Hooptedoodle #365 - Got to Get Ourselves Back to the Garden

Inspired by Jon's very fine photos, I went out to check on our white lilac, which is coming along nicely.

Syringa vulgaris "Madame Lemoine" - regular as clockwork, but blink and you miss it. Some way to go yet, but if the rain stays off it should be good.

I also observe that we have an unusually good show of blossom on the whitebeam trees, in the wood behind our house. Not very spectacular, to be sure, but pleasing, and I usually manage to fail to notice them altogether. The whitebeam (sorbus aria) is a relative of the rowan tree, and produces red berries which are much prized by our local wood-pigeons; I understand these berries can be eaten by humans as well, but the pink pebbledashing of my car each Autumn by the pigeons rather puts me off the idea.

This, of course, is really a photo to show off our clothes dryer, but in the background you might just make out the whitebeam trees in the wood, swamped by the big sycamores behind, but bravely showing off their blossom. Two years ago they produced a remarkable crop of red berries in September, so maybe we'll get that again.

I enjoyed my afternoon in the sunshine - I must work on that (mental note). I can manage to keep busy during lockdown with no problem at all, but sometimes whole days go past and I hardly notice.

Looks like the Spring is unaware of the problems we are having!

 

Hooptedoodle #364 - R-Nowt

I promised myself that I wouldn't upset anyone by airing my petty little thoughts on the global pandemic - after all, everyone is trying hard, doing their best, and some people are really performing absolute heroics in the public interest. And, of course, we have the top brains in the world concentrating on the problem, and surely we can be confident of the wisdom and the organising abilities of our elected leaders?

You may harbour some concerns about whether the leaders can actually hear the top brains, but I would hesitate to be unconstructive about the state of play.

Since I am starting to believe there is a very good chance that I may not survive this episode of world history, I'm beginning to lose touch with the reasons why I should keep quiet about it, but I shall avoid being rude about anyone in particular. This note is merely the musings of the sad little soul of an old mathematician, and I don't expect anyone to agree with me, nor be concerned about what I have to say - it's OK.

When something bad happens, reaction to it calls upon a lot of things. Some of these things will have needed some kind of investment of funds and effort before the event - preventative stuff. Identifying potential risks, putting in place rules and regulations to minimise the likelihood of a disaster; if we focus loosely on catastrophic building fires, as an obvious example, we might have implemented strict control of design and construction standards, of the safety of materials used, sufficiency of emergency exits and lighting, documented procedures for  using all these - and I mean maintained, tested procedures. We need to ensure that people who are at risk know what they need to do, or at the very least know where to find out quickly. There should be a good level of awareness of how to cope with an emergency, plenty of guidance information, and sufficient investment in rescue services and equipment is essential, obviously. The plans should be as complete as they can be, and should, if possible, be reviewed as part of the normal routine of making changes, and - if at all possible - they should be tested periodically. There's lots of this - far more than I can think of off the top of my head - things that have to be done in advance, just in case, procedures that have to be followed, if it happens, and trained, fully equipped rescuers who will turn up promptly and do the business in the regrettable circumstance of the bad thing happening.

All pretty obvious, really. I believe that in the UK we tend to concentrate on the end of the chain - we pride ourselves on our ability to perform well in an emergency, rather than in our talent for planning in advance to avoid problems happening at all, which is traditionally seen as rather unrewarding and maybe a bit negative. If the disaster comes, we film the heroes from the rescue services in action, we have a victory parade, we award medals, we may have a day of national mourning if we really have to. It's cheaper that way.

(1) it probably won't happen - let's hope not

(2) if it does, we'll make a huge splash about the heroics of the rescuers (quite rightly so, by the way - absolutely right on) - that's better politically and for uniting public support. The Daily Express loves that stuff.

(3) if there's a public enquiry afterwards, with a bit of luck we will no longer be in office to be held accountable or have to stump up with the money, or we may be able to spin it somehow to get off the hook

OK - that's all theory, and there's nothing particularly clever about it. That should be reassuring - we don't know for sure, of course, but we would certainly expect that things will be handled as well as possible by the people in charge.

I follow the daily bulletins in the UK media about the progress of our pandemic lockdown. It's been very harrowing, but thus far the course of action has been pretty much forced by events. We have been reacting - that's the bit we think we are good at. The next bit is going to be scaling the thing back, which will require decisions to get life going again, being careful not to have a new wave of infections as a result. This will take judgement - at which point my confidence in the leaders starts to leak - and, let's face it, we haven't done this before, so there is no manifesto to act out.

Like everyone else, I have to watch all this with as much hope as I can muster. A lot of faith seems now to be pinned on the Reproduction Number - R0, as it is termed, as an indicator. Sometimes, I find, mathematics can be reassuring - if you can measure something you can understand it - maybe even control it - so I spent a little time reading about this. Crudely speaking, as you will certainly know, it is a number which compares the number of new infections in a unit time with the number of people in the population who were already infected during the same interval. If you can get the value to less than unity, then that's good. We're not exactly sure what the consequences of R0 = 1 would be, but they would sure as hell be better than R0 = 10.

OK - it's not quite like this - we are considering rates of change here, so there is some calculus in there, and since we are considering variations in exponential growth functions there are a few natural logarithms too, but the spirit of the thing is that we have to divide one number by another, and try to get as small an answer as possible. This is obviously important, so I am paying attention.

The number on the top of this fraction - the new infections - is it known, then? How accurate is it?

Well, we only started widespread testing some weeks into the pandemic. We know about people who are in hospital, and we now know more about other categories - health workers, some other key workers, we are starting on residents and staff in care homes for the elderly (at this point I know more about the current situation in Scotland rather than the entire UK, but Scotland is normally the same as the rest of the country, maybe a few weeks behind). There are a whole pile of other people of whom we have no record at all:

* people who caught the virus and, as is very common, never knew - showed no symptoms at all, though they might well still be a source of infection to others
* people who became ill, and thought they might have Covid-19, but did not become sufficiently unwell to contact their doctor or go into hospital - they just quietly recovered, and thought they might have had it

The total of these two categories is certainly considerably larger than the people who have tested positive, so we have, at best, a measure of the size of the very small tip of an unknown iceberg.

Righto - what about the divisor, the number on the bottom of the fraction? - do we know how many people were already infected during the study period? Well no - of course we don't - given the tiny coverage provided by general testing, and the lack of understanding of how this virus behaves - how long are affected individuals infectious? - what is the true nature of the immunity which comes from recovery? We don't really know.

There are other details about what statistics we have on people who leave the infected population by either recovering or dying, but that is, once again, going to be a small number compared with people we can't identify and don't count. Let's not fuss about the details - the truth is that R0 is based on a mathematical function involving the comparison of one number we do not really know and another number which we also do not know. I do not find that comforting. We will be able to see if the number of people who die in hospital drops, and we can make some estimates of what has contributed to any change in that, but R0 looks like a dead duck to me, unless we know a whole lot more than we possibly can at present.

Overall, I'd be happier if someone would admit that R0 is no real help to us at the moment, and explain what else we can use. Next time the day's government spokesman makes a big deal about R0 dropping I shall be quietly confident that he is bluffing - there may be some number that he and his colleagues refer to as R0, but I don't believe it is anything which is of any real application to the public at large.

How about the entrails of a goat?

Zoom - Firming Up

After learning that the world shortage of webcams, caused by demand during lockdown, has put the prices through the ceiling, I've been pottering around to see what else we can do in the short term. My Windows laptop was a big disappointment - the internal camera is very basic; I think the processing power is fine, so it might work well with an external camera (if I had one), but there is another constraint anyway, in that Zoom will only permit one computer, one tablet and one smartphone to be enabled under a single account, and my desktop Mac is already the heart of operations.

Righto - I had a shot with the Android tablet. I didn't expect a lot, but I have to say I'm very pleased with the results. I constructed various experimental stands to hold the thing, and had a couple of brief sessions with Goya and with Stryker today to see how things looked from their end. Very promising. It would be better, of course, to have two cameras on the job, but if the stand for the tablet is rigid enough and stable enough then I can take the tablet down when necessary, and offer views from other angles, or close-ups, or whatever the generals want. The beauty of the stable stand is that I can put the tablet back in its main vantage point without fiddling around adjusting everything.

The best arrangement we achieved has the tablet about 7 feet from the floor, tipped forward (on a music stand, in fact), looking down over one corner of the table. We tried various combinations of lights, with the curtains open and closed - eventually the best arrangement was with curtains closed and all the room lights on, with the camera pointing in a direction which minimised reflected light. The photos were taken by Goya, at the far end of the conversation - there is a little loss of resolution in the pictures, compared with my original screen view, but it certainly looks as though it will do the job.

Remote generals should be provided with paper maps of the table, and we'll improvise some sort of unobtrusive grid reference system to clear up any ambiguities - maybe some form of unit roster arrangement might be a good idea, too. Whatever - I think we can now go ahead. We hope to have a smallish Napoleonic game ready to roll in a week or three.

I'll continue to keep an eye on the insane world of webcams, but the pressure is off for the moment.

The view from 7 feet up in the air - screen capture from the far end of the link. A little clarity is lost in transmission, but it is surely good enough to get us going. My son points out that if I buy an expensive 1080p streaming camera Zoom will detect our rural broadband service, and default to 730p anyway. That would be a shame (though I do fancy a decent camera for creating videos anyway). The mugs do not indicate a mighty consumption of coffee, by the way, I placed them there in case we couldn't find the corners through the camera view. Needn't have worried, I think.

Fighting by Zoom?

Interesting session this evening, using the newly installed Zoom set-up for a 3-way chat  - Stryker, Goya and myself. Videoconferencing. We had some problems with my broadband playing up a bit, but it's obvious that this does offer the opportunity of some remote miniatures gaming. Quite exciting, really - Stryker showed us around the 6mm ACW game he is soloing in his hut at the moment - looks good.

I realise that a lot of people are already doing this, but it's unfamiliar to us, so a fairly trouble-free toe in the water would be a fine idea. We may change our minds at any time, of course, but at the moment the plan is that we should set up a 3-way game to try it out - and pretty soon.

Agreed Thoughts / Guidelines / Givens (any minute now we'll have a Terms of Reference):

(1) for a 3-player game, the host should be umpire and general runner-about, the remote attendees will be the two commanders.

(2) the first game shouldn't be too large, or we will put ourselves off.

(3) a gridded game would work well, since the table layout should be easily visible, and there is no scope for getting bogged down in (remote) measurement - it would also be useful for the commanders to have paper maps of the table/board, for their own reference.

(4) since I have a very clearly marked-out gridded table, and all the necessary figures, I could be the first host - and we might have a look at the CCN scenario 006 for The River Coa in the Peninsular War. We'll use my Ramekin dice-driven activation system, so we don't have problems with the Command Cards, and I'll do all the dice rolling at my end - on camera, of course [The Lovely Rita].

Lovely Rita in her previous job

My set-up ideas on this would be to have my (big, Windows 10) laptop in the games room, with (preferably) a dedicated webcam connected. If the webcam can just stream live video into the laptop through USB, then this full screen display of the battlefield can be offered via the Share Screen option in Zoom. Thus the default screen would be the normal Zoom Gallery view of the participants, with a Share Screen option of the tabletop action, as seen from the webcam (mounted on a fairly high tripod, angled down onto the table).

I assume that all this would work OK. Snag #1 is that I have to get my hands on a webcam. I realise it is possible to set up a smartphone or other device to work as the webcam, but I have an aversion to solutions involving gaffer-tape or wishful thinking, so an actual webcam which just works out of the box would be good, especially for a klutz like me - the scope for dropping an iPhone from a height of 2 metres is too obvious, and just think how that would spoil the game...

I see that the prices of conference-quality 1080p webcams are just about what you would expect - very high - but there are cheaper options, and the options are getting cheaper and better all the time. I had a look to see what is available second-hand on eBay, just to get some experience without busting the bank. When I checked these used items back against Amazon and elsewhere, I realised that, in general, new webcams are on sale cheaper than second-hand ones, and often the spec is better. This is obviously an area where technology is improving and prices are dropping fast. Hmmm.

I was looking at customer reviews on various pieces of kit - some of the Logitech units look good, but it's hard to tell with my current level of understanding without actually trying one out. That's as far as I've got - we have agreed that we would like to try something, and it would be nice if it worked without a huge amount of hassle. At this point I really would welcome some suggestions, if anyone has experience of this stuff, and would be kind enough to help out a little. Any camera recommendations? Any "don't ever do what I did" stories? All welcome.

One small downside of Zoom, of course, is that a "meeting" involving more than 2 people is limited to 40 minutes unless you have a paid account, in which case you are talking about $15 a month. As a loss leader, Zoom are currently waiving the 40-minute limit for new subscribers, and there are some supposedly "special" offers to help during the lockdown period. That's all fine, but I had a think about it. If multi-way Zoom is obviously a good thing to have access to - particularly if old chaps driving across Scotland with vans full of soldiers and scenery are likely to meet with the disapproval of The Polis for the foreseeable future, then $15 may be a snip. When I think about it, I currently pay a monthly amount for an Audible audiobook membership from which I haven't ordered anything for a while, and I also pay for a Spotify account which I never use.

I could get myself organised and save most of $15 a month with very little effort, so that's not such a disincentive. And, of course, I could then keep in contact with my long-lost relatives - two at a time, if need be. Hmmm.

If I can sort out what I need to do about a decent camera - and some reasonably decent ones are only about £30 these days - this looks rather like a goer.

Stryker does Zoom - scary

O Blog-ee O Blogg-er (Life Goes On)

This is just by way of a quick apology - I am having continuing problems with Blogger, and I wish to clear up any accidental breaches of etiquette.

Abergele Market, long ago - can you spot Desmond?

(1) A trifle to start with - the pictures which disappeared a few weeks ago have not come back, but it is reputed to be a known problem and Google are "working on it". If they come back, good - if they don't come back, I may replace the lost images. I may forget.

(2) There are certain bloggers who send comments to my blog and I don't get notified. I'm not sure why - it seems to be a regular feature of certain individuals - I keep an eye open for pending comments. If I've missed any, no offence intended.

(3) For some reason, I am only able to comment on some blogs if I use my own name, as per my Gmail account. If I have stopped commenting on your blog, it is not because I no longer love you, it is simply because I choose to use my MSFoy blog ID. Nothing sinister, it's just that if I use my real name I may get hassle from my ex-wife and the tax authorities of several Western nations. Also Max Foy's widow will be furious if she finds out he's dead.

(4) I can no longer follow any new blogs using my MSFoy ID - again, I am required to use my real name. This may be because my email provider is BTinternet - I've had occasional messages from Google that they cannot validate BT's mail server as having proper security certification - there was mention of some protocol or other (DMARC? - can't remember). Whatever, I'm not very interested.

I guess I have to be glad that it still works a bit. I am offered regular suggestions that I should try New Blogger, but I remember (with a shudder) similar pressures to move to Google+, and I am keeping my hand on my halfpenny.

I'd like to think this is the most boring post I've put here for a while - if you disagree, please don't bother to let me know.

WSS - Regiment Scharfenstein

More Imperialist infantry - this was supposed to be the last refurbishing batch for Phase One, but in fact I decided to hold back and strip two of the battalions, since they weren't in a good enough state to retouch. This last batch comprises the fuzzy end of the collection - these figures had not been varnished, and appear to have been stored less successfully than most of their colleagues. Whatever, they are more weathered, more battered than I have attempted so far in this project.

These fellows took a fair amount of labour to get into shape - I'm happy with them now, though a regiment dressed in grey with black facings is a bit on the sombre side.

These are two battalions of the regiment of Sebastian Carl, Graf Kratz von Scharfenstein. The Regiment Haßlinger will be along in a week or two, once they have been stripped and had the castings cleaned up a little.

Getting there!

Hooptedoodle #363 - Robot and Foy

Last week I downloaded the app for Zoom, the videoconferencing tool, and, since I've now had three prompts from friends to get my account fired up, I set about doing exactly this.

Filled in the online form to join up, and clicked the button to receive my email, so that I can reply to it and validate my account. What could be easier?

Well, my email didn't arrive. I requested a re-send, and it still didn't arrive.

I got on to Zoom's online customer support, and opened up the chat line. The chat line suggested I should check my spam folder, and maybe contact my workplace IT section for help. I confirmed that I had checked spam, and that I am my own IT support, and the chat line couldn't understand what I was talking about. "TRY AGAIN WITH DIFFERENT WORDS..." it suggested.

Tried a couple of re-wordings, and it became obvious pretty quickly that I was chatting with an expert system, and I was getting nowhere fast. I don't have a lot of time for this sort of exercise today, so I just said "Forget it for now - I'll try later."

To which the expert system replied:

"IF YOU USE LANGUAGE LIKE THAT, WE WILL BE UNABLE TO HELP YOU."

It's disappointing when an expert system has such poor expectations of its own customers. Maybe I will try again later - not sure.

The language problem, I think, is at their end - their chat line must have a very small repertoire of known words.

No worries. Maybe I'm due a return to Skype?


***** Late Edit - Happy Ending? *****

Credit where credit is due - I did receive the activation email, plus the 4 further re-sends I requested. They arrived at 03:11, which is 15 hours after I sent my original request.

OK - I'm probably operational now. I imagine the emails are sent by more robots. Thus my first impression is that Zoom's AI staff are not only sensitive but also remarkably slow. I have a couple of YouTube instructional vids to watch to get up to speed. Maybe later - my robot is still asleep.

******************************