Now, the computer does the measuring

Pretty boring photo, I’m afraid. Perhaps that’s forgivable since it’s here for sentimental reasons.

The millimetric scale on the right suggests it’s a ruler. However the units on the left won’t be familiar to everyone for this is an em-rule used in an activity that has almost disappeared. Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted to lay out a page design for a magazine or a newspaper you cut up galley-proofs with a pair of scissors and glued them to a large sheet of paper. The stone-hand or clicker at the printer’s used this to create the design for real with cast metal type. Now the designer creates a virtual page on a computer screen and sends the result over the wires in file form.

Printing employs some of the most wilfully obscure units outside pharmacology. Typeface heights come in points and there are a handy 72 of them to the inch. Theoretically column widths could be similarly measured but because this would lead to large figures ems (equivalent to 12 points) are preferred. These archaic units are retained on DTP software and elsewhere on computers because printing is nothing if not conservative.

When computer design became widely available I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. Now, with a perversity born out of wishes granted, I have sentimental (if not practical) regrets. Print-shops were smelly, dirty, esoteric places filled with ex-apprentice craftsmen who shared a journalist’s desire to put ink on paper. I enjoyed their company. The em-rule is a memorial to that friendship.

Stays a must when boarding

My brother was bringing Takista into a slotted berth at the – which? – marina. Say Ile de Ré, it’s such a smashing name. My job was twofold. To jump on to the pontoon and prevent the bows from hitting the rear of the berth. Then, using a line attached to the boat, tie on to a mooring cleat.

Ashore a French lad looked up questioningly. I nodded and it was he who protected the bows. When I joined him to tie on he gestured, Un joli bateau. He was right. Built for racing, and somewhat cramped below, Takista was sleek and purposeful. Here she is at St-Jean-de-Luz and the photo reminds me of when I first boarded her. No doors, as with a car. How do you “get on” a boat?

First, don’t grab the guard-rail. It prevents people going into the sea but it’s not intended to withstand the pull of someone climbing aboard. Search out the metal cables, called stays, running to the top of the mast from the edge of the deck amidships. These, duplicated at the other side of the boat, hold the mast up and are strong enough to pull on.

Other stays, forward and aft, do the same job and are your good friends at sea. Leaving Cap Breton Takista emerged into shallow water over which poured a tide race which corkscrewed the boat alarmingly. I’d gone aft to stow a fender in the lazaret (Yes, yes, I love the jargon) and wanted to return to the cockpit two metres away. Impossible. So I stood up, took hold of the backstay, feeling safe and relaxed enough to enjoy watching Takista’s pirouettes.

In those days equipment did the selling

Machinery is only one aspect of technology but I wonder if a coffee roaster I saw in the late forties in my home town, Bradford, was the first device to awaken my interest in things that did things. Mind you, it wasn’t the roaster’s raison d’etre that attracted attention. Its ostentatious manufacture, its flamboyant operation, the way it was displayed and its delectable byproducts meant it was unignorable.

The inset gives some hints but this machine is smaller and more utilitarian. The Bradford roaster had a cast-iron chassis with the name (alas now forgotten) standing out in relief. The chassis had something in common with clothes wringers dating back to the previous century, and was painted in brilliant red and green.

Even at rest it looked impressive. When working, flames licking round the huge central drum that held the beans made it look like an industrial accident. My wife says something similar still functioned in the seventies in Kingston-upon-Thames but, not surprisingly, the HSE had suppressed the flames.

With an asset like this marketing instincts (long before the principles of marketing were articulated) had it positioned in the shop’s front window. Wow! But of course there was another powerful positive, and the olfactory products of roasting were allowed to escape into the street. This at a time when probably nine out of ten Bradfordians drank tea.

To tell the truth I didn’t really understand what it did since my apostasy from tea was a year or two away. But it worked in the way a firework display works. And I can see and smell it now.

Like a crystal ball, but more reliable

Having emerged from re-reading A la recherche… I needed a change of pace. James Lee Burke’s Cadillac Jukebox got me back to modern times which now resume with The Drunkard’s Walk or “How randomness rules our lives”.

This is not a clone of Eats Shoots and Leaves. It’s by a professor (Leonard Moldinov) and it explains the mathematics of probability and statistics. If you can add up you’re OK. Even readers of average curiosity should be interested because here mathematics solves what most lay people would regard as the impossible.

As well as illustrating the penalties for getting it wrong. The author was told by his GP that the chances were 999 out of 1000 he would be dead within the decade. This followed a blood test taken for a life insurance application. On a hunch the author had taken an HIV test and it came back positive. But his doctor “had confused the chances that I would test positive if I was not HIV-positive with the chances that I would not be HIV-positive if I tested positive.” With probability the words are as important as the figures.

Even given more than my self-imposed limit of 300 words I would risk traducing Moldinov’s carefully-worded prose. So read the book. The style is lively and non-technical and the examples are interesting (The somewhat maligned baseball player Roger Maris is sympathetically analysed). The examples include the mathematical side of coin tossing (with an empirical proof – new to me) and dice throwing, perversity in the face of overwhelming evidence, the danger of judging ability by short-term results and the fact that so-called “random”numbers are biased towards the lower digits.

Well-reviewed in The Guardian.

Look on my works ye mighty, and despair

To post one’s face or not? Plutarch recently came out full frontal, others disclose only a carefully chosen part. With herhimnbryn it’s ankles and feet clad in multi-coloured stockings, while Rosie provocatively offers an ear lobe plus pendant.

I belong to the obscurantists since I doubt even my wife could honestly identify me as the marine creature here on the dashboard. Two or three months ago I posted a slightly more recognisable photo in context with a different subject and it drew no comments whatsoever. I took the hint.

In any case with B. Bonden Esq it’s la technologie c’est moi. That’s why I’m aping The Observer series on writers’ workplaces and providing a view of the hardware I surround myself with. Perhaps those who are shy about their faces will be more forthcoming about their digital pulpits.

The deep kitchen table came from Ikea for I cannot stand being cramped. At the far end the colour printer is encircled with a modified plastic crate on top of which stands the scanner. A wireless router and Skype impedimenta crown the computer. Apart from a few techno-manuals the books are French, mainly novels. The upper shelves support my collection of forklifts, souvenirs of my life as editor of a logistics magazine.

From the window I can see the tower of Hereford cathedral.

No such thing as a free leap forward

A post with the same first para appeared yesterday. The post sought to be funny but wasn’t. So the idea is here recycled.

We’d just finished with Siegfried Idyll and were about to hear Four Last Songs. But, as a sort of entr’acte, came the tinkle of a mobile phone. The acoustics of Birmingham’s Symphony Hall are so good I was able to identify the culprit immediately and watch his panicky scrabbling.

When mobiles first impinged on our family I recall someone saying this was how all phones should be. No more naked dashes from bathroom to hallway, no more trudges from one vandalised, urine-smelling cavity to another, no more running out of change. What we didn’t foresee is there would be a price to pay and the unfortunate Birmingham concert-goer was paying it. Perpetual connectedness comes at the risk of public humiliation.

My brother paid a variant of this price. He went to a concert and switched his phone off. Halfway through he began to have his doubts about this but the phone was in a bag and getting to it would have caused much disturbance. The concert was blotted out by his subsequent agonies.

I pay a different price. I cannot trust batteries. So my mobile is always turned off and only used when I make the briefest of calls. I’m a candidate for half a phone but none is available.

And there’s an even heavier price. Mobiles are ideal for triggering car bombs remotely. Not exactly an unalloyed benefit to mankind as the phoner (above) appears to realise.

Does techno discourage viewers?

Judged by the aims of this blog Flight of the Phoenix is a movie that got it wrong. But see what you think.

A twin-boom plane (that's one in the inset), carrying a mish-mash of cardboard characters, crashes in the Gobi desert. Because one passenger can design planes and because there’s a cargo of manufacturing tools, the cast fashions a new aircraft based on one of the booms which is flown away into the sunset. FotP is a remake of one starring James Stewart which I saw and have forgotten. Except that it wasn’t this tedious and predictable.

The premise of amateurs building a plane is unlikely but, hey, let’s give it a go. But the movie makers didn’t. The techno-stuff is mostly unexplained and pushed into the background. Instead there are sub-plots about warring tribesmen, who’s stealing “the precious fluid” (water), personality clashes, and the rest of the nonsense by which Tarzan films were blown out to full length.

It’s my belief that if they’d stuck mainly to the re-building the movie would have been better. Even those with no real interest in technology could have responded to a story which laid out the problems and explained how they were resolved. “Caper” crime stories follow this route; so did Dambusters. But the makers had no faith in that, an opportunity was missed and a string of clichés ensued.

I am not transfixed by technology. It’s only one of my interests and I chose it simply as a way of imposing self-discipline for a blog. However I believe an intelligent “How to…” approach can be entertaining, even in fiction. Or am I over-estimating the movie-going public?

Experienced velcro user needed

Retirement meant donating my suits to Oxfam and sloughing (sluffing?) it in grubby chinos and open-necked shirts. It also meant disdaining shoes that need polishing and opting for trainers. One advantage of this tatterdemalion outfit is I spend less time getting dressed of a morning and, looking to reduce this time still further, have contemplated velcro-straps for the trainers rather than laces. Still am contemplating them, thirteen years later.

I feared velcro would, in a phrase my mother favoured, lose its nature. Interrogating those who had gone down the velcro route produced no useful information. Nearly all regarded trainers as fashion accessories and discarded them long before the straps had ceased to strap. I only discard mine when light shows through the heel.

The fancy suede-ish shoe shown is my wife’s and was bought in January. Given she has size 3½ feet it probably cost a bomb. The straps are still giving good service but there is no guarantee that aesthetic disenchantment with the shoe will not precede velcro failure. So, no guidelines there. In any case my footware gets a far harder work-out than my wife’s.

I usually expect my continuously-used trainers to disintegrate within fifteen months of purchase. For some deeply buried reason I would feel betrayed if I was forced to junk them because the hairy bits no longer hooked up. For me a junkable trainer is one that lets in water. Does anyone out there have any scientifically-backed views on velcro longevity?