Trip To London & The Centre for Computing History
This trip to London on Wednesday was ostensibly to hand over documents for my South African passport application. I had an appointment at a centre near Liverpool St. train station at 8.30 so I decided to go a day earlier so that I would easily be able to get there on time. As I had a whole two days in London I tried to set up meetings with people I'd like to talk to.
I first asked my daughter if there was anything she would like to do together in London. I also wanted to talk to Sophie MacLean about using formal systems and computation to study analytic number theory and to Philippa Gardner to see what she knows about any practical instances where people are using Pi and Bigraph Calculus for building secure, reliable computer and communications systems. I also wanted to talk to Hannah Fry about how statistics really works when you are using it to predict behaviour of intelligent agents. Unfortunately none of these meetings were possible.
I booked a Flixbus ticket from Parkside in Cambridge to Victoria Coach Station in London, but for some reason the ticket I got was only as far as Finchley Road in Camden and the bus dropped me right outside a charity shop where I found a really wonderful pile of books. Almost every one was interesting and I had to leave because I felt compelled to buy everything I looked at. I escaped with only six items in a bag from a Chinese Dim Sum takeaway.
This shop was near the corner of Frognal and Finchley Road, just past the Camden Arts Centre and the Lovelock Hostage Bridge installation at JW3. I wouldn't have noticed the centre but for the giant mural by Leon Fenster. Unfortunately they have to scan and search everyone who enters.
Warren Zevon - Lawyers, Guns and Money
Subscribe to Warren Zevon on MV.
Camden Arts Centre is across the road in a beautiful old Victorian library building with a flourishing garden, so I went there and had a cup of coffee with imaginary Natasha, then we set off on an adventure, which evolved into a James Bond story; where James Bond tries to defect to Russia in order to get back to Bolivia. This is a difficult thing to do, as it involves unifying Marxist materialism with Berkleyan idealism, but it turns out just to be an exercise in practical reason with a fox. Then Bond finds a dead-letter box where people from America can write Marx, and on the way back down the hill he bumps into Baroness Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, who was the step granddaughter of the Duchess of St. Albans and in her day the wealthiest woman in England. The Holly Village she built on Brookfield in Highgate was a social housing project, now in private hands.
Then James Bond retired, and I went to the Duke of St. Albans to drink a shot of single malt with Eugenia Cheng and we talked about Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, which he wrote in Brixton Prison. See this very interesting Conway Hall article Bertrand Russell and World War I:
He was sentenced to six months in Brixton in the so-called second division prison regime, where books were not permitted, and endless sewing of mailbags was in prospect. This was altered on appeal in May 1918 to the first division, where prisoners were still banned tobacco but were able to carry on their profession: in the first fortnight he had written 20,000 words of his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, when not reading and writing forbidden letters put in the pages of uncut books carried in by his visitors. These included a letter to his fellow campaigner and earlier imprisoned ‘conchie’, Clifford Allen, late in June: “The end will come – might come tomorrow – but not through us. If we have any effect on posterity, it will be owing to what we have done together with what we shall do after the war. At present, the thing is, so far as is compatible with not helping them [the Government], to avoid their ruining our capacity for work afterwards. If we could get the men out on condition they abstain from propaganda, I should advise them to promise .. Our political duty, now, is entirely to be in readiness for after the war ..”
Eugenia then explained what ordinal logics are, and cleared up the connection with Alan Turing's PhD work. See Alan Turing's Systems of Logic: The Princeton Thesis Edited by Andrew W. Appel A facsimile edition of Alan Turing's influential Princeton thesis and Dependent Types and Parametric Polymorphic Types. See also this post which I made on my last day in Mexico before the Americans threw me in jail: Ian Grant's Weather Report 9/1/22 (especially this video https://youtu.be/5wTJoZBpyxw)
Then I noticed the barmaid who reminded me of Hannah Reid:
But she'd gone when I next looked, ... Then I walked to SoHo and it started raining, ...
Subscribe to ForSGS.
After that I walked to Victoria and then on to Chelsea and finally got to the hostel I had booked at around 3:30 am. I spent an hour or so filling in my passport application in the wrong colour ink (it must be black, blue is unacceptable) but it didn't matter because they weren't going to handle my application on account of my passport having been issued thirty years ago. They say I must apply to the South African Home Office for an ID card first.
After that I wandered rather aimlessly around until I stumbled on the London office of the RNIB. It's now called "The Royal National Institute for Blind People", presumably because they got fed up with the queues of bats and worms that kept turning up wondering what it was all about. There I tried out the very impressive Navilens system for finding one's way around the building.
Then it was but a short walk to King's Cross, where I found numerous art projects:
Here's a good part of it:
Then I went back to Cambridge and the next day I went for a walk: The Photogenic Purlieus of Cambridge. Then on Sunday I went to see the Bring 'n Byte event at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge. See I Got Bit at the Bring 'n Byte Yesterday. There I met lots of interesting people: a Zimbabwean guy who sells ISA cards for old IBM compatibles that let you connect to the Internet. See https://shop.flamelily.co.uk/ and the PicoMEM board:
The PicoMEM is an 8-bit ISA expansion card which aims to be an all-in-one solution for ISA-based vintage PCs. It is designed as a way to run Emulated ISA boards on a real PC. It connects the full 8Bit Memory and I/O Bus plus an IRQ to a Raspberry Pi Pico, through a multiplexor/Level shifter chip. It also has a 8Mbyte PSRAM connected in SPI and a MicroSD Slot. The PicoMEM Board can be seen as both a working PC extension board as well as a development platform.
I also met Andy Toone and we talked about so much stuff I had to make notes of it all and I haven't even started on that yet. Andy Toone designed and sells the Feertech Microbeast. See Taylor and Amy Build The Feertech MicroBeast and Veronica Goes to Visit Taylor and Amy ... There was a TI 99/4a at the museum, but no Newbury NewBrain!
I also met David Pleasance and he told me some interesting stories about Commodore Business Machines' final years after Jack Tramiel left. This was when the Commodore 64 and Amiga appeared.
I wonder if anyone will bite on this idea for psyops terminals: The Dodleston Messages Comes to Cambridge. Maybe we need a kickstarter for this too, ...
Comments
Post a Comment