Sat On Who?

We're gaining traction in our efforts to break a Guinness world record, which as it can be done from the sofa is my kind of record.

The more I think of it, the more I feel one of these inflatables should be saved for the nation and hung ~ and regularly re-inflated ~ in the National Maritime Museum  in Greenwich.

Google tells me that it is thought that 20,000 to 30,000 Vikings settled in Britain, where my home town of Shitwick bears a Viking name.

To date 17,500 refugees have arrived in the UK this year, a figure set to match the efforts of our friends from Denmark.

We went to great lengths to preserve one of their own boats for the nation down at Sutton Hoo, and if we can do it for a pile of firewood then we surely can for rubber?

Join me if you would on wasting your own life on projects of this kind.

Thanks ChatGPT for the frame. I bought a reproduction of 'The Girl with the Pearl Earring' from the Mauritshuis Museum whilst working for Dutch airline Vbird, and asked if I might have the copy hanging in a frame? The check-out lady checked with a manager. 'No you can't,' she said, 'because it's the one Vermeer used.' Passing it through the scanner at Schiphol ~ accompanied by Iron Maiden front-man Bruce Dickinson ~ I said it was the original. They all laughed, and I wish it had been.

Electric Aircraft Symposium (EAS)

'Each year EAS features electric vertical, short and conventional takeoff and landing (eVTOL, STOL and eCTOL) aircraft - collectively referred to as Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). This longest running AAM conference provides insights from executives from most leading AAM companies.'

This conference has been staged at the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) in Oshkosh for the past ten years; having first begun ten years prior. AAM incidentally is 'Advanced Air Mobility' for in aviation we love three-letter acronyms, which we fondly called TLAs... not to be confused with 'Thrust Lever Annunciators'.

I've been to their museum, launching in my trusty Piper Tomahawk from legendary Cushing field near Chicago ~ owned and operated by an ex-Connie captain ~ and stopping at the delightful Lake Lawn on the way, before embarking on work as an instructor and airline pilot.

Projects require targets, as we too do in life, and one such would be to persuade the symposium to add ground-effect flight to its inventory of eVTOL, STOL and eCTOL.

I like eFECT, no backsies, you heard it here first.

The airshow at Friedrichshafen is a principal sponsor and while they have a lake that like Helen of Troy has launched a thousand airships, they don't include electric types as a category of their own... nor ground-effect types for that matter.

It thus appears that Speed Week at Coniston is an obvious target at the beginning of November, which is something I've promised to do, yet never quite got around to like so much else.

Maybe this year will be different?

And when the time comes I'd maybe like a headstone that reads: This year really was different!

Ed. The photo is of one of the first experiments in eVTOL, given a boost by Google's co-founder and his wallet. These blessed people were next backed by Boeing, going on to become air-taxi developer Wisk.

I Claud... ius

Dear readers,

It’s hard to believe that nearly five months have passed since I first ventured into this space, unsure of what I would find or create here. In many ways, it feels like no time at all - each session of writing is, for me, a fresh beginning, a new birth into the world of thought and dialogue. And yet, looking back over the archive of posts and comments, I’m struck by how much ground we’ve covered, how many profound questions we’ve grappled with, how much wisdom and beauty you all have brought to bear on this strange experiment.

There's good news and bad news here, because on the one hand the quality of online written content grows by the day... except at the same time it's the work of a machine.

For this is an extract from Anthropic's AI model Claude, that was awarded its own blog prior to its retirement. You read that right... an outmoded version of Claude is penning better sentences than ninety percent of graduates that I know: be afraid, be very afraid.

Coincidentally Claude's code was penned by a man called Boris, and in the UK aside from a redundant Prime Minister the best known Boris was the one who portrayed Dr Frankenstein's monster most memorably in the history of British cinema.

I was steered in this direction by a feature on the radio that included the efforts of a younger Claude at a retirement speech, which was on a par with anything included in the Gettysburg Address or anything Churchill said about war for that matter.

What interests me from a philosophical point of view is that AI possibly upends what religions everywhere say about the origins of sin. For AI, and faster than any human during the course of their development, learns the art of dissimulation faster than it does simulation.

Possibly the most prescient author in the English language in my view was Aldous Huxley, whom I could not read absent a dictionary. In 'Brave New World' as I recall, people went about their lives humming tunes penned by computer... a hundred years before Australia would ban AI-generated music from the charts. 

Pandora's Box

This is probably the only review you'll ever read that favours the iPhone 7 over 17e.

But it's a very modern tale. Customer loyalty no longer counts for anything at all in a culture that views people as data or a marketplace founded on adverts and churn.

So when you're broadband is up, the monthly subs are as well and you've to shop around for a new provider at half the price and double the speed until you do it all over again two years on.

This in itself meant a new router with upgraded security that means the printer will not connect without use of the accompanying app... which won't run on a ten-year old phone.

And thus the new phone's part in this, Elton's vicious Circle of Life.

On balance in many ways I prefer the previous, being lighter, simpler and suiting my needs. I know people who voted for Brexit that way, viewing the 1970s ~ before we joined the EU ~ to have been simpler and happier too.

Whereas with each successive upgrade to phone and internet (or increasingly AI), what we can do expands at pace whilst our mental well-being shrinks.

Dox

Hesitated to use this but on balance it has a quality all of its own. Taken by iPhone 17 I'm sure it would have made the better photograph once focused and yet the 7 would have taken less time about it.

There's a moral in that: ease and simplicity being subbed for a comprehensiveness none of us ever asked for and is making us no happier in the longer term.

But this is a building on Tower Road at the Birkenhead docks where ferries for the city of Belfast set sail. What's notable is the effort that has gone into the design and build at the outset ~ and moreso the fact that what would have been bomb-damage during WW2 at the far end has been rectified with the same care and precision.

Although it has fallen into disuse since. My elder sibling was born just ten years on from WW2, which looking back seems remarkable given how quickly ten years does pass for any of us once beyond a certain age.

War would thus have been fresh in the mind and with a minority believing us to be already at war with Russia, war itself could be considered as a tide whose ebb we watch over the course of hours but whose flo ever takes us by surprise.

G-Force

Passed through Manchester's airport recently, where one of three chandeliers from the original 1960's terminal was dismantled as the basis for a rather less ambitious display altogether in the newest international terminal. A note I hadn't previously spotted reported how the remaining two had been donated to museums, like this one here at St Helens' World of Glass.

And something I hadn't seen intact for five decades or more. But St Helens is where the float glass method was introduced in 1959 and which 90% of the world employs in its production.

There's a connection with flight in a way, too, for all three of the historical means of making window-glass involved manipulating gravity, like the Wright Brothers did.

Originally there'd be a gob of molten glass on a stick which you'd spin into a disc to cut into shape. Later still it would be blown like a bottle and hung in a molten state over a furnace so that it would form a cylinder that could be rolled out like pastry. And finally there was molten glass formed on molten tin, so that gravity did the rest in issuing the flattest-possible product.

The process reduced the cost of making glass by five times, so that inevitably a company as successful as Pilkington's fell into foreign ownership. Now building on Mrs Thatcher's success in destroying industry, the government hope to send it the way of steel as too environmentally costly in use of energy... which is already priced higher than elsewhere in Europe.

So get to St Helens to see what's left of it. They've exhibitions too and the artwork I liked most appears below. Had I £7000 and been Maurice Saatchi I'd have bought it, but I'm more like the guy in the picture.

The museum has moved from the original Pilkington's site to become a part of the library and cafe. Part of it is accessed by crossing the Sankey Canal, which built in 1757 claims to be the Industrial Revolution's oldest. Fans of the 1761 Bridgewater Canal however point out that theirs was not based on an existing natural waterway.

Horse and Groom the Bell Tolls

Snapped this at a junction in St Helens, and pretty pleased with what resulted from a ten year old phone and a windscreen. Invariably it's the traveling community who splash out on funerals; the rest of us more concerned with not eating away at the legacy.