Spent the day in London yesterday, great to see the city again, and to enjoy two famous station landmarks: Platform 9 3/4 in King’s Cross and the Paddington statue on Platform 1. It all quickly became exhausting for our younger daughter. I eventually headed back early with her, and it was great to savour the quiet in contrast to the heaving masses of tourists to which we contributed!

Back home at my parents' house I browsed some old books to read over the Christmas hols, picking up Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation to see what enthused my teenage self. I hadn’t realised at the time how hopeful it is about the future: only 30k years or so to go until…

Walking is the best form of short-distance transportation. It’s the most convenient, the cheapest and the most healthful. Countless years of technological advance has not changed that.

or

…private vehicles are rare… Their use is not really necessary since we have Expressways and for shorter distances moving corridors. For still shorter distances, we have our legs.

As usual, though, they needed to create a city-planet to do it (Trantor here, without the simple flying repulsor-tech of Star Wars' Coruscant)

Having said that, gravitic shafts are an early attempt at anti-gravity lift, the lack of development of which is a clear early indicator of the beginning of the decline of the Galactic Empire

I finished a piece of music! It’s as slow as its creation, but the opening section, which I love, has been stable from the start. Just four instruments in total, usually just two playing at a time, 54 bpm, tons of reverb, made in Studio One. It’s called Reactiv, and it’s on Soundcloud

soundcloud.com/halledr/r…

Oh my goodness, this is pretty amazing: Karel Capek’s 1925 Letters from England start off with his impressions of London - streets, traffic, parks and so on.

It’s so quotable!

In {Czechia}, in Italy, France, the street is a sort of large tavern or public garden, a village green, a meeting-place, a playground and theatre, an extension of home and doorstep; here {in London} it is something which belongs to nobody, and which does not bring you closer to his fellows; here, you do not meet with people, and things, but merely avoid them.

A night ride back home from Ladenburg over over the weir in Heidelberg, after meeting up with colleagues from where I worked previously

Had a pleasant stroll along the river in Neckargemünd during a lunchtime break in our Musikfreunde rehearsals. Always good to get some fresh air and to give the ears a break, even if a river cruise ship isn’t the most silent form of transport.

(they’re a bit like a Porsche 911, where the noise really reaches you when their rear is facing you. I can’t think of any other ways in which these things are similar, apart from general ontological ways, of course…)

A return to commuting with the S-Bahn and the Brompton raised a smile, despite the gloomy, drizzly weather this morning. I should do it more often, even if the second train across Mannheim still isn’t due until the end of the year…

Somehow, I managed a 50 km cycle today, over two stints: to work, and back. I definitely struggle on the ride back, after a normal day at work, and (whilst probably only marginally) back upstream along the Neckar.

Still, Ladenburg is always a welcome sight: my photo was rubbish in the end, though, since I moved the phone whilst it was still taking the night-time shot. Kind of arty, but pointlessly so. The cloud layer over the illuminated water tower could almost (well, not at all) have been an aurora.

Somehow, I managed a 7 km run today, with only the last km being more of a walk than a run. I found myself switching styles as I ran, loosening up as many muscle groups as I could. It probably looked very strange, but it felt good!

Tony Judt talking to Timothy Snyder in Thinking the Twentieth Century

This, in my view, is the intellectual sin of the [20th] century: passing judgement on the fate of others in the name of their future as you see it, a future in which you may have no investment, but concerning which you claim exclusive and perfect information.

Last night I wanted to enjoy an evening G&T with my wife. She’d been back for a day already after visiting friends, so we had caught up personally, but she wanted to catch up on the news (flooding in Valencia, the execution of a German-Iranian in Iran, the upcoming US elections) and so she switched on the TV. I watched, for a little while, too. But as soon as they started reporting on stupid Republicans spreading doubt about the legitimacy of the vote and the security of the polling stations, and they showed a clip of their stupid candidate raging about something, I couldn’t take any more. Feeling viscerally disgusted, I left the room and went upstairs to finish reading the final chapter of Hillary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light.

Those of Henry VIII were dark days, for most people: of an omnipotent yet inconsistent absolute ruler and his councillors, most from ancient ruling families who couldn’t countenance any move towards a less feudal system. Of the jostling between the great powers in Europe (France, the Pope) with no consideration or care for individual lives.

This is my visceral fear for today, of thuggish, childish, nihilistic autocrats returning to the fore: something dark that I - thankfully, but also tellingly - don’t encounter in my daily life and so don’t feel I can counter: I try to tune out that noise from the media, tune out those concentrated slugs of negativity bias, and be nice and courteous to the people I meet.

Thermal management in the autumn is tricky, but rewarding when out on the old Panasonic again

Last week I was at an offsite business workshop, where the key players gathered to hammer out the setup and highlight the hurdles for the next phase of our major PLM project. This offsite was in Ladenburg, that charming historical Roman town between Mannheim and Heidelberg on the Neckar river…

… though of course, our hotel’s location was in the industrial outskirts of the town, where the charm was of distinctly another flavour. I didn’t stay at the hotel, choosing instead to cycle there and back, a lovely ride along the Neckar (going past the spot I’d been recently on my Panasonic road bike).

The hotel even had a section dedicated to bikes in the garage, which was greatly appreciated.

One lunchtime walk to escape the noise of such a large group took me to the fields outside Ladenburg, with a view to an old-looking chemical factory. See, it does have its charm:

A new mobile phone is a good opportunity for a reset of our digital lives, too. Naturally, the whole ecosystem surrounding a phone is interested and invested in keeping us engaged and subscribed: that is why I like to avoid the whole “transfer my phone” business and start from scratch again.

Of course, it’s my own fault that over the 5-6 years with my Android phone I ended up with something like four different browsers and at least four different email clients - I am curious and interested in how different options provide the same functions in different ways and styles.

But it’s not just that: starting afresh without a podcast app, with only the Gmail app, no posting apps means I can view and review not just my online life, but also reconsider my priorities in life. I now bring a book to re-read with me on the commute, a small notebook and a pen, to concentrate on my own thoughts and reflections for a while, before my curiosity draws me back into the maelstrom of apps and diversions once more, for the cycle to begin again.

If you’re in a similar situation - enjoy it, make the most of it!

Great to get out on the old Panasonic road bike again, along the Neckar by Ladenburg. Definitely need to replace the old tape and hoods, though: they’re getting exceedingly manky…

Micro.blog broke down for me last week, on the 7th of September, something to do with SSL certificates, and my website is still not up at the time of writing this. Whilst I appreciate the work behind the scenes, I am beginning to wonder if it’s more hassle to stay or to move on to another, robuster service…

… or whether I can treat the frustration philosophically, use it as a reset for my own motivations and writing., and consider this week “off” (and counting) as a blip in the grander scheme of things.

I ended up taking a break from posting during the holiday, though not from reading, writing (well, drafting) and generally being more active than I had been at work: trips to the beach, swimming in lakes, visiting towns and family in North East Germany, by the Ostsee (Baltic Sea), all worked their magic, as did the second week at home, including borrowing a Bakfiets for a couple of trips to the tip.

I needed the additional break from posting during my first week back at work, as it is genuinely draining (though fulfilling!), and I’d been sleeping really badly, alas.

Yesterday’s trip up along the Rhein in a 1973 Alfa Romeo GTV was rather good (and, also, exhausting!)

Anyway, some visual impressions from my days off.

Great to see the Global Cycling Network (GCN) - predominantly a sports bike channel in the past - really taking on motonormativity on their YouTube channel

GCN would really have been John Forester’s channel, his tribe - experts in lycra on fast bikes, as The War On Cars pointed out recently - but they’re taking a broader stance on bike transport now, and it’s good!

So: Our Espagna series of concerts is done and dusted, Bolero is behind me and I can let my embouchure relax again (the benefits of being an amateur). Enjoyed a ride down to the old bridge in Heidelberg yesterday to see the submarine on its way to Sinsheim, followed by a frozen yoghurt affrogato with my wife at Yolicious.

I’d already donated to the GoFundMe campaign for Gemma Parry, wife of my old schoolmate Tom Parry who died in a fatal accident on Glen Nevis when, today, I wrote an email to our old friend Bart, and messaged another school friend, Jerry, on LinkedIn, reminiscing about that friendship and wondering a little about the meaning of such an irregular but surprisingly deep friendship.

I know I’ve mentioned COVID a lot over the last couple of posts, but it did affect my mental capacity to write, but also to think and feel: donating to a web site was simple enough, but only today, now that I’m getting somewhat better, was I able to write to Bart and Jerry, and to recognise a deeper sense of loss.

RIP Tom, lad, you strange, humorous, thoughtful and gentle friend.

Really starting to think of creating my own, eponymous, domain, following my prior experience with switching services, and the logic from micro.blog’s Manton Reece in his online book Indie Microblogging

Domain names are so important because they exist at a layer above any web hosting platforms. If you’re no longer happy with your web host, or they go out of business, it’s your domain name that allows you to move to another web host without breaking URLs, so that readers can still find your content. This level of indirection makes your content portable, which makes it your own.

I’m currently in training to play that beast of a trombone solo in Ravel’s Bolero with the Musikfreunde orchestra. It’s not all that long, but it’s very high, and it occurs three times in the piece, plus the even higher bit right at the end. It’s a challenge even for professionals, and pretty daunting for us amateurs.

Our conductor had the decency to ask me if he could add it to this season’s programme, meaning I had time to think and to take up the gauntlet. Since then, I’ve been building up my upper register, practising more frequently than I have in a long time, focussing first on building up my embouchure, and now beginning to get a grip on the music itself.

As Dion Tucker, the jazz trombonist with his YouTube channel, The Chops Shop mentioned in one of his videos, musicians are athletes of the small muscles - and there’s a certain satisfaction in feeling the embouchure muscles firming up and becoming more stable as I continue practising and rehearsing.

This feels important: a relatively clean way to recycle PV cells that’s under development at Wuhan, as described by John Timmer of Ars Technica

But the article from the US National Renewable Energy Lab that’s linked in the Ars Technica puts the whole PV waste potential into perspective. Even in 2050, without any recycling at all, it would be 1000 times less than coal ash and around half that of the delightfully-sounding “oily sludge”, both toxic byproducts of the oil and coal industries.

It feels similar to the arguments about EV batteries, too: the recycling technologies are either there or imaginable, but the market needs to develop in size (and regulation) along with it.

I enjoyed reading this article on Wired the other day on the downsides to that apparent silicon valley cult of Effective Altruism. EA (or Alt-Eff, as I like to shorten it, for no particular reason) is on the surface of it an attractive proposition: a well-informed and clever organisation finds the technical metrics for clearly stating the most effective ways of supporting humanity around the globe, and focusses its spending on those.

The trouble is that the whole culture of rationality and programmability pervading silicon valley, added to the lack of time individuals (can) take to analyse the situation for themselves, means that metrics tend towards the overly technical, rational and clear - and thereby susceptible to omission of the humanity behind the sheer number of humans that they purport to aid.

It reminds me of the Aristotelian modes of knowledge of techne and phronesis, which relate to crafting and making (techne) and to inter-relational politics (phronesis). If you are by nature and training a technical person revelling in programming or financial analysis, you are at great risk of missing the interpersonal, or even the overall human aspect of your undertaking.

Tipping already barely stable relationships amongst societies and governments, providing targets for capture by the powerful and unscrupulous, misuse and even environmental pollution are all possible dangers that don’t appear to have been covered in the same way by Alt-Eff as the traditional on-the-ground aid agencies try to deal with.

Better than doing nothing? I’m not even so sure of that - perhaps better that the hugely rich tech bros (and their finance cousins) actually pay fair taxes to their own governments to support funding for inter-governmental overseas aid… Aid and charity are tricky, and that article goes to great depths to show why: worth a read!

We’ve been looking at switching from our 2015 Toyota Avensis estate to an EV for a while now, but still struggle with the sheer bulk of the “cars” we’ve tried up to now.

From the Tesla Model Y to the Nissan Ariya and VW ID.4 these vehicles have been huge, heavy and remarkably small of boot (trunk).The closest we got to a real car was the NIO ET5, but that ended up being a little too small for us, more akin to a Mercedes A-Class wagon than to our Toyota.

Each time I’ve returned a car from a test drive and driven the first few metres in the Avensis, I’ve felt the familiar lightness of our admittedly underpowered petrol car, in which we’ve driven around 75k km in the nearly 8 years we’ve had it. I wonder if we should just keep running it for another few years until proper electric cars evolve.

There’s an issue with that thought, though: we’d still be burning petrol, and emitting hefty chunks of CO2 (amongst other things) whilst we’re at it. If I look to how far we’ve driven in the Avensis so far, we can see how the emissions stack up.

If we assume a fuel economy of around 7 l/100 km (equivalent to around 34 mpg in old money), and a carbon dioxide emissions rate of 2.35 kg/litre fuel (the American EPA charmingly refers to the number of grams CO2 generated per gallon of gasoline !), we will have burned 5250 litres of fuel and emitted 12337 kg of CO2 in that time… Yes, 12.3 tonnes!

Looking at it another way: If we assume 8.9 (9 is good enough) kWh of electrical energy per litre petrol (a value proffered by the Canadian Government, then our Avensis is running at an average consumption of around 63 kWh / 100 km, which is nearly 3 times that of a Tesla Model Y, which, when we tested it, was showing around 21 kWh / 100 km, on a predominantly Autobahn-based route for a weekend.

So, in one sense, it doesn’t matter that the Y is an SUV: in energy terms, it’s running at around 3 times more efficientuy than the Toyota (and gets more efficient still when we’re on shorter, cross-town or commuting trips). It’s even a few cms shorter than the Avensis, though significantly wider of stance.

But - those shoulders, and the shape of the boot! The Tesla is by far the best of the boots that we’ve encountered so far, but it’s still noticeably shorter than that of the Toyota. We could live with it, but these EV SUVs (SUEVs) are terribly inefficient in space where we need it.

Of course the battery pushes the floor upwards, so EVs tend to end up higher than ICEs, but the rear passengers, growing teenagers, do end up needing to slot their feet under the front seats to have a chance of resting their legs on the seat squabs. Rear seat height seems to be smaller despite the overall height of these cars (10s of cms greater than our car).

Ultimately, the question is about which sort of efficiency we want: energy? There, it’s a clear win for the big EVs. Space and road-space efficiency? Well, the SUEVs are taller and wider than our traditional ICE estate car, but are shorter - tall but still energy efficient isn’t that bad a trade-off. These things seem very width-inefficient, though, and that troubles me.

The switch to EV is a convincing one, but still not compelling - and the reluctance has both reasoned and emotional bases, which makes it all the trickier.

Every Christmas, Easter and family birthday, as I list out the contents of a parcel on what feels like an excessively conspicuous “non-EU deliveries” sticker, then pay the suddenly exorbitant postage and customs fees to the UK; every time that, right at the end of the ordering process, a British website discovers that I’m based in Europe, or a European online store learns to its horror that I want to ship to the UK - indeed, every time I want to ship nice things, only to discover that they won’t, and now that the formerly anticipatory, family-related traipse to the post office has become a trudge to bureaucracy, I silently curse Brexit.

These are, in the grand scheme of things, little niggles, already well known to anyone who has ever wanted to ship to countries like the USA or Japan. But they always remind me that the UK - barely but clearly (though for some vague notion of “Brexit means Brexit”) - voted and then acted to make things worse than they had been until just very recently.

What good did it do?

For what and for whose benefit? From my perspective here in Germany, I still haven’t discerned anything concrete: nothing that has made Europeans look jealously across at their neighbours, the land of my birth, and want to change course in that direction.

Assuredly, there are people feeling good about Brexit back home, and like-minded tribalists around Europe who share the dream: a vague but powerful sense of “freedom”, a baseline intuition that the UK is not “beholden” to the admittedly confusing construct of European political entities, that the UK has been released from some dread dream of federalism or a “United States of Europe”, however far in the future, however long past their own lifetime. A UK unbound from European lethargy and tortuous consensus-building, able to spring free and react swiftly, or plan for a greater, divergent future: that sounds pretty good, I suppose.

Equally, though, the UK still needs to trade with the EU, and that trade has taken a significant and - in my view - unneccessary hit. It’s still a source of frustration to me that the likes of the wretched “European Research Group” managed to characterise the EU as simultaneously a homogeneous mass of “them”, and as an overly complicated, bureaucratic mishmash of cultures. The Brexit discourse, such as it was, cleverly split the double-sided nature of political diversity in Europe, ranging as it does from Costa in Portual and Scholz in Germany, to the likes of Orbán, Meloni, Fico in Slovakia and Wilders in the Netherlands; how that diversity makes consensus so difficult, on the one hand, yet also demonstrates the EU’s startling heterogeneity: quite clearly the opposite of the unified, “one size fits all” / lowest common denominator monolith (aka “enemy”) that all populists need.

It’s still unclear to me which, if any at all, of Britain’s latest or forthcoming legislations would not have been possible as a member of the EU…

Do we need Orbán to show that Brexit was unnecessary?

That Europe can still countenance an increasingly thin-skinned authoritarian in Orbán, who seems to idolise the others of his ilk (the usual suspects along the lines of Putin, Erdogan, Trump and Xi), is not a good sign, but it does at least seem to confirm that Brexit wasn’t required for the UK to be able hold extreme views, to argue for a severe limitation of immigration, for a country to be held hostage to simplistic, nationalistic, illiberal populist authoritarian ideologies.

Ideologies always tend towards a message of “greatness”, skipping the concept of “goodness”. Greatness requires winning, beating someone else to some goal, and - as mentioned above - having antagonists in the story. Goodness requires a careful balance of ethics, and is often extremely complicated.

Sovereign projects

The question of sovereignty in a highly networked, multi-nodal world is a genuine one. People want their votes to count in determining the course of their own country, without the idea of layers over them constraining their actions. The addition of supranational unions and associations, along with the increasing power of non-state actors in the digital realms (OpenAI, Google, et al), makes it understandable that many will want to withdraw from such a complex life, seek solace and clarity in a “tribe”, and perhaps even dream of just having a “strongdoofus” to solve all their problems.

But did leaving the EU truly provide a remedy to that complexity? I don’t see that it did.

Perhaps Brexit can be viewed as a grand project, without which politics can enter a period of “drift”; except, a project usually has a goal, and it seems that Brexit was the goal, with nothing else beyond.

There’s a similar case to be made for the EU right now: does it have an overarching project beyond its own creation, defence and maintenance? It would seem so: being a liberal democratic regional power to match the USA and China (along with all the many thousands of sub-projects that spin off from that).

Posting

With Brexit off the political menu in the UK for the foreseeable future, my hope is of the return of a general political will to rejoin the EU customs union, then to start engaging more constructively with other countries on the EU’s periphery; a return to a freedom of movement not just of people, but of the nice things that we have in Europe that I would love to share with my family back home, and for them to share nice British things once more with us…

Ah, Marmite…

A Happy New Year

Despite letting my niggles at the post office take me to excessive amateur politics, and despite the other tragic things going on in the world demonstrating humanity’s capacity for allowing bigotry and hopelessness result in violence and death rather than action to reverse them, I do want to wish everybody a Happy New Year, may your networks and connections grow broader and stronger, and your deliveries on time!

Every Christmas, Easter and family birthday, as I list out the contents of a parcel on what feels like an excessively conspicuous “non-EU deliveries” sticker, then pay the suddenly exorbitant postage and customs fees to the UK; every time that, right at the end of the ordering process, a British website discovers that I’m based in Europe, or a European online store learns to its horror that I want to ship to the UK - indeed, every time I want to ship nice things, only to discover that they won’t, and now that the formerly anticipatory, family-related traipse to the post office has become a trudge to bureaucracy, I silently curse Brexit.

These are, in the grand scheme of things, little niggles, already well known to anyone who has ever wanted to ship to countries like the USA or Japan. But they always remind me that the UK - barely but clearly (though for some vague notion of “Brexit means Brexit”) - voted and then acted to make things worse than they had been until just very recently.

What good did it do?

For what and for whose benefit? From my perspective here in Germany, I still haven’t discerned anything concrete: nothing that has made Europeans look jealously across at their neighbours, the land of my birth, and want to change course in that direction.

Assuredly, there are people feeling good about Brexit back home, and like-minded tribalists around Europe who share the dream: a vague but powerful sense of “freedom”, a baseline intuition that the UK is not “beholden” to the admittedly confusing construct of European political entities, that the UK has been released from some dread dream of federalism or a “United States of Europe”, however far in the future, however long past their own lifetime. A UK unbound from European lethargy and tortuous consensus-building, able to spring free and react swiftly, or plan for a greater, divergent future: that sounds pretty good, I suppose.

Equally, though, the UK still needs to trade with the EU, and that trade has taken a significant and - in my view - unneccessary hit. It’s still a source of frustration to me that the likes of the wretched “European Research Group” managed to characterise the EU as simultaneously a homogeneous mass of “them”, and as an overly complicated, bureaucratic mishmash of cultures. The Brexit discourse, such as it was, cleverly split the double-sided nature of political diversity in Europe, ranging as it does from Costa in Portual and Scholz in Germany, to the likes of Orbán, Meloni, Fico in Slovakia and Wilders in the Netherlands; how that diversity makes consensus so difficult, on the one hand, yet also demonstrates the EU’s startling heterogeneity: quite clearly the opposite of the unified, “one size fits all” / lowest common denominator monolith (aka “enemy”) that all populists need.

It’s still unclear to me which, if any at all, of Britain’s latest or forthcoming legislations would not have been possible as a member of the EU…

Do we need Orbán to show that Brexit was unnecessary?

That Europe can still countenance an increasingly thin-skinned authoritarian in Orbán, who seems to idolise the others of his ilk (the usual suspects along the lines of Putin, Erdogan, Trump and Xi), is not a good sign, but it does at least seem to confirm that Brexit wasn’t required for the UK to be able hold extreme views, to argue for a severe limitation of immigration, for a country to be held hostage to simplistic, nationalistic, illiberal populist authoritarian ideologies.

Ideologies always tend towards a message of “greatness”, skipping the concept of “goodness”. Greatness requires winning, beating someone else to some goal, and - as mentioned above - having antagonists in the story. Goodness requires a careful balance of ethics, and is often extremely complicated.

Sovereign projects

The question of sovereignty in a highly networked, multi-nodal world is a genuine one. People want their votes to count in determining the course of their own country, without the idea of layers over them constraining their actions. The addition of supranational unions and associations, along with the increasing power of non-state actors in the digital realms (OpenAI, Google, et al), makes it understandable that many will want to withdraw from such a complex life, seek solace and clarity in a “tribe”, and perhaps even dream of just having a “strongdoofus” to solve all their problems.

But did leaving the EU truly provide a remedy to that complexity? I don’t see that it did.

Perhaps Brexit can be viewed as a grand project, without which politics can enter a period of “drift”; except, a project usually has a goal, and it seems that Brexit was the goal, with nothing else beyond.

There’s a similar case to be made for the EU right now: does it have an overarching project beyond its own creation, defence and maintenance? It would seem so: being a liberal democratic regional power to match the USA and China (along with all the many thousands of sub-projects that spin off from that).

Posting

With Brexit off the political menu in the UK for the foreseeable future, my hope is of the return of a general political will to rejoin the EU customs union, then to start engaging more constructively with other countries on the EU’s periphery; a return to a freedom of movement not just of people, but of the nice things that we have in Europe that I would love to share with my family back home, and for them to share nice British things once more with us…

Ah, Marmite…

A Happy New Year

Despite letting my niggles at the post office take me to excessive amateur politics, and despite the other tragic things going on in the world demonstrating humanity’s capacity for allowing bigotry and hopelessness result in violence and death rather than action to reverse them, I do want to wish everybody a Happy New Year, may your networks and connections grow broader and stronger, and your deliveries on time!