaiman is also known for his involvement in various creative projects across different media, including writing for television and film. "Status-Q" is his personal blog where he shares thoughts, updates, and various musings. Please note that information may change over time, and it's a good idea to verify the current authorship if there have been any changes since my last knowledge update in January 2022.

Mmm.

OK, well, let’s try…

Bard

Quentin Stafford-Fraser is the author of the blog 'Status-Q'. He is a computer scientist, writer, and filmmaker who has been exploring the nature of reality, consciousness, and the meaning of life for many years. His blog is a forum for his thoughts and ideas on a wide range of topics, from the latest scientific discoveries to the deepest philosophical questions.

Bard gets my vote.

Now, having done that important test, I can return to my career as a filmmaker who has been exploring the nature of reality, consciousness, and the meaning of life.

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A little Yuletide pedantry

‘Gift’ is generally a noun. ‘Give’ is a verb.

When did we start using ‘gifted’ to mean ‘gave’? As in, “A friend gifted me this radio.” I seem to hear it all the time now, and not just from Americans, though I think it was a transatlantic trend initially. Perhaps people feel the need to have a different word for ‘gave without expecting payment’… but surely, if you expected payment, the word would in any case be ‘sold’?

So I turned to my OED, and it does allow ‘gift’ as a transitive verb, but meaning ‘to endow with gifts’. So you could say, “I gifted the Sultan”, meaning that you showered him with presents. If you want to be more specific, it insists, you need to use ‘with’. I gifted the Sultan with roses of every hue. Poetic, but perhaps too poetic for the situation where my pal gave me his old USB drive. I suspect it’s more appropriate when saying that The Almighty had gifted the Sultan with great wisdom.

I know they say that in American English there is no noun that cannot be verbed, but I would strongly lobby for sticking to the concise and precise ‘gave’, and reserving ‘gifted’ for its correct use as an adjective, to describe, perhaps, one who writes erudite blog posts.

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Taking things literally

John Naughton linked to a splendid post by my friend and erstwhile colleague Alan Blackwell, entitled “Oops! We Automated Bullshit.“

I won’t try to summarise it here, or even discuss the topics he raises, because you should cetainly go and read the article. But I did like the aside where he questions his own use of the word “literally”:

Do I mean “literally”? My friends complain that I take everything literally, but I’m not a kleptomaniac.

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Ye Olde Wordle

Rose and I have long enjoyed playing Wordle – we do it each evening after dinner, taking alternate lines, and then move on to do the same with Quordle.  (Quordle needs a bit more screen real-estate, so I recommend a decent-size iPad at least.)

Anyway, I was pondering the idea of more literary variations.  Suppose you had a Wordle where the only words allowed, both as guesses and answers, were in the Complete Works of Shakespeare?  Even if you’re well-educated, you would probably need a few more lines to solve it, but it might be fun!

I’ve done a quick analysis, and there are just under 3000 different 5-letter words in the Gutenberg plain text file of the Complete Works.   That’s more than there are in the normal Wordle game, though I haven’t stripped out proper nouns, so it’s probably a comparable vocabulary.

Glancing through them, though, I think there might be challenges.

When Henry VI says,

Her sight did ravish, but her grace in speech,
Her words yclad with wisdom’s majesty,
Makes me from wondering fall to weeping joys,
Such is the fulness of my heart’s content.
Lords, with one cheerful voice welcome my love.

for example, we know what the bard means, but he never uses the word ‘yclad’ anywhere else — I expect, frankly, he just invented it to maintain the pentameter — and I can’t guarantee that I would have guessed it before line six in the Wordle grid. I just don’t use ‘yclad’ often enough in day-to-day conversation.

So perhaps it’s a foolish idea.  

 

Instead, while we’re on the subject of words beginning with the letter ‘y’.  I shall content myself with pointing out an interesting fact about the title of this post, which is probably blatantly obvious to any linguistic scholars amongst my readership but, for the rest of us, might just help impress friends at the pub. 

When you see signs like ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’… have you ever wondered why it’s always ‘Ye’? Where does the ‘Ye’ come from?

Well, in fact, it never really was ‘Ye’.  It was ‘The’, but ‘TH’ was often written using the ‘thorn’ character originating in Old English, Old Norse and languages of similar vintage, now almost obsolete unless, I gather, you are writing in Icelandic.   A capital thorn normally looks like this: Þ, and a lower-case one like this: þ, but there are lots of variations, and in some scripts if looks more like a ‘Y’.  

A Wikipedia page gives these pleasing examples of Middle English abbreviations (and apologies, especially to those receiving this by email, if these don’t format well for you!):

  • Middle English that– that
  • Middle English thou – thou
  • Middle English the– the

With the advent of the printing press, a thorn character often wasn’t readily available and so a ‘y’ was substituted, as in this Blackletter example of an abbreviated ‘the’:

EME ye

And from there, it was but a short step to seeing signs wishing to convey a feeling of antiquity being written as ‘Ye olde…’.

 

 

 

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Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

“We are experiencing an unusually large volume of calls at the moment. We apologise for the delay.  Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in turn.”

My friend Andy Stanford-Clark was complaining about this on Twitter, 

“No, there are an unexpectedly low number of people answering the phones at the moment. Don’t blame your customers for your organisational inefficiency. Thank you.”

I’ve talked about this before: some organisations seem to have this as a standard disclaimer on the beginning of every call you make to them, which means it is blatantly untrue: how ‘unexpected’ or ‘unusual’ can the volume of calls really be?

No, what this really means is, “We consider our time to be more valuable than yours.”  Even though your call is really important to us.

(Sometimes, though, these automated messages can be helpful.   When they say, “This call may be recorded for monitoring and training purposes”, I say, “Thank you!”, and click the record button.)

Now I’m considering, when they do finally connect, playing a recorded message that says, “I’m experiencing an unexpected number of answers at this time. My call is important to you, so please hold, and a valued customer will be with you shortly.”  Repeated a few times, of course, but interspersed with some upbeat yet calming music.

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Staying Dry and Stealthy

I’ve always been a little bit of a Gore-Tex skeptic.  While I have owned, and do currently own, several garments and shoes incorporating the fabric, I’ve always felt a little bit let-down by it.

“If this is both waterproof and breathable”, I would ask myself as I ascended the hill in a slight drizzle, “then why are my shoulders getting rather wet?”

So I was interested to come across this rather fun video by a Canadian biking gear company, which talks about the history of Gore-Tex, how it works, what it can and can’t do, and why even the manufacturer doesn’t really use traditional Gore-Tex any more.

A quick summary is that it’s waterproof OR breathable, but not both at the same time.  Which is fairly predictable… and still gives it an advantage over something that is, say, purely waterproof… but do watch the video.

~

This ties in with something I was told in a shop recently when buying a new jacket.  I was complaining about my previous one not seeming to keep me dry for very long, and wondered if I was affecting the waterproofing by washing it too frequently.

Actually, they said, it might come from not washing it frequently enough.  And that would tie in with the assertions in the video; it seems that the key to successful Gore-Tex use is to make sure the water beads up and runs off quickly, so it doesn’t have to be simultaneously waterproof and breathable. To do this, you need to wash it in something that will top up the water-repellent coating.

So if you do decide to pay the Gore-Tex premium, be prepared for the Tech Wash premium in the years to follow.

My favourite jackets, by the way, have been made of Ventile, which is also not cheap, and doesn’t claim to be completely waterproof, so it’s not necessarily ideal if, say, you’re heading for Wales!  It’s hardwearing and exceedingly comfortable, though, and popular amongst birdwatchers, because it doesn’t rustle like most other fabrics and give away your location.  

It’s probably useful for secret agents too, for the same reason.  I couldn’t possibly comment.  I pretend that I have mine for dog-walking.

 

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Bureaucratic daftness

Bemused by two examples today of silly things that big organisations do:

  • A letter arrived from the NHS for a friend with information about an important and urgent medical appointment, which was sent by second-class post. “Please contact us on this number”, it said, “if you haven’t heard from the hospital by the 2nd November”.  It arrived on the 2nd November.  

  • A financial institution says it needs certified copies of three months of my bank statements.   That means I need to go and show them to a neighbour who will sign them to say they are true copies of the original, and then I can scan and send them.  But it’s been years since we received our bank statements on paper, so I will be printing out a PDF for them to sign.  Are they signing it to say that my printer hasn’t made a mistake?  In that case, what about my scanner?   But I checked, and yes, that’s really what the institution concerned wants me to do.

    So I will send both the scan of the signed printout of the original PDF asserting that it is indeed a true copy of the original PDF… and the original PDF.

Imagine if I actually had anything else to do, like earning a living…!

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Overchoice and How to Avoid it

Do you ever find yourself agonising over two very similar items on Amazon, wondering whether you should by the one that has 0.3 more stars but is 30% more expensive? And what about other more major decisions, in this world where we often have so much choice?

In a nice article entitled Overchoice and How to Avoid it, Gurwinder says:

The best way to manage the myriad decisions of the modern age is by employing “philosophical razors,” so-called because they shave away options, simplifying choices.

Naturally, there’s an overwhelming range of razors to choose from. I’ve tried scores of them, and have found that most aren’t workable, either because they lead to poor decisions or they’re too complicated for everyday decisions.

A few, though, have proven indispensable. Here are the five I use most.

Read on.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for the link. As Charles suggests, you probably need to write these down somewhere prominent to get in the habit of using them!

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Forms of address

Here’s a rather pleasing collection of UK address oddities by Paul Plowman.

In the US, it’s common for house numbers to be quite large – my parents-in-law used to live at 18325 Robert St, for example – but that’s because the first two or three digits are the block number, and the numbers aren’t contiguous within the block, so you can build more houses in the gaps if you want to and renumber very little.

But what do you think is the highest house number in the UK? This (and other entertaining facts) can be found in Paul’s blog post.

Thanks to Doug Clow for the link.

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Charging your car without draining your house

If you have an electric car, and a home battery as well, you may have the problem that charging your car drains your house battery.

I’ve had a few queries after some of my other videos about how I avoid this, so here you go:

(Direct link)

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Hippy fruit

“Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is!”

Most of my readers, I’m sure, will be familiar with this question, but if you happen to live far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy, you may have trouble with the vernacular and so appreciate the helpful notes provided in The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.

And if you don’t know why the towel is significant… well, there’s probably no hope for you. Better stick to your own planet.

Everyone else, though, will appreciate the importance of that most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor, so why, I ask myself, did my iOS spellchecker have so much trouble today with the simple phrase ‘sass that hoopy frood’?  It offered me hippy fruit and hoppy food and generally had as much trouble as a Nutrimatic machine trying to make a decent cup of tea.

Surely, all computers should incorporate the works of Douglas Adams in their basic training?  Come on Apple, you’re missing a trick here, especially since Douglas was one of your biggest fans.  What did you use? The Encyclopedia Galactica, for heaven’s sake?

I’m pleased to say, however, that ChatGPT is an improvement, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian Siri in having some idea of what’s going on in the universe.

Result of asking ChatGPT "Hey, you sass any hoopy froods?"

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