Surrey

A trip to Surrey; some things came to light

1. A classic Burton building in the High Street ...
2. ... founded by Barbara Burton ...
3. ... with elephants in the window, just like Aber.
4. People "buying bricks" for the cathedral. It might have been my family, but wasn't.
5. A beautifully carved Madonna.
6. A metaphor for our times.
7. A plaintive sculpture.
8. The Jellicoe Roof Garden viewed from afar.
9. A really very graceful cathedral.
10. A lady.
11. A clock.

UPDATE - Photo-voltaic cells: free money

I wrote with conceit about a year ago about our PV cells. It is now two years since their installation and the pictures they generate begin to stabilise.

The average daily generation and usage look like this (click to enlarge)

(recall that "usage" is not a clearly defined quantity).

The best fit sine waves to generation and usage, plotted on the graphs, are (click to enlarge):

The waves are (again) reassuringly homed on the spring equinox. The average daily generation in 2011-12 was 9.8KWh, and in 2012-13 was 11.3KWh - yes, the weather really was better!

Out of interest, remember especially that June 2012 was awful, and July 2013 was pretty good - here are the pictures for those months against the best fit - no prizes for guessing which is which:

Well, the upfront money-in-pocket from the FIT is now over £5/day. What we save from using free rather than costed power, and pushing surplus into the grid, is as ever secondary and difficult to pinpoint, but is certainly another positive quantity.

We're not regretting this purchase.

Ca Plane Pour Moi: the New York Dolls' legacy

Ca Plane Pour Moi, the iconic Plastic Bertrand song. People have more chance of remembering their first hearing of this than where they were on 11/9/01, or when Kennedy was shot.

In a moment of idleness, I set about capturing a list of covers with youtube or similar links. Mercifully, early on in this pointless exercise I discovered a shrine to this immortal song. Whoever did this work has done a more than thorough job. Go see.

Do not miss:

• The deeply poignant original by Elton Mortello, Jet Boy, Jet Girl.
• Hemmi Gunn's version, translated into Icelandic as Einn dans við mig.
• The dancing video in Thee headcoatees version.
• Seriously foxy ladies in the Swiss band Tears.
• Pigloo - hahahahahahaha!
• Andre Vershuren's accordion instrumental.

(Apropos of Elton Mortello's version, he must have known of Jet Boy by the NYD, which I saw performed live in York in, ummm, 1974.)

My French is appalling, but I also commend David Gibb's attempted translation of the lyrics - My cat Splash indeed. An Aussie chat show has these lyrics overlaid on the PB original.

Ca plane pour moi - ganz wahr.

Piglet Cuckoo MP beer

• In Polish, the word for please is proszę, which the British cannot distinguish in pronunciation from prosię, meaning piglet. How many times have I walked into a Polish bar and said "Two beers, piglet!"?
• In Welsh, the word for beer is cwrw (do remember that w is a vowel). A cuckoo is, unsurprisingly, cwcw, which is a distressingly close thing.
• The Greek for beer is μπύρα, which is bloody confusing for the linguistically inept mathematician who knows the letters, but not that mu and pi combine to give a b. So actually, they call it beer.

One might have assumed that linguistic Darwinism would have assured that all words relating to beer and its purchase would be unambiguous and easily understood by all: I favour calling it "beer" everywhere.

(The Polish for cuckoo is kukułka.)

Safle bws encore

I have in the past had cause to remark on the bus-stops of Aberystwyth:

• For data capture of, inter alia, passenger mass
• As unusual and rare sights in the cityscape

Now - to my surprise and delight, the rarest of events just outside my own house! Over a period of months, the authorities [sic] have erected a fine new stop some 25 yards east of the previous; nobody is sure why. Endless hours of fun are to be had watching putative customers deciding which one actually works - the same confusion afflicts the bus drivers.

We know of no plans ro remove the "old" one.

The best pub in Llandudno

We travel to Llandudno, a town of over-high buildings where the model aeroplane enthusiasts dress their craft as seagulls and rare cable-hauled trams run amok in the streets.

Those habitual liars Trip Advisor tell you the best pub in town is a place I will not name, to avoid risk of libeling. With minimal effort we found two contenders in The Cottage Loaf and The Albert - who knows how many more and better there may actually be?

They also undersing one of the country's most exceptional ancient monuments where you can see blissfully happy people excavating malachite, to impede the parking of cars.

The Fields Medal, Goldbach, Twin Primes and fraud

A wonderful month for number theorists: the Weak Goldbach Conjecture is proved [Helfgott], and an enormous inroad is made to the Twin Prime Conjecture [Zhang]. Neither advance owes anything to me.

Kevin then posed an interesting question: is the Fields Medal awarded in the year of the work that merits it? If so, wouldn't you be pissed off to make an advance of huge stature to be pipped by someone else?

I'll delay my publication of a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis until next year, just in case.

More productively, we thought about manufacturing a facsimile of a Fields Medal using the underused 3D printer in Gwyddoniaeth Gyfrifiadurol at Prifysgol Aberystwyth and taking it turns to wear it during excursions to the pubs of Aber.

Kevin, incidentally, is runner-up in the World Outdoor Cribbage Championship.