I learned the truth at seventeen

Mason Mount will join Manchester United on a five-year contract, with the option of a further 12 months, after Chelsea finally accepted a deal worth up to £60million for the midfielder.

And Mount will pocket at least £78million in wages if he stays at Old Trafford for the full term of his deal, as he will be paid £250,000-a-week, plus bonuses that could earn him up to £300,000-a-week.

The £138million total is 5.75 per cent of the £2.4 billion announced for the NHS over five years by Steve Barclay the Health Minister today. 

Just over seventeen Mason Mounts doesn't sound quite so extravagant. Come to think about it, a Premiere League squad consists of up to twenty five players, so you couldn't run a football club for five years with players on equivalent deals for £2.4bn.

It is mind boggling really,

Text is already technology

Generative AI models like chatbots learn the patterns and structure of their input training data, and then generate output inspired by its inherent patterns. The training data is a corpus. The corpora of Large Language Models are nothing more, though certainly nothing less, than unstructured libraries; books stacked at random in boxes, but read thoroughly as they are being unpacked. 

Thus, what this latest artificial intelligence advance is presenting us with is not a step change or discontinuity but rather another rung, one further up the ladder. A ladder footed by Plato's Socrates in the Phaedrus, that Derrida has been wobbling, up till now, on the top of; not because his technique was poor but because he had climbed further than anyone else and was on his tip toes.

Accidental

I read a rave review in the Torygraph yesterday: Accidental Death of an Anarchist: never has this satire on police brutality felt so bitingly relevant. In the wake of the Casey report, this take on Fo's play is acutely topical – and its star, Daniel Rigby, delivers a comic tour de force. (It is here but behind a paywall.)

Looking at the website, I see that it got five stars from the Daily Mail as well, while the Socialist Worker weighed in with "combines biting humour and knockabout fun with a shattering satire on institutional power.’ How's that for squaring this circle? I think we have found August's theatre visit.

Also looking at Paapa in the NT's 'The Effect' for September. Nothing may come of it though as I didn't like the last two things I saw by its director Jamie Lloyd (Cyrano de Bergerac, and The Seagull).

How I spend a typical day

My all time favorite.. ❤️
Never gets old.. pic.twitter.com/lyCUCJKMOg

— Buitengebieden (@buitengebieden) June 26, 2023

Jeremy Seabrook

I picked Steve up in Bath on the way back from Cardiff to London yesterday. His son is at Bath Spa University so we put all of the possessions from his accommodation in the back of the car and set off. (Rebecca and Harry had already left on the train.)

This meant that he was with me when I stopped at Hammersmith to take PG out for his weekly grocery shop. To my surprise they bonded, as we drank coffees in COFX, over a writer called Jeremy Seabrook, Peter having directed a play of his called Life Price in 1969, and Steve having read his work on social and economic justice in a professional capacity.

PS I noticed from The Guardian that there was a documentary called "The Clinic" on ITV last night: the story of the rise and fall of the Tavistock Centre's Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS). It is available here on itvX. Steve is at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. I wonder if he knows about the show or might be interested in it?

Wilson Road

It was a relief to see Mum in Ty Gwyn yesterday after all the time she had spent in hospital. Something as small, for all that she was in a wheelchair, as sitting in the garden with coffee and cake was like the lap of luxury. John came with me and Anne-Marie arrived shortly after us and we talked about her growing up in Ely.

John and I drove there afterwards. If you head down east along Archer Road from outside our maternal grandparents' place and turn left at the roundabout you will be in Wilson Street. The second right then will be Snowden Road, where Kyrees Sullivan, 16, and Harvey Evans, 15,  were killed in May when they crashed while riding an electric bicycle through the suburb after having been followed by a police van.

I imagine the picture shows where the fatal collision happened.  The park gates a little further up are where most of the memorial decorations are fixed. I didn't want to photograph that as people were still laying wreaths and I thought I would be intruding.

Three or four hundred from the lamppost, south down Wilson Road, is the primary school where mum taught a class of 60. Five hundred yards further down the road and over the junction with Cowbridge Road is the St Francis of Assisi Church. If the residents of Ely aren't our people who are?

Hallucinations

NEW YORK, June 22 (Reuters)

New York lawyers sanctioned for using fake ChatGPT cases in legal brief

 A U.S. judge on Thursday imposed sanctions on two New York lawyers who submitted a legal brief that included six fictitious case citations generated by an artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT.

U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel in Manhattan ordered lawyers Steven Schwartz, Peter LoDuca and their law firm Levidow, Levidow & Oberman to pay a $5,000 fine in total.

The judge found the lawyers acted in bad faith and made "acts of conscious avoidance and false and misleading statements to the court."

Levidow, Levidow & Oberman said in a statement on Thursday that its lawyers "respectfully" disagreed with the court that they acted in bad faith.

"We made a good faith mistake in failing to believe that a piece of technology could be making up cases out of whole cloth," the firm's statement said.

Hallucinations, sometimes called confabulations or delusions, in Chatbots. A curious thing about them is that nobody seems really to understand how they occur, Large Language Models being, to all intents and purposes, opaque. We should all be both more intrigued by and worried by them.

The Godfather in Conversation: Why Geoffrey Hinton is worried

Windrush

HMT Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury on 22 June 1948

Well I never. The first of the Windrush generation arrived exactly 13 years before I was born. I haven't made that connection before.

Running Interference

Myself: “Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible” as Lord Salisbury said.

Prodnose: This is one of these secret message things I suppose, intelligible to a select coterie, possibly resonant for you when revisited in some tranquil future, yet opaque to the great unwashed, and breaching no confidentiality agreements?

Myself:  Give this job to Clemenza. I want reliable people, people who aren't going to be carried away. I mean, we're not murderers, in spite of what this undertaker thinks...

Hop to it

 Hello, Ben has broken his foot on account of being a halfwit. That is all.

Volume III: Quantum Mechanics

 Probably ought actually to read The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume III: Quantum Mechanics before giving you the benefit of my opinion.

Kindly Leave The Stage

We did the gig last night. It went surprisingly well given the circs. An abiding memory for me will be the image of Jenny holding the music in one hand while lowering the mike to the level of the bell for Emily's sax solo.

Having played a funeral and a birthday in 2023 I am now in the market for a wedding.

No pressure, but if anyone is thinking about popping the question check the dates against my diary first .....

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

On Saturday next week, I am going to walk from St Francis' Church, where mum and dad were married, past the primary school where she taught, and on to Archer Road where my maternal grandparents lived. I reckon it will take about a quarter of an hour.

Frank Road, Stanway Road, Grand Avenue and Snowden Road from the graphic to the right are all present and correct around the route as you can see from the map I have embedded above.

This is all dirt-under-the-fingernails real to me. Anyone (resident or commentator) who wants to accuse me of anything voyeuristic can kiss my arse.

I am with the people of Ely (still being harassed by the police) on this one.

The claims of a police pursuit were initially denied by Alun Michael, the Police and Crime Commissioner for South Wales, but the force has since confirmed a van was following Kyrees and Harvey before the crash.

The two officers in the marked vehicle who were following the pair were served with gross misconduct notices earlier this week.

Disgraceful. 

More I cannot wish you

Guys & Dolls at the Bridge Theatre last night. It was great. The immersive production works a treat. While I remember though, there was - as so often these days - a daft virtue signalling inexplicable gay moment in it that served no purpose aside from confusing the plot.

St Illtyd's Anthony O'Donnell was Arvide Abernathy in it, a mere 37 years on from me seeing him in Giordano Bruno's Candelaio for the RSC in the Barbican in 1986.

I also saw him, excellent as the poet-baker Ragueneau, in Stephen Rea's Cyrano de Bergerac at the National in 2014.

It is good to catch up every 17 or 18 years.

Holding Space

Fingers crossed it won't happen, but I think I may be confirming some bad news here later.

Update:

It is confirmed, Ryan fell asleep at his mum Deb's and Dave's house last week and didn't wake up. I am devastated. God knows what it is like for them. I only really spent much time with  him on our annual skiing trips but did so for enough years to do so from when he was a boy until he was brining his daughter. The image above is  tribute his friends have done I think (I pinched from Karen, his aunt, on Facebook.)

Less running in the family

After arriving on hospital on April 26th for a hip operation on the 27th Mum got out of the CAVOC ward in Llandough yesterday, and is back in Ty Enfys: 48 days in hospital. Apparently the day was a logistical nightmare which gave her some stress, but I hope things will start to relax now.

Also in family health news, I tripped and fell again the day before yesterday (Icons passim) hurting a rib this time. Slightly unnerved I messaged my diagnosis of peroneal nerve damage to a friend who is a reconstructive plastic surgeon, and I am really proud she thought my diagnosis may be right. Have you ever heard of such a ridiculous thing to regard as an accomplishment?

Yesterday, I took my foot along to Ollie who is a physiotherapist. She said I have drop foot (https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/foot-drop/), told me to make an appointment with my GP, gave me a restorative band exercise. and came up with the interesting the idea - from my gait - that I had had the condition for a long time before it was exacerbated.

I have booked an enhanced access telephone appointment with the The Vineyard Hill Road Surgery for 6:30 pm on my birthday. I wonder what an enhanced access telephone appointment is.

More running in the family

John and I went to Central to see Mia and BA (Hons) Acting cohort in a Pinter double bill on Saturday; Party Time / Celebration.

She was in Party Time: a scathing and amusing attack on the increasingly powerful and narcissistic super rich, set against the backdrop of terrifying state oppression.

It was paired with Pinter’s final work, Celebration, a delicious comedy about the vulgarity and materialism of the nouveau riche, bur we didn't see that as she was only in Party Time so we sneaked out before the second one, but she and all the cast were certainly good in the first.

Peter directed a Pinter double bill 'Landscape and Silence' in New York's Lincoln Center's Forum Theater, as long ago as 1970; fifty plus years ago, so we as a family have got form with this sort of thing,

Running in the family

I finished writing the horn section (Emily sax, Megan trumpet) for the Honky Tonk Women instrumental break yesterday. I used software called MuseScore. It is free to download and will actually play what you write on versions of the instruments. Here is the native file of the arrangement. I wonder if my brother John would find it a useful product now he is writing songs?

Flatfoot

 As previously reported (Icons passim), I tripped and fell on my way out of the AI conference last week, and have had some sort of problem with my right foot since. No pain, but it feels "flat" somehow.

I took advantage of yesterday's yoga class to give it a more thorough check. The issue seems to be that though I can move the foot down and two the sides, I can't move it, or indeed the toes on the end of it up.

According to ChatGPT:

The movement of the foot upwards is called dorsiflexion https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/318930. It involves the contraction of the muscles in the front of the leg and foot, such as the tibialis anterior, the extensor hallucis longus and the extensor digitorum longus https://dermalmedix.com/foot-tendon-functions/. These muscles are connected to the foot by tendons that pass through the front of the ankle joint . The tendons help pull the foot upwards when the muscles contract. 

Some possible injuries that can affect dorsiflexion are tibialis anterior tendonitis, which is inflammation or degeneration of the tendon of the tibialis anterior muscle https://www.sportsinjuryclinic.net/sport-injuries/ankle-pain/anterior-ankle-pain/tibialis-anterior-tendon-inflammation, and ankle joint restriction, which is when the ankle joint is tight or scarred and limits the range of motion Sometimes, a tendon transfer surgery may be done to restore more normal movement to a foot that has lost function due to nerve damage or muscle weakness https://www.footcaremd.org/conditions-treatments/ankle/tendon-transfer.

Deep peroneal nerve damage? Perhaps Ollie or Renu can point me in the right direction.