State of the onion

From time to time (more often in the heady days of Harmless Drudgery's youth) I take stock....

<inline_ps>
Well I just got it myself. Stock...  onion... Oh well.
</inline_ps>

 My last report (18 months ago) started thus:

In its first twelve months, from October 2012 to September 2013, the Harmless Drudgery blog attracted just over 7000 visits. July 2013 was the only month with more than 1000 visits (1070, to be precise). In the first 5 days of September 2017, the total was just over a thousand (1053 to be precise – another 17 would have supplied a pleasing symmetry, but the gist is clear)

'So shaken as we are, so wan with care' as Henry IV Part One put it 'Find we a time with frighted peace to pant'. Well, not 'frighted peace', exactly, whatever that is...

<translation type="informal">
I think what he meant by 'find we a time...to pant' was 'Let's have a bit of a breather'.
</translation>

... but self isolation (which is, I suppose, a sort of 'frighted  peace').

Anyway, the blog is not maintaining that 200+ hits a day level (1000+ in 5 days), but the present performance is not too shabby (nearly 80 a day this month – a good deal healthier than I reported here

At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day)

back in the pre-referendum era):

Last 12 months' 'page visits' to Harmless Drudgery
I suspect the latest month's improvement may have something to do with people
having an unwonted amount of time on their hands

<autobiographical_note>
That 2015 post has called to mind  a song I wrote in the style of Peter Starstedt (he of Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?  [and little else] fame), which underlines the mistake perpetrated in a review I read in The Times a good few months ago (needs citation, as they say in Wikipedia,  but the object of the review was probably this). It was a review of a biography of Paul Simon, which said that Simon's experience of singing to uninterested audiences in Greenwich Village explained the words 'people writing songs that voices never shared'. I'm not sure whether it was the reviewer or the author who came up with this nonsense, but it was (nonsense, that  is). If the words  had been 'people writing songs that nobody ever listened to, the rotten swine' then maybe the writer's observation would've been less banal, less simplistic, less platitudinous. 

It's fairly obvious to me (and to anyone else who has written a song that nobody else ever sang – or  even heard) that Paul Simon was referring to precisely that sort of splendid isolation – people writing songs that were never heard outside the song-writers bedroom. 

</autobiographical_note>

But it's time for my constitutional.

b

Update: 2020.04.05.19:55  – Added inline PS

Update: 2020.0414.14:30 – Added PPS

Further evidence of a link between lockdown and blog-readership; (daily figures courtesy of Blogger):

Love in the time of corona

The big news today is that Mr T, the Neanderthal sporter of bling, is treading on peoples' toes Big Time. Trump's edit of his notes for this speech was reported in the Washington Post, with this photo of his notes:

His defence of this deliberate rabble-rousing was disingenuous and plumbed new depths of insensitivity. The World Health Organization's feelings  were made abundantly clear in this tweet:

I write abundantly not because I'm particularly partial to the cliché (if something is going to be clear in any way, the odds are strongly in favour of abundantly ...

 <COCA_NUMBERS>
Search for *ly clear in this corpus. abundantly is second only to perfectly.

Meanwhile, in this much smaller corpus, dedicated to British English, both  perfectly and

abundantly are deposed by a brand new number one – absolutely (which clings on to fifth place in COCA). "Go figure", as I gather they say in contemporary American. (In my teaching days I'd've called "abundantly clear"  a strong collocation).
</COCA_NUMBERS>

...as the adverb of choice) but because it has long been the WHO's position on the naming of viruses. Generally, it's unfair (and misleading) to name a virus after a place. The pandemic known commonly as Spanish flu came from everywhere but Spain (Africa, USA, France):

In August 1918, a more virulent strain appeared simultaneously in Brest, France; in Freetown, Sierra Leone; and in the U.S. in Boston, Massachusetts. The Spanish flu also spread through Ireland, carried there by returning Irish soldiers. The Allies of World War I came to call it the Spanish flu, primarily because the pandemic received greater press attention after it moved from France to Spain in November 1918. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship. 

wikipedia

It was an accident of non-alignment. Cases in Spain only got reported because they could be.  If only they'd had wartime censorship Spain might have avoided that stigma.

But is place relevant in the case of the Coronavirus? Tom Standage, in Go Figure reported (with no source, but quite plausibly) that a majority (6 in 10) of infections that affect humans started life in other species. (Wikipedia has an article on cross species transmission, which may well point to a source if you want to trawl though it.)

And an obvious source of cross species transmission is wet markets – where all manner of animals are thrown together  in painfully cramped conditions (a crate of chickens,  say,  piled next to a crate of piglets). Such markets aren't peculiar to China, though I suspect most take place in south-east Asia; with a fair few in South America and Africa – and chiefly in the developing world. Articles calling for such markets to be banned or suppressed in some way (like this one or this) are becoming more strident.

"But you can't ban them – they're part of our culture" cry the users. Well bad things need to be banned. And stigmatizing them is a good way of ensuring their demise. If it's a question of  weighing the health of billions of people (and, coincidentally, that of the world economy) against the way of life of a few million, I know where my money is.

Though I hate to appear to side with Mr T, I don't mind the virus being given a name that stigmatizes its source; not geographical, though. The "wet market  virus", perhaps.

But it's a lovely day. I shouldn't be cooped up in here...

b

Soothing the savage beast

...a misquote of course. What Congreve [not Shakespeare, the usual suspected source of most iambic pentameter] actually wrote in The Mourning Bride was

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, 

To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.

<digression title="factoid du jour">
The Latin for oak, robur, gave English the word robust. (Further info). Strictly, it was no English wordsmith that came up with a word based on robur. as Latin already had the adjective robustus, but the link is still worth knowing about (and I only recently had the "Of course it means that – DOH" moment).
</digression"> 

A recent Classic FM page reported (if report is not too strong  word in this case –  there was a disappointing dearth of hard facts about the paper in question):

New research from the British Academy of Sound Therapy (BAST) has shown there is a common dosage for music and revealed how long an individual needs to listen to it for a therapeutic effect to be experienced.

Clicking on that inviting link in the first line leads not to an authoritative source but to another – equally unauthoritative  – Classic FM page (which at least gives some detail):

To carry out the trial, students divided 157 adult participants into two groups. The first received ultrasound-guided injections of a benzodiazepine known as midazolam, while those in the second group were given noise-cancelling headphones delivering ‘music medicine’.

For three minutes – the length of time it takes for midazolam to reach optimum effectiveness – patients in the second group listened to a musical recording specially designed to lower their heart rate, blood pressure and levels of the stress hormone cortisol. 

To ensure accuracy of results, researchers used an approved anxiety scale with patients before and after treatment, scoring them from 1-4 on six simple statements, while doctors also rated them on a 10-point scale
.
.
.
And it certainly had the desired effect, with the abstract of the study describing music medicine as a ‘non-pharmacologic intervention that is virtually harm-free, relatively inexpensive and has been shown to significantly decrease preoperative anxiety’ 

Source

There may be some way of getting out of this labyrinth of self-reference, but I don't have the time to find it. If you have, have at it. But it reminds me of a reference I made here to 

...the madrigal All Creatures Now, written during the reign of Good Queen Bess ('See where she comes, see where she comes with flow'ry garlands crownéd...'). I have sung this madrigal before, and [not] given this phrase a second thought: 'Music the time beguileth'.  It doesn't seem to belong semantically (or musically) with either what comes before or after it. So previously I have dismissed this line as just an Elizabethan filler that doesn't mean very much.

But having so recently written That's 'wile', as in 'beguile'... [HD – in that same post] I realized that Bennet (the composer) was referring to the way music has a beguiling effect on the listener's awareness of the passage of time; it wiles time away.

 (And if you'd like an H in that wiles, read that post: I've highlighted in red my reasons for going H-less; but you do whichever you prefer.)

The BAST article used this infographic, which I found quite interesting (although I think the RDA message (the Recommended Daily Amount) is rather lost. It would have been more persuasive (about the music versus drugs issue) if they had used the term RDA:

 Music as Medicine infographic, from The British Academy of Sound Therapy. 

That's all for now. I must get on my HazMat gear before this evening's TCB concert.

b

Update 2020.03.17.16.45 – Added PS

PS
I wronged the Classic FM report. Because the first two links in it pointed to more fairly vapid editorial I assumed that the whole site would be like that. But there is a link to the original paper if you persist.

<apologia>
But I'm afraid that the more web masters' budgets are splurged on the generation of "content", the more editorialisers churn out verbiage by the yard, garnering the vain clicks of us seekers of wisdom and truth. Classic FM weren't (egregiously) guilty in this case though –  I was just a bit quick to write them off.
</apologia>

Timeo spammeros et dona ferentes

That's "I fear spammers even if they're bringing gifts". Sorry about spammeros – not very interesting, but it's a fairly good match for Virgil's Danaos. Ahem:

For the last few months, after years of blissful freedom from such pollution, this blog has become prey to attacks from spammers who post "comments" accompanied by invitations to acts of obvious self-abuse – "Click here" being the favoured euphemism for "Try this noose on for size". The most common (I must have had over a dozen – word-for-word the same) is

Wow! this is Amazing! Do you know your hidden name meaning ? <Link>

At first I just ignored them, for reasons of ingrained IT hygiene.

<autobiographical_note>
In the late 1980s, when DEC was waking up (ever so slowly) to the importance of the Internet ("Why should we care about the Internet, based on Requests for Comments?...

<background>
The central repository of knowledge/standards/best practice in the world of the Internet is a document (of which there are thousands) called Request for Comments (usually abbreviated to RFC, and having – for IT practitioners –little or no implication of invited comments. If it's a standard, it's too late for comments anyway. But it's still an "RFC".
</background>

...I know what my comments would be. We already have our own Easynet linking tens of thousands...

<background>
At its peak, DEC had well over 100,000 employees worldwide, many of whom had a MicroVAX (sometimes more than one), all joined on the Easynet.
</background>

... of computers. Who needs more?") I followed a course on this Brave New World. One of its messages was 

Don't respond in any way to spam – however inviting a link might seem ("Unsubscribe", for  example). All you're doing is confirming that an address is valid – making it a more valuable addition to yet another "Sucker list". 

</autobiographical_note>

But now I've realized that the links were still there on the blog, making me in some way complicit. So I am now deleting them. Some, though, are intriguing – sometimes for their inanity (Can they really expect me to fall for that?)  like this one:

Do you understand there is a 12 word phrase you can communicate to your crush... that will trigger intense feelings of love and instinctual appeal for you deep within his heart? 

Because deep inside these 12 words is a "secret signal" that triggers a man's impulse to love, please and guard you with all his heart... 

12 Words Who Trigger A Man's Desire Response<this was a link> 

This impulse is so hardwired into a man's genetics that it will make him try harder than ever before to love and admire you.

In fact, triggering this mighty impulse is so important to getting the best possible relationship with your man that the instance you send your man one of the "Secret Signals"...

...You'll instantly find him expose his soul and heart for you in such a way he haven't experienced before and he'll perceive you as the only woman in the universe who has ever truly fascinated him.

And some speak of a world of improbable levels of paranoia and conspiracy theories:

You should see how my partner Wesley Virgin's report launches with this SHOCKING AND CONTROVERSIAL video.

As a matter of fact, Wesley was in the army-and soon after leaving-he unveiled hidden, "mind control" tactics that the CIA and others used to get everything they want.

THESE are the same SECRETS lots of famous people (notably those who "come out of nothing") and the greatest business people used to become wealthy and famous.

You probably know that you use only 10% of your brain.

That's because most of your brain's power is UNTAPPED.

Perhaps this expression has even occurred INSIDE your own head... as it did in my good friend Wesley Virgin's head about 7 years ago, while riding a non-registered, garbage bucket of a car with a suspended license and on his banking card.

"I'm absolutely frustrated with living check to check! When will I finally succeed?"

You've taken part in those questions, ain't it right?

Your success story is going to happen. You just have to take a leap of faith in YOURSELF.

Mind the boggles.

Time I returned to the real world. But first I'll report a conversation that stirred an old memory from my Grant & Cutler days (1976-8).  A fellow choir member also sings with another choir, which is singing a Kodály piece.

<anecdote>
A colleague at Grant & Cutler (already mentioned in connexion [AND THAT'S THE WAY I SPELL IT, OK?] with the horn blasts in the overture to the Rosenkavalier...

<Rosenkavalier>
([she]...blushed with a giggle that suggested  "Isn't Strauss awful?" as she said that the horns in the overture were "representative of the act of love")
</Rosenkavalier>

) had previously worked at a sheet music shop where a customer had ordered the music for Could I but express in song?  (presumably Malashkin's song, often translated as Oh, could I but express in song? , with the Oh spoiling the story, so let's forget it). 

The customer was told it would take N weeks. After 2N weeks the customer returned to ask where their music was. The assistant looked in the order book and saw that the person who had taken the order knew that there is no [l] sound in Kodály.

<pronunciation_note>
(Wikipedia's transcription s /ˈkoʊdaɪ/, though I have usually heard /ˈkʊdaɪ/ and [I'd be surprised if Hungarian  did that peculiarly English thing of taking a simple vowel and spreading it out into a diphthong or even a triphthong])
</pronunciation_note>

The order read:

Kodály – Buttocks Pressing Song 

(presumably a folk tradition well-known among musicologists)
</anecdote>

Bye for now

b

Flipping (pesky?) bits

On 8 May 2019 Radiolab broached the subject of bit-flips (when a 1 or a 0  becomes a 0 or a 1), while listeners in the UK had the luxury of ignoring the still distant Brexit shenanigans of 31 Octob... sorry, January 2020 (in the vain hope that something would deliver us from the nightmare). So this Radiolab offering didn't air (sorry) on the BBC until February 2020.

<RANT>
And the latest is that unless the EU rolls over by June Boris is going to stamp his little foot and spend 6 months in intensive no deal planning, handing over the reins to the disaster capitalists of the far right.This really is the negotiating tactic of the schoolyard – if not the playgroup.
</RANT>

But about those bit-flips. In the words of the Radiolab blurb

Back in 2003 Belgium was holding a national election. One of their first where the votes would be cast and counted on computers. Thousands of hours of preparation went into making it unhackable. And when the day of the vote came, everything seemed to have gone well. That was, until a cosmic chain of events caused a single bit to flip and called the outcome into question.

Today on Radiolab, we travel from a voting booth in Brussels to the driver's seat of a runaway car in the Carolinas, exploring the massive effects tiny bits of stardust can have on us unwitting humans. 

The programme is worth a listen if you've the time, but I'll cut to the chase. In that Belgian election one of the voting machines gave an impossible result; more votes were cast in favour of one candidate than voters who'd used that machine.

There was a manual recount, and before you could say But I thought the Cold War was  over (it was the Communist candidate who'd had the Putinesque...

<ASIDE silliness ="11">
So that's what the name of that pasta dish means...
 </ASIDE>

...success) the IT people noticed that the difference between the manual result and the digital one was exactly 2¹³ (or, as they said on the programme, 4096).

Not being a natural thinker in binary, but having some experience of the world of bits and bytes, when I heard "4096" I thought  Hang on, that's 4K' ...

<ROUGH_EQUIVALENTS>
A "binary thousand" is, in its approximation to 1000, a bit like a "metric mile" (or 1500 metres); that is, not. But close enough. Since 200 metres is just over a furlong, 1600 metres would be a lot closer.

<CALCULATION>
A metre is 4 inches more than a metreyard, so 9 metres is a yard longer than 9 yards (i.e. 10 yards). So 100 metres is 111 yards and change. People of a certain vintage will know a furlong is 220 yards, and there are 8 furlongs in a mile. So 1600 metres is just over a mile.
</CALCULATION>

But sports commentators still call the 1500 metre race "the metric mile".
</ROUGH_EQUIVALENTS>

What caused the bit to flip was a cosmic ray; and it happens all the time, often in a benign way (causing a glitch that can safely be ignored). Computer engineers know this, and know that there is no hardware "shield" that can save chips from this threat...

<CLOUD_CHAMBER>
Cosmic rays don't care about physical objects standing in the way.  The particles themselves are much too small to be seen directly, but there are several YouTube clips with instructions for making a cloud chamber – which lets you see the trails they leave (on the Radiolab  programme they liken them to the con trails that a jet aircraft leaves behind.)
</CLOUD_CHAMBER>

...Bit-flips happens more at higher altitudes (where the cosmic rays have higher energy); and it takes much less energy to flip bits in modern (miniaturized) chips.

So we're screwed, though not entirely. Where precision is a matter of life or death (say, in an aircraft's electrics) there is a way round the problem: redundancy. A life-or-death component is typically duplicated twice; and output commands (such as raise the nose or cut the engines) are voted on. Only a majority vote triggers action.

But redundancy isn't popular among designers of consumer electronics; who wants a smartphone big enough to house a lot of redundant processors?  Some bit-flips – a majority of them? – are benign, and usually go unnoticed. And, as for the rest, we'll just have to get used to the occasional computer blip (in fact, we already are accustomed to computers that misbehave; we just have to learn not to be so surprised when they do). Or (here's an idea) DO WITHOUT THE  WRETCHED THINGS.

Time I did a bit of prep for this:

Bye for now.

b

Update: 2020.04.30.12:10 – A couple of typo fixes. (Does nobody proof-read these things?)


.

Quarantine and epicentre

People who know a bit about the formation of languages learn  that they must beware of the Etymological Fallacy, which this Oxford Reference page defines as

The belief that an earlier or the earliest meaning of a word is necessarily the right one. That it is fallacious is illustrated by the fact that orchard once meant a treeless garden, treacle a wild beast, and villain a farm labourer.

The creeping Wikipedi-ization of the modern world has exposed us more and more to this tendency to hold that words must mean what they used to mean, which implies that meanings must never change. Still, a knowledge of where words come from can be fascinating.

The word "quarantine" has had a long history, originally referring to a period of isolation at the time of The Plague (well  one of the waves of  one of them – it was all a bit muddled back them, TBH).

This page dates it (with annoying vagueness – the site is, after all, designed to drum up business for English Language summer schools, so it would be unreasonable to expect much in the way off academic rigour) to "a document from 1377"  though in an  earlier form that set the safeness-from-plague period to thirty days – una trentina. In an earlier post I briefly referred to "quarantine"‘s ship-of-possible-carriers origin, but I didn't place the first use as coined by Venetians trying to keep the plague out of Dubrovnik (as this page does if you care to read it through):

The word “quarantine” has its origins in the devastating plague, the so-called Black Death, which swept across Europe in the 14th century, wiping out around 30% of Europe’s population. It comes from the Venetian dialect form of the Italian words “quaranta giorni”, or “forty days”, in reference to the fact that, in an effort to halt the spread of the plague, ships were put into isolation on nearby islands for a forty-day period before those on board were allowed ashore.  

Source

My ingrained cynicism about the temptations of the Etymological Fallacy doesn't,  however,  prevent me from experiencing a frisson of "innocent merriment" ...

<PC_defence degree="set phasers to stun">
(at the risk of seeming to make light of a notably unfunny situation)
</PC_defence>

... when the Diamond Princess quarantine forced the word back to its roots (with people not  being allowed to leave a ship).

My other concern at the moment is the snowballing over-use of epicentre. Again, I'm not trying to argue that the word can only be used between consenting vulcanologists ...

<spelling_for_dummies>
(and the infernal machine wants me to write "volcanologists", but quod scripsi scripsi)
</spelling_for_dummies>

... but I just feel my lip curling whenever people use a big word just to make them sound serious. What's wrong with centre? What's wrong with focus?...

<digression>
There's that innocent merriment again. Focus, being derived from the word for fire, seems particularly apt when talking about an infection that causes, among other things, fever.
</digression>

...hub..., source ... There are many ways of avoiding epicentre; but it continues on its juggernaut way. This view of its growth in popularity (sadly out of date – the  latest data they've got is from 2008, and in the last twelve years its use can only have grown) comes from Collins:

 Anyway, it's time I got back to note-bashing for  our next concert:

<incidental_observation>
A fellow choir member has asked about "Jesu chare"  in the Pergolesi Buxtehude  – not having found chare in a latin dictionary.  There are two problems with this search. The first is that the phrase is vocative – addressing Jesus. "Dear Jesus" would be, in the nominative (just naming him), Jesus carus. The spelling of that second word points to the second problem. This recalls my "epicentre" rant; one of the mechanisms of language change is hypercorrection (trying to sound important by a misplaced display of "learning"). The introduction of h after c ...

<inline_ps>
I'm not referring to a /h/ sound following the /k/. The hypercorrect change is from /k/ to /χ/ (like the sound at the end of Bach). Trimalchio – that* character in the Satyricon – is (unwittingly) referring to the influence of Greek sounds on Latin. Greek slaves were common in the Roman world,  and there were Greek-speaking enclaves in what we now know as Italy.
</inline_ps> 

...is usually hypercorrect; this is satirized as early as the first century AD in the Satyricon; which has a social-climbing character who is mocked for saying chommodus rather than commodus; Oops, TMI.
</incidental_observation>

Anyway, it's lovely music. Don't miss it.

b

Update: 2020.02.18.15:45 – Added inline PS.

Update: 2020.02.19.12:15 – Added footnote

* Oh what a tangled web we weave
   When first practice to update with an inline PS

That character is mentioned later on. Sorry.

Update: 2020.02.21.10:20 – Corrected the composer; it was Buxtehude

Where's the camera?

The many-BAFTA'd film 1917 features, about halfway through, a dog fight from which I've taken an illicit still showing the moment where my eyebrow jerked up (only one eyebrow – this is cynicism, not surprise).

Moment of untruth?

A flaming wreck is hurtling towards the soldier in the open at... what?  100 mph?...

<guess>
This a guess, but it can't have been doing less – possibly a lot more
</guess>

...and he turns and runs along the exact path of the crash . The plane is obviously disabled, so it isn't going to veer off that path. Presumably he thought he could outrun it – quick on their pins, these Tommies; or maybe he just had a death wish. Maybe, though, he knew the camera was behind his mucker in the barn, and wanted to be sure of creating just the right composition (which wouldn't have resulted if he'd done the sensible thing and run off on a perpendicular from the path of the doomed plane).

Like a film scene I commented on here nearly 6 years ago, what mattered was the visual effect rather than any attempt at verisimilitude.

A not entirely unrelated case ...

<different_though>
(totally different, though; the similarity is only that the director's wishes for a satisfying visual composition were more important than any questions or doubts raised in the mind of the viewer)
</different_though>

...cropped up recently in the last episode of the Wisting series on BBC Four.

<spoiler_alert>
And if you are that way inclined, now's the time to bail out. Exposition of a cinematic cliché follows.
</spoiler_alert>

A lone policeman approaches a suspect 4x4, which conveniently enough has windows lighting the boot (not the ideal vehicle for a psychopathic kidnapper who from time to time uses the boot for purposes of  victim-conveyance),

Then the camera angle changes, so that it is inside looking out, as the policeman goes through a basic kidnapper's starter kit  (duck tape, plastic cable ties..., you know the drill).

At this point I started to wonder what could have been the point of this change. But I didn't have to wait long.

Right on cue, the aforementioned psychopath appears behind the policeman and knocks him out (but doesn't think to use his kidnapper's starter kit, to stop him butting in to the next scene).

There are times when cinematic cliché interferes with the story.

<autobiographical_note>
I'm reminded (irrelevantly of course, as this wasn't the director's fault). In the early 1970s I saw, at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, Chabrol's Le Boucher. In one scene suspense was being ratcheted up by the images and the soundtrack –  I have no clear memory of the details; I think someone was looking for trouble in a gloomy outhouse. But what broke the tension was not Chabrol's soundtrack (a voice from out of the shadows, as I remember). It was the subtitle ( a case of legendum praecox?)
</autobiographical_note>

But I'm missing the cricket.

b