A late summer visit to Isaac Newton’s falling apple tree

We decided to use the end of the school holidays to visit East Anglia. A joy of getting the work monkey off your back is you can take time to travel, so we staged the journey, first stopping off at Worcester where we would leave the M6. We went into the city to have a look around, and I was pleasantly surprised – unlike some British urban areas which seem to be in steep decline, Worcester was jumping, the High Street was reasonably lively and there were very few closed shops in the main drag. Indeed, I have been generally reasonably pleased with urban parts around Britain’s second city.

Liverpool used to be larger, until Thatcher’s managed decline after the Toxteth riots. I did some work in some of Liverpool’s schools in the less well-heeled parts of the city in the early 2000s. Let’s just say the place was edgy – rows of terraced houses boarded up with steel, and the security around schools impressed me, though I have since realised that all schools are treated like high-security prisons all over the country, with high-rise steel fences and access management. When I was at school you could just walk in off the street 😉 Containerisation, Felixstowe and the fall of Empire probably all did their bit for Liverpool, so now Brum it is.

I have never been to Birmingham itself, but the surrounding regions seem to have jobs enough, even if the council is bankrupt.

Hostile forces observed…

Worcester was a pleasant walk along the river, somewhat intimidated by the flotilla of swans which were at least on the other side! Flooding still seems to be a problem in that part of the country.

Flooding is a problem

Wilko was the poster child for the cost of living crisis and closing down shops, the exception to the general rule

Wilko-tastic

Wilko-tastic – this High Street fight is lost

A general air of civic affluence otherwise.

Worcester Greyfriars

Worcester

there was a somewhat Masonic feel to the Guildhall and some of the stained glass windows. I didn’t actually find Joachim and Boaz inscribed on the two pillars

The work conundrum

I lauded our Millenial overlords last time, who seem to have the right approach to work, and today it seems to be the time of the over 50s to join the ranks of the shirkers, while also being lauded for their great unretiring. I was surprised to read the diagnosis of “You have stress-related heart disease” in that writer – while I had observed it enough at The Firm it seems that it has now become A Thing in the ten years following my observations. I managed to dodge that bullet at work, but I saw it impair people’s quality of life and saw it take three people out before they reached three score years, never mind and ten. As the study showed, work becomes less important as they age and leave the workforce – seriously, you get paid to say that?

I saw an interesting critique of why jobs have been becoming more shit as I went through my career. Obviously part of it is the increasing push to efficiency, which drives out some of the wrinkles that were more fun to explore, some of it is that globalisation means you are now in competition with the whole world which was not the case when I started work. But that piece drew out the specific case that if you have more opportunity to exercise judgement and/or the task is more varied this makes the job better in and of itself. Matthew Crawford picked that up a decade ago in Shop Class as Soulcraft, the case for working with your hands.

The trend towards outsourcing inherently tends toward defining the job via a prescriptive service level agreement, combining with the metrics and crap makes work more shit in and of itself. Still, if you think that’s bad, wait until you see what AI in the form of Microsoft Copilot can do for you at work

generative A.I. tools that make attending meetings, writing emails, scheduling travel, and catching up on projects vastly easier.

Am I the only one to think this is Not A Good Thing? White collar work is going to end up as some sort of expensive tournament between jousting AIs as people use the tools to raise their profile. I suspect a lot of meetings are performance art, but this will raise it to a whole new level. Given that AI has show a respect for the truth that put Donald Trump in the same veracity class as the apocryphal hatchet-wielding George Washington, our companies will seize up with duelling AI bullshit. Maybe we will need a new layer of humans to adjudicate the battle. It doesn’t sound like an obvious recipe for efficiency. The answer to too many meetings is to shoot the incentives that make people call too many, rather than skimming an AI enabled higher level of excess noise trying to parse it for a signal.

There’s a case to be made that AI will be the greatest cartoonist of the human condition ever, showing us a disastrous pastiche of our excesses. I don’t have Skynet fears about AI, it’s what it will do to people that I have a bad feeling about. Driven by the profit motive AI will pollute the information space of the world with so much shit that we’ll be unable to tell which way is up.

Rupert Murdoch hung up his boots at just the wrong time. He clearly got a terrific rush from bringing out our darkest desires, and AI is the chance to weaponise that – truly a boot stamping on a human face, forever. I am sure that his son will be able to carry on the good fight of feeding the darkness of the human soul with new! improved! AI! edge!

Newton’s Apple Tree

the manor house where Isaac Newton was born and did some of his work in the year of discovery

Eschewing the blandishments of machine assistance we plotted our route to Lincolnshire using a road atlas. I have a satnav, but it has a nasty tendency to take you either via the M25 or via endless, twisty roads. I’ve never got into the Garmin soul to identify what makes it tick – even if I plot a route on the PC companion program basecamp and upload it the satnav disagrees with the route I thought I had chosen, which caught me out a few times. I take a dim view of inconsistency in computing equipment, so I don’t do that now.

It’s good having it in North up mode as a moving map display, you can see turns coming up and find your place on the map easier. I would throw a load of money at fixing this, but I don’t know how to specify my requirements. I haven’t been near the M25 for years now and go out of my way to avoid that soulless bastard place, not because I can’t do it but because I don’t want to. I saw far too much of it when I lived in Ipswich and I don’t want to see it ever again. So I am stuck with the old ways of navigation.

We stayed at a pub in Buckminster, which is near Colsterworth, the manor house where Isaac Newton was born. His father died before he was born and his mother moved away when she remarried, to a much older man. Isaac Newton was raised by his grandparents – apparently he had to remain on site otherwise a pretender could come and lay an adverse possession claim to the house and 200 acre estate. I guess feeling abandoned by his mother and no father could have warped his view of the world a little.

Isaac Newton’s apple tree still bears fruit

When I was at school I could swear they taught us that the apple fell and hit Isaac Newton on the head which led to the development of the theory of gravity. This has been toned down now to that he saw it fall to the ground, or perhaps the NT is sick of children throwing apples at each other’s heads. They don’t allow mutts, which pleases me. There’s a Science Centre, for budding Junior Geniuses. I was surprised that a fruit tree is still viable after 400 years, but though part of it did blow down in a storm the tree is still there and bears fruit, it is a Flower of Kent, which the NT representative said were sharp little blighters, since they are cooking apples.

looks like Newton didn’t bother to make his bed, the slob, too busy mucking around with prisms and scrawling on the wall

They have set up the end room similar to how it was in Newton’s time. He returned to Woolsthorpe for extended stays between 1665 and 1667, while the plague raged in Cambridge, and made some of his notable discoveries in the attic room. He apparently had the habit of writing on the walls, which can’t have endeared him to the housekeepers, but I guess being lord of the manor has its advantages.

spectrum on the wall of the chamber, with a bit of calculus thrown in

The National Trust have set up a section of this with a LED lamp and a prism that casts a spectrum on the opposite wall. The geek in me noted a suspicious gap ‘twixt green and blue part of the spectrum, white LEDs are basically blue LEDs with a phosphor to convert some of the blue into a bit of yellow and red¹ so you often get a hole in that section. I can’t help feeling the National Trust ought to put another shilling in the ‘leccy meter and use a high temp halogen lamp, just in case any of those precious budding junior geniuses they witter on about in the Science Centre ask questions about the missing spectrum. The fact they have got away with it so far is testament to a pedestrian lack of curiosity in these junior geniuses IMO.

Maybe that’s the point of the £33 family entrance price, to keep the li’l varmints out of the house, I think the Science Centre is free. I specifically extended a curious mustelid snout into the concealed workings to determine that this wasn’t from the Sun, having observed the dubious spectrum 😉

The apple tree as seen from the chamber that Newton made many of his discoveries

There was also a piece about the corruptibility of different materials with Time, and light, and wear. I was surprised to see that gold was quite as corruptible as the exhibit showed, unless this is a layer of accumulated sweaty pawprints on the surface going the way of all flesh

Warren Buffett says that all you can do with your cube of all gold mined ever is fondle it, the NT seems to say it will respond, just not for the better

Today the world’s gold stock is about 170,000 metric tons. If all of this gold were melded together, it would form a cube of about 68 feet per side. (Picture it fitting comfortably within a baseball infield.) At $1,750 per ounce – gold’s price as I write this – its value would be $9.6 trillion. Call this cube pile A.

Let’s now create a pile B costing an equal amount. For that, we could buy all U.S. cropland (400 million acres with output of about $200 billion annually), plus 16 Exxon Mobils (the world’s most profitable company, one earning more than $40 billion annually). After these purchases, we would have about $1 trillion left over for walking-around money (no sense feeling strapped after this buying binge). Can you imagine an investor with $9.6 trillion selecting pile A over pile B?

[…]You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.

Warren Buffett in his letter to BRK shareholders, 2011

Peake’s Puny Pip

There’s a sapling from a pip of the apple tree which went to space with Tim Peake. Perhaps Peake’s Pip lacked vigour in the first place, but either going into space is detrimental to the plant or they picked the runt of the litter, it’s not an impressive sight for eight years. OTOH you usually graft fruit trees onto more vigorous rootstock, so maybe this is just what apple trees are like. At least it’s none of this F1 hybrid carry-on as they didn’t do that 400 years ago so it should hopefully breed true.

Tim Peake’s Pip. Somewhat runty for eight years, no?

It was a pleasant day, so we walked over to the parish church that Isaac Newton attended. No spectrum, this is a beam of light filtered by the stained glass but it seemed to have some of the spirit of the old boy.

There are some friendly signs to guide you round the back of the organ where there is this sundial carved by the precocious Isaac Newton as a child. There’s something a little bit bonkers about a sundial on the inside of the church, but I guess it saves it from erosion.

Isaac Newton’s sundial. Here was a proto-academic unafraid of working with his hands

Norfolk spa hedonism

It always surprises me how long it takes to skirt the Wash to get from Lincolnshire to Norfolk, here we did pass through some places where hope came to die, and awkward mix of dirty fried chicken shops for the truckers to refuel, along with Polski Skleps which probably contributed to the hefty Brexit preference of this region. Having cleared this dispiriting stretch we stopped at Hunstanton to stretch our legs at the curious limestone and clay

East Anglia’s west-facing cliffs at Hunstanton

chocolate layer-cake cliffs facing west on the east coast. This is a one-star beach on water quality, and we all know what that means, don’t we?

On to Congham Hall in Norfolk for a bit of gratuitous hedonism. Mrs Ermine is more into the spa thing than I am, but they do it well at Congham Hall, you get the cream tea and an inclusive dinner, which was all good stuff and they go out of their may to make it nice, which is what you are paying for. Sunday nights are the cheapest, apparent, and Mrs Ermine fixed this up for the best rate. I was tickled to read in the Torygraph that free spa slippers are the latest aspect of the culture wars. It’s a spa, FFS, there is absolutely nothing environmentally friendly about a spa, from an energy and water usage POV, the whole point of the opulence is the gratuitous excess use of energy and water. Think Nero and Rome, rather than Skolstrejk för klimatet

Given not all your guests are spring chickens, ‘elf’n’safety might want a word in the eco-fans shell-likes. Not being a regular spa-goer I checked in my slippers in the lockers before going into the wet part. Bad move as the floor was slippery, and I observed that everyone else kept theirs, leaving them to the side as required if going into the pool. Other than this error, which is entirely my bad, I had a good time. Congham Hall seems to be free of slipper chiseling despite the eco-hostility of the dastardly practice.

The Telegraph is olivious to the irony in how the travel industry has stepped up to tackle climate change

more than 500 travel companies from around the world signed the Glasgow Declaration on Climate Action in Tourism, which aims to halve emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

You’re shittin’ me, guys. Tourism is in and of itself an egregious needless waste of energy and resources, the best way to reach net zero in that industry is to shut the lot down. Two words – air travel. Compared to that the rest is in the noise, and no, they aren’t going to electrify air travel any time soon, and even if they did, unless they start dropping spent batteries off the plane as it travels they are going to struggle with the win that not carrying the takeoff weight of kerosene all the way to the destination does for you. Bio-kerosene is not the answer since all that does is fight the poor for land to grow food. Let it go. For sure, these firms should avoid being needlessly wasteful wankers, but nickel-and diming the experience ends up in the hell that is Ryanair. And while Ryanair is right that

Our booking engine is full of passengers who have sworn they will never fly with us again,

There is something inherently and deeply borked about the whole concept of mass budget air travel, which is why it’s apparently such a horrible experience. You pays your money, you takes your choice. Pay more, suck up the misery  or do without 😉

Mrs Ermine has business to attend to the next day so she returned to Somerset by train, and I stopped off at a campsite near Strumpshaw Fen to see if the rook roost was building up at Buckenham Carrs.

Corvids incoming at 9 o’clock

Mainly jackdaws at this stage, but it is a little bit early in the year for this roost to build up to full strength.

to Ipswich via Dunwich Heath and a view of Sizewell. The entire power output of this could charge one of the travel industry’s imaginary green 747 jetliners in…1.5 hours, that’s 16 in one day

The day after was windy, so I visited Ipswich for the next couple of days to sink a few beers with some friends, the second day at the evergreen Fat Cat, which I am glad to see still running. My erstwhile local was turned into a supermarket. I can’t abide quizzes or karaoke, and the Cat just does beer, no food. You can eat a takeout there and they provide plates and cutlery. They have an iconoclastic approach to kids in pubs along these lines. And treat their gravity-fed beer with the care it deserves.

The logical way to get back to Somerset would be the A12, M25 and M4, but: M25. Also that fellow Mr Khan wouldn’t want my campervan anywhere near his nice clean city. I don’t actually hold that against him, the point of a campervan is to stay places there aren’t hotels and airbnbs. So I went north again toward the Rollright Stones in Oxfordshire and spent a couple of nights at a nearby campsite.

The King Stone at Rollright

The Rollright Stones were moody in the evening. The campsite is in walking distance of the stones so I made my evening visit by foot. Next day I visited the dolmen at Enstone and Stow-on-the-Wold, which pleased me in retaining free parking just out of town.

Enstone dolmen

I like the Cotswolds, when I started my first real job at the BBC I went to their engineering training department at Wood Norton near Evesham. I was there for about six weeks, it set up a few things about how the world of work should look like that, how shall I say it, didn’t stand the test of time. Back then analogue TV was a precarious dance at the edge of what was practicable to keep the signal stable and reliable enough to start its journey across the transmission network, where noise and distortion built up at each and every stage. So there was craft in setting this up and nursing the unreliable systems to work OK, which is why this was largely done in house because domain knowledge mattered. Digitalisation sort of fixed all that, although I still recall the blood drain away from the poor devil in the 1980s who accidentally trashed an expensive TRW TDC 1007 video ADC in the lab.

Nowadays there’s something much more capable than that built into every security camera. But there was more of a sense of achievement at the end of a long shift at it all going sort of all right on the night than simply pressing record and letting them sort it all out in post on a multi-camera shoot with a NLE, which is today’s much better workflow.

From those formative months I took away a sense of the Cotswolds as the Good Life, I grew up in sarf London 😉 Stow seems to be a bastion of Received Pronounciation – even in Tesco what I heard sounded like rewinding the radio wireless to the Home Service of the 1970s. There are some rum residents of the less salubrious eastern parts, it’s not the footballers that lower the tone. The stones are all right, it’s the fauna you have to watch, and the Oxfordshire end of it seems to hold the undesirables, closer to the Great Wen I guess.

On returning, I sweated the National Trust membership again and visit Barrington Court. The point of the NT for me is to get volunteers to do all the gardening that I CBA with and make it all flowery and nice.

faun in the White garden at Barrington Court

Sure, they also have car parks near decent scenery and all that sort of thing, and it’s nice not to have to wrangle the smartphone with data that I haven’t got, out in the sticks where there’s no data even if I did have it, but I would say buildings and gardens are their stock in trade.

Barrington Court pumpkins

The National Trust’s volunteers at Barrington Court have been busy growing pumpkins. They’re circumspect about the major benefactor Abram Lyle

His fortune came from the colonial sugar industry; he was the founder’s grandson and Director of what became Tate & Lyle.

One feels that the colonial sugar industry isn’t attached to a good-news human development story, though there’s an argument that you shouldn’t visit the sins of the fathers…, the fundamental problem with sugar in the here and now is that it makes people fat and is cynically used to make things moreish. And it’s subsidised, FFS…

However, the war-invalided Abram Lyle did right by this place, the first country house acquired by the nascent National Trust in a rush of blood to the head. They bit off more than they could chew

With no endowment and a huge amount of restoration needed, Barrington Court was a challenging property, especially during the economic downturn after the First World War.

Abram Lyle took out a 99 year repairing lease in 1920 for £500 p.a. even though it had attics full of owls. That’s not a good thing… Lyle’s son must have cursed him, since Abram Lyle pegged it 21 years later, bequeathing the repairing lease to his son and grandson. OTOH his son became president of Tate & Lyle, so there was some compensation.

The NT seem to have got the dander up of a bunch of right wingnuts who are getting in a huff about the dastardly notion that the British Empire was not necessarily all about sweetness and light, bringing civilisation to the subjugated, etc. And that occasionally some shit went down and, y’know, slavery was a thing. These wingnuts, called Restore Trust, are hollering about all sorts of wokery in the National Trust. Half the map isn’t pink any more and hasn’t been for a very long time, chaps.

I will take great pleasure in exercising my Quick Vote to align with the National Trust’s aims, because they just don’t particularly offend me in any particular way, they are doing pretty much what I hire them to do, and anything that can throw sand in the wheels of RT’s wingnuttery is A Good Thing in my book. They are in a right dander about that option

Last year, a “Quick Vote” was introduced on the AGM voting papers. This encourages voters to tick a box to vote in line with all the recommendations of the Trustees and of the Nominations Committee.

Well, duh. They do actually let the cat out of the bag in the presentation of the form that this is what it does, and you have the option to vote individually. This is not hard to understand 😉 What’s the worst thing I have seen the NT do

that dragon’s gonna land with a hell of a crash. Other than that, the National Trust is reasonably inoffensive

This scone at nearly 500 calories is a terrible deed, but at least you know what the enemy looks like before you snarf it. I passed on the option, personally, chugging a fifth of your daily calories in a single hit is probably not a good way to live long and prosper, but it’s certainly not worth bursting blood vessels about.

Wingnuttery seems on the rise, I was pissed off when the RSPB apologised for calling ministers liars – in my view this tweet is a straightforward statement of fact

you said you wouldn’t weaken environmental protections.
And yet that’s just what you are doing.
You lie, and you lie, and you lie again.

I know you aren’t allowed to call ministers liars in the Houses of Parliament, but everybody else can, and there was a case to answer here, for putting shit in the rivers which impairs their utility for most birds. It’s fair enough and within the remit of politics to say that we have decided it’s more important to build houses and save money by discharging the waste straight into the rivers but then don’t claim you give a shit about the shit in the rivers. It’s the duplicity of pretending otherwise that stinks

A government spokesman said it was “fully committed to our ambitious and legally binding commitments on the environment”, and would “tackle pollution at source in a way that these legacy laws never addressed”.

Yeah. Liars. Bang to rights. How do I know they lie? I spent three days feeling rough as guts after paddleboarding in the Avon. By the fruit shall you know the tree. There may be many beneficiaries of getting rid of EU legacy laws, but the aquatic environment and those who swim in it aren’t among them.

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1. emerging narrow-band cyan-emitting phosphor for white LEDs with enhanced colour rendition, [Nature, 2019] ↩