exo : blah

A Saturday afternoon in late October turns out to be a bad time to visit the Trevi fountain. We’d expected it to be busy but it’s not only the piazza itself but the surrounding streets that are jammed. Wall to wall people shuffling along to try and find some space where they can even see the fountain while volunteers blow whistles at the overly enthusiastic. We leave almost instantly having barely seen the fountain.

This is probably the worst of the excess of people found at the popular sites of Rome but the feeling of being in an endless queue of people slowly milling past sights is one that becomes familiar over a week.

The colosseum and forum lull us into thinking it won’t be too bad. There are queues and a lot of people but it’s not awful and well managed. There are moments where there is space around us and time to contemplate free of the press of fellow tourists. This is especially true in the forum which is large enough for the crowds to spread out. It’s also not really got a blockbuster sight so there isn’t the same funnelling of everyone to a single destination.

St Peter’s is a different thing. We visit on a Sunday morning so we can see the Pope give his little homily from a balcony far above the packed square. The shout outs at the end to the pilgrims from across the world are both charming and a little odd. It empties remarkably quickly afterwards and we wander off for some lunch while we wait for the church to open. It only takes five minutes walk to get to somewhere with a free table.

Lunch done we head back, wander through the now reasonably empty square following the signs for St Peter’s. There’s a load of x ray machines lined up under the portico and a queue that leads round the corner and onto a side street. And then down the side street. Really quite a way down. It’s at least eight people wide and extends far enough that we have time for a whole conversation about if this can really be the queue, if we want to join it and if we should do something else instead.

We join the queue.

In fairness it moves quite quickly and it’s probably only twenty five minutes before we’re through the security checks. There’s another brief queue on the other side for unclear reasons and then we’re walking up to the church. Inside it’s a mass of people. It’s not much of problem because the building is vast, and surprisingly quiet given the crowd. It’s hard to appreciate the size, partly as we are bad at scale and also because, magnificently, it’s been designed to look smaller than it is. It’s only looking up to see the people on the dome walkway that gives away the size. The crowding is made worse by the central floor being given over to a sea of clear plastic seats. I don’t know if they are always there or it’s related to it being a Jubilee year but the main body of the church is essentially closed to visitors, which is a shame as I very much wanted to see the markers on the floor to shame other churches for being so smol.

The crowds mean that you have to actively step out of the procession of people to view things. You can’t really just stop and look without the throng pressing round you. Possibly other times are better but it’s still a bit off putting.

The next few days we avoid the sights and just roam. It’s a lovely city to wander round and a great place to sit and watch people.

We do go to the Vittoriano which I highly recommend as an example of the Italian inability to do subtle. It’s hard to avoid seeing it as it’s right next to the forum and huge. Monumental for the sake of being monumental; both impressive and comedic in its scale. There are probably good views from the top but 18 euros to go up a lift seems a bit much.

On our last night we go to see the Sistine Chapel. This was the only bookable slot we could get despite booking weeks in advance. We turn up an hour before, walk past the enormous queue of people without a booked time and get to the slightly less enormous queue of those with booked slots. Having been assured we can join 15 minutes ahead of our slot we go for a coffee, and return with 25 minutes to spare to a queue of hundreds. Once again it’s fairly well managed and it moves reasonably quickly and we get in only ten minutes or so after our booked time.

Inside the museum again feels line one long line of people processing through. We try to check out of it where we can which is reasonably often as they route you through pretty much the whole place before the main event, and the place is huge. I assume this is deliberate to keep a handle on numbers in the chapel but it does lead to the feeling of being in the longest, best decorated queue in the world. In total we are in there two and a half hours and only scratch the surface. The Pope has collected a lot of stuff. We barely look at the modern art section after the chapel as it’s late and we’re tired, hungry and all out of looking, but even with the barest glances you sense it’s got another hours worth of stuff.

The Sistine itself deserves the hype. It is luminous. We’re in there for I guess half an hour and only leave because it’s closing time. Getting to wander in when it’s empty is surely one of the great fringe benefits of being the Pope.

It’s 25 years since either of us have been to Rome. We’d expected it to be busier, not least because previously it was mid March, but it’s slightly shocking to see how much more so. We didn’t do much touristing then but I recall popping into St Peter’s for a quick look in a way you clearly cannot now.

Second year running. Officially a streak!

cycling

I think a good year. I did a lot of doing the rides I wanted and not a lot of rides for the sake of it.

I did finally manage to nudge over 250km in one ride which has been on the list for a while. One of these things that it’s good to have done but unlikely to be repeated. I’ve realised 200km is the limit of what is enjoyable for me to ride in a day which seems like a good thing to learn.

There were five weeks in the second half of the year with no riding because we were away and I never really got fully going after that which is a shame. The weather in the autumn wasn’t great. That said, I still got out and did some decent rides, it just felt like I was treading water. And then a worse than usual December cold hit and knocked out a chunk of that. I’d normally hope to finish strongly over the Twixtmas period but the weather was very much not favourable.

Once again I would have liked to do a bit more gravel stuff but it’s just that bit more annoying to plan out. The more I do the less I need to plan but if I want to do a decent length ride it’s so much easier to head out on the road bike.

pictures

There is something of a theme in that I did ok with the proper camera for the first half of the year and then it too fell off. As with last year I still have not really got a workflow for getting the photos off the camera and sticking them somewhere. I think I should decide not to care about doing much with the photos and just take it as an excuse to enjoy the act of pointing a camera at things.

Not sure this is my fav of the year but it is one I was pleased with. Taken with the phone on the sort of walk that frankly the SLR is just a bit too heavy to carry, or at least for me to want to carry.

One nice thing has been getting a little photo printer. I probably need somewhere to put the photos, ideally a frame that’s easy to swap things in and out of, but even just pinning them to the fridge has been pleasant and a change from everything disappearing into the internet.

The phone got an upgrade so I’ve now got a telephoto lens there which has been good. If nothing else I’ve taken several squirrel photos that would not have happened without it. Another nice thing with the new phone is being able to use a physical button to access the camera which is a significant boon when wearing winter cycling gloves. The days of trying to swipe open the camera with my nose are finally at an end.

work

More climate things, more crowdsourcing things, including using it for an internal project, and a bit of prodding TheyworkForYou which was a bit of a gear change.

Having mostly been working on small and new codebases I mostly wrote shifting back to a project that’s over twenty years old is always a bit of a shock. I do not think I did my best work there for various reasons not least of which it came at a point when I was just sleeping terribly.

No real big achievements, again with this theme, but lots of small improvements and a chunk of making previously tedious processes that required a developer, I.e. me, self serve which is always pleasing.

books

As before there is a mostly complete list of books read over the year so you can go look at that for the raw details.

I stalled out a bit on reading in December through a combination of seasonal malaise and actual illness but otherwise it was a pretty good year. Not sure I quite kept up with the incoming pile but the five weeks out of the country mostly reading ebooks from the library didn’t help with that. Although huzzah for ebooks from the library which are just great for travel. Also so much easier to just nope out of a book that cannot physically manifest your misplaced sense of failure at abandoning the story half way through. Especially as if you ignore it long enough the book very politely returns itself so even your virtual shelf is free of guilt.

The definite recommends for the year were The Book of Love, Ink Blood Sister Scribe, which I am still unclear on how to punctuate, Molloy Molloy and the Angel of Death, Catfish Rolling, The Saint of Bright Doors and Frontier. Some Desperate Glory was also good but didn’t quite stick the landing.

I gave up on 6 books and I really should have given up on The Terraformers and The Buried Giant. There former was just a bit too “let me tell you about my research and did you know capitalism was bad?” and the latter just annoyed me.

I saw Matthew’s year note thing and liked it so figured, why not, let’s try something like that.

cycling

I’m not sure it was a banner year but it was a one of just chugging along. I mostly rode on the road because I like the bike and I got some fancy new wheels which added a bit of fun.

The most satisfactory riding was a round trip to Glasgow to watch the World Champs in easly August, partly as the aptness was pleasing and partly as riding to Glasgow has been on my list for a while. It was not the best ride because tbh as ridden it wasn’t the most scenic of rides, plus it was very damp on the way there so not entirely pleasant. I think there’s probably better routes to take but overall I think there’s other places I’d rather ride so I’ll probably consider that box ticked.

Had a UK holiday and took the gravel bike so had some riding in a new place which was good. As ever a bit hit and miss on the routes but always lovely to see new areas.

Not really sure there was a standout ride though. Had a lot of good rides but nothing absolutely spectacular. Which is fine.

Distance and time wise it was much of a muchness with recent years, although did lack any 200+ km rides which I’d like to resolve this year, as well as shifting the balance back towards off road a bit.

pictures

I got a proper camera again which was good. 90% of the pictures I take are still on an iPhone because I always have it and most of the photos I take on bike rides. Plus it takes good photos. However I did take a chunk of photos with the proper camera that would not have happened without it including probably my favourite of the year.

The main obstacles with the real camera is it’s much more of a faff to get photos off it because loading from a card, and that I haven’t really settled on a process or app for browsing and editing photos. I am mostly using Apple Photos because it’s there and it does just about enough but it still feels quite klunky. I am loathe to pay the Adobe tax and start on Lightroom but thus far all the other alternatives I’ve looked at have’t been convincing. More work required.

work

I do not talk at all about work here so this is an exciting first, although I’m going to be brief because I don’t talk about work here. I built a crowdsourcing website from scratch which was largely enjoyable and pretty successful according to the people using it. Otherwise it was mostly improving stuff from the last couple of years of work on our Climate Programme.

As Matthew said we had our 20th Anniversary this year of which I’ve been there a bit over half. Was nice to see lots of familiar faces at the party and really heartening to hear from people who have found our tools useful. If you like that sort of thing there’s a 20 year retrospective you can read.

books

Elsewhere is my mostly complete list of books read so you can go look at that for the raw details.

Highlights were Matrix, Piranesi, The Midnight Lie, When Women were Dragons and Saint Death’s Daughter. Nona the Ninth was also a delight but I expected it to be so somehow that makes it not a highlight. Likewise A Day of Fallen Night.

I was a bit better at noping out on books I wasn’t enjoying although I still read all of The Stars are Legion and Babel despite not enjoying either so still work to be done. I am at least of to a good start for 2024 on that front having already given up on a book that’s been sitting half read for months.

True to form we’ve arrived in Venice the day before a festival, Vogalonga, we were unaware of three days previously. A chunk of the first day is spent sat on a Vapareto stop on the Grand Canal watching people rowing. It is not as best we can tell a race, at least by the time we sit down. It is somewhat chaotic and the police on a motor boat in charge of marshalling the participants do a lot of blowing whistles and pointing to the side of the canal appropriate for the direction of travel. In retrospect this seems hilarious as the rest of the time boats weave about the canal based on where there is space. I guess locals get more leeway than tourists allowed onto the canal for an annual outing.

The next day we again head to a Vapareto stop to make our own way along the canal. Like much of the rest of Venice the Grand Canal is very Venicey. Plenty of places manage to meet expectations in little photogenic pockets, Venice is all pocket.

It’s in the most rammed with people bits that it feels the least something else and the most everywhere else. St Mark’s, if you ignore the canal in one corner, is not unlike many other palatial Italian squares. Not that it is unimpressive, more that it is less exceptional. Similarly, the shop lined alleys directly off the square recall other old Italian centres.

The drop off in density of people as you wander away from The Sights is also in keeping with elsewhere. We do less of this than we might due to reasons, but wandering down the little alleys is hugely enjoyable. It is, again, not entirely dissimilar but for the canals. Obviously the canals are the whole point of Venice but they are constantly delightful. Partly aesthetically but almost more so for watching Venetians canaling.

There is something slightly idiotic about going to a place and marvelling at what is obvious and everyday, but the novelty of watching a supermarket get a delivery to its loading dock adds a level of background delight not present elsewhere. Partly this is because I am not a water person so find boats vaguely magical. They do not move in a way that makes sense to me, both ponderous yet unexpectedly nimble.

It is this misplaced sense of wonder that makes a day spent hopping on and off Vapereto seem more extraordinary than it really should. I can understand that it is just a bus service but it is boats so using them to travel a few hundred meters somehow feels too trivial, too casual. Boats should require ceremony and planning. It is hard to feel decadent squashed in with tourists, schoolchildren and commuters, and yet it does. I am not rational about boats.

As well as Vogalonga our visit coincides with the architecture biennial so there is a great deal of art nonsense which we largely ignore. I’d assumed that the biennial was fairly limited in both scope and time but it seems semi permanent and has offshoots all over the city. Down yet another tiny alley we chance on the shed housing the Scottish entry which, as with much of it we’ve passed, is more art installation than architecture. It is a bit weird to be reading about Ravenscraig by a canal.

A bit weird is the overall vibe. Not disconcertingly so but there is much of Venice that when you stop and think doesn’t make a lot of sense. It is wilfully impractical in many ways but makes it seem reasonable and normal when you are in the bubble.

Take the example of container­ized shipping. This is text­book automa­tion, but the picture is not “replacement”, a line of clanking robo-longshoremen carrying bulky cargo from the bellies of ships. Rather, an entirely new task was imagined — moving and stacking enormous, modular containers — and it’s THAT task that was given to machines. It’s hilar­ious, if you think about it: “Ah yes, we auto­mated this onerous human labor … by completely rebuilding the entire phys­ical infrastruc­ture of global shipping, fighting a pitched polit­ical battle along the way!”

Robin Sloan on ChatGPT and why automation is rarely about replicating existing tasks and more about reinventing process to allow machines to do them. It’s at the bottom after the bits about web platform experimentation which are also good.

1. During the course of the inquiry, we took evidence from ministers and departments from the Government led by Prime Minister Johnson. On 6 September 2022, Liz Truss became Prime Minister. We hope the new Prime Minister and her Cabinet find this report useful.

Life moving pretty fast for the House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee. It is a good report though.

The DSA is doing plenty of things that its members would want a party to do, but it is not running candidates on its own ballot line. One especially popular analysis describes DSA as a “party-surrogate,” an organization that engages on the terrain of the Democratic Party to build an independent membership with its own constituency and base, thus allowing for tactical flexibility and dynamism. As a party-surrogate, the argument goes, the DSA can help build movements without falling into the trap of movementism, and contest elections without being sucked into the mire of electoralism.

Brendan O’Connor really clearing things up.

Petrarch wanted to end the cruel wars for light causes that were wounding Italy, but had no plan beyond sending his poem out into the world, and urging elites to have their kids read Cicero. Machiavelli also wanted to end the cruel wars for light causes, and seeing that reading Cicero had failed he proposed a new way of evaluating history, collecting examples of what worked and didn’t in the past, basing our statecraft and actions on them so the next time we try things we’ll choose more wisely.

Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages – Ex Urbe

This is long but excellent on why living through the renaissance was not great, how the notion of the renaissance came to be and why it continues to be such a popular idea. Plus, it’s funny.

Would we encourage an epidemiologist to apply ‘fresh thinking’ to the design of an electrical substation? Perhaps we should treat with caution the predictions of electrical engineers about pandemic disease outbreaks.

Royal Statistical Society are sad that people continue to be bad at science communication.

“Like my cat, I often simply do what I want to do.” This was the opening sentence of Derek Parfit’s philosophical masterpiece, Reasons and Persons. He believed that it was the best way to begin his book because it showed something important about people. Often we are not as special as we think we are. For instance, when people simply do what they want to do they appear to be utilizing no ability that only people have. On the other hand, when we respond to reasons, we are doing something uniquely human, because only people can act in this way. Cats are notorious for doing what they want to do, and the sense of proximity between a cat and its owner pleasingly heightens our sense of their similarity. Hence, there could be no better way for this book to begin.

However, there was a problem. Derek did not, in fact, own a cat. Nor did he wish to become a cat owner, as he would rather spend his time taking photographs and doing philosophy. On the other hand, the sentence would clearly be better if it was true. To resolve this problem Derek drew up a legal agreement with his sister, who did own a cat, to the effect that he would take legal possession of the cat while she would continue living with it.

It’s about ethics in ethics.