sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLI

The latest batch:

Some of these are recommendations, or acquisitions, from the recent Eastercon.

blooming spring

The elder is looking simply superb this year.

looking down from an upstairs window gives the best view

brains, bees, and sea

Several more days of neuromorphic fun.  There are lots of things we don't understand about the brain: very little of the brain is active at one time, neurons send other neurons encapsulated mRNA messages, split brain patients become functions extremely quickly, dendrite processing is an important process. I led a session on embodied physical reservoir computing.  A session on how LLMs work was illuminating.  There is work on building biotransistors which can be made on flexible substrates, and work in water.  The brain includes a "neuromorphic twin" model of the world, which it uses to predict sensory data; if there is a mismatch, there can be peculiar sensations.  The brain has as many glial cells, including astrocytes, as neurons; a model of these at one extreme of a spectrum of structure looks a bit like a dense associative memory, what capabilities might other places on the spectrum provide? AI basically hasn't incorporated any discoveries from neuroscience in the last 50 years.  Deep learning, with its billions of parameters, works because a particular Riemannian metric is more likely to exist in these high dimensions giving a unique global minimum.  Insects diverged from other animals before there were brains, so have rather different structures. Bee navigation establishes an absolute reference frame by using the sun and time of day.  

Whew!  That's been a lot.  I'm flying home tomorrow, so today I spent time walking, decompressing by watching the sea up close (it's profoundly weird to stand close to the shore for quite a while, and the tide neither comes in nor goes out), and a bit of paddling.

There's a lovely sandy beach in front of the hotel, which ends at these rocks.  Standing listening to the water gently lapping against them is incredibly relaxing.

more brains, and coastal views

We've had multiple days of great talks and conversations, and lots of walks.  We've heard about evolving computer programs to become replicators and machine learning programs, evolving self-organising developmental pathways, song learning in zebra finches, navigation and learning "place" maps (when you move to a different room, you switch to a different mental map; might that be why you forget why you moved to the new room?), computing with spikes, future neuromorphic hardware, making brain-like circuits with very simple components (resistors, capacitors, batteries and memristors), a mnemonic for understanding the effect of different operations and memories (if one bit is a 1 ft box, then an adder is a room, a multiplier is the whole hotel, the closest memory cache is down on the sea shore, DRAM is Corsica, a hard drive is in Rome, and the cloud is on Jupiter!). Today the focus was on robots with neuromorphic brains, and the key role played by the environment.

May brain is full to overflowing, and we've still got a couple of days to go!  To decompress a bit, I went for a walk along a costal path.  Low rocky cliffs, with a few beaches scattered along the length.

some of the coves are sandy; this one is splendidly rocky

brains and trees

Today at CapoCaccia 2025 we had some discussion sessions on "Life with and without a cortex".  We learned that you can take the cortex out of a mouse and it makes hardly any difference: although the mouse cannot learn new behaviours, the majority of behaviours it uses are in fact innate.  One speaker said that looking at mice doesn't help to understand our brains: we need to look at more nearby species, eg monkeys, and even so, that only gets you so far.  And there was the fun idea that each of the seven deadly sins is associated with a particular hormone.

More conversations, then I went exploring a bit further afield that yesterday.  Unfortunately my phone's 4G isn't working, and there's no wifi outside.  So I downloaded a map of the vicinity, and took great care to remember where I had come from.  I found some good trails through the local pine forest.  Again, stunning.

view from a hotel window : CapoCaccia 2025

I arrived in northern Sardinia last night, for the two week Capo Caccia workshop on Neuromorphic Intelligence.  This morning I saw the view from my window: this is on the "non seaview" side of the hotel, which means the room is a little cheaper.  It's still a lovely view.

The restaurant looks over the sea, and the view is indeed stunning.

In the morning were some great "discussions" (more informal than lectures) on evolution of neural circuits, and emotions in fish.  I then had some excellent conversations with participants in the afternoon.  Then off for a stroll to photograph the sea view.

It promises to be a fantastic time: great talks, great conversations, great food, great venue, great weather!

ying yang eggs

I've seen broken yolks before, but never like this.

 

the hills have vanished

There were definitely hills on Friday

for the title alone

Near the registration desk was a table piled with a load of free second hand books.  We looked through them, but had most of the ones we might want (and, anyway, flying back puts a crimp on book acquisition).  However, there was one I couldn't resist, for the title alone.

Okay, so it turns out this is two separate stories, but even so...

view from a hotel window

It was dark by the time we arrived at the convention hotel last night, so no view from the window.  It was a bit gloomy and grey this morning, but enough to see the view, including the dome of the convention centre, and hills in the distance.

Off now to breakfast, and then to registration, and then to the start of the con proper.

417 Expectation Failed

We flew in to Belfast this evening, ready for the Eastercon starting tomorrow.

We laughed in nerd as we walked along the hotel corridor to our room.

First of all, a room Not Found.

Then our room, URI Too Long.

And the last room on the corridor, Expectation Failed.

Unfortunately, no more rooms, so no teapots.  

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CL

The latest batch:

 

The company who I have been with for over 40 years for insuring house contents is no longer insuring house contents.  So we are looking for a new insurer.  

We have a lot of books (no!)  This causes issues: everyone who is quoting wants to insure them as "antiques", in danger of being stolen.  No, there are a lot of individually not very valuable books (some are indeed old, but not that old, and not rare).  No-one is going to steal these: it would take forever, and they have very little resale value.  We can't be the only ones in this situation, surely?

breaking the trend

We had a lovely start to March: nine sunny days before the weather turned.  

April has been even more amazing.  Fourteen sunny days:

before the weather turned today:

Well, we needed the rain!

moonlighting

While I was up in Scotland enjoying the spring sunshine, my other half was enjoying the clear night, using the 8" telescope and a Raspberry-Pi camera to photograph the nearly-full moon.

Definitely better pictures than using my phone camera.

views from two hotel windows

I travelled up to Glasgow yesterday, via Edinburgh, for a project team meeting the day before a workshop we ran today, in Edinburgh.  So yesterday evening I travelled back from Glasgow to Edinburgh, to overnight here before the workshop.

A nice sunny morning in Edinburgh. 
Some reflection of the double glazing, which was a foot deep and not openable.

We held the workshop -- about 20 people discussing quantum optics and photonic computing -- and then the team travelled back to Glasgow, ready for a project debrief tomorrow (to be followed by me travelling home in the afternoon, via Edinburgh).

A nice sunny evening in Glasgow.

I could care more

I was reading an article the other day that branched off into a discussion about the expressions I couldn't care less (obviously correct) and I could care less (obviously bizarre).  A comment pointed me to the Merriam-Webster discussion.  This is all quite fair-minded, but I definitely rofl'd at the last sentence:

if you can’t get past some people continuing to use could care less, and the fact that there’s nothing you can do about it, you may console yourself with the notion that at least they are not saying “I could care fewer.”

 

asymmetry

I bought some new walking boots today, having worn my previous ones down, had them resoled, and then worn them down again.

The guy in the shop measured my feet on a nifty computerised device.  He wasn't surprised that my left foot is 1mm longer than my right foot.  But he seemed completely gobsmacked that my right foot is 4.5mm wider than my left foot.

not to scale

Eight ways to observe the eclipse

We watched the partial solar eclipse quite closely this morning, with eight different instruments.

Going counterclockwise, we have:

1. A pair of solar viewing glasses from the 1999 total eclipse.
2. The SeeStar telescope with a solar filter.
3. The new solar binoculars.
4. The digital SLR with zoom lens, and, of course, solar filter.
5. The cardboard solar projector telescope, bought for the 1999 eclipse
6. The 5" Meade telescope with, you guessed it, a solar filter.

We used all the instruments, but the 5" gave the best view, and the SeeStar got the best pictures, overall.

Just starting: see the big sunspot near the limb. 
There are some smaller, fainter spots towards the top-middle of the disc.

Near maximum, and the smaller sunspots are close to the edge of the moon.

Nearly over

I snapped the sky with my phone to show that it was getting somewhat cloudy. 

The sun is completely overexposed, of course.  But wait. What's that spot on the dome?  (In case you are wondering, we couldn't use the 8" telescope in the dome for this event, as we don't have a solar filter for it.)

Look at that reflection!

So that's the seventh way we could see the eclipse (although we didn't notice it at the time, only when looking at this photo).  

What about the eighth?  Well, that's the same as the way we "observed" a partial eclipse 10 years ago, with our solar PV:

The big dip: that's no cloud, that's the (partial) eclipse)

The device to attach a phone camera to the 5" telescope arrived in the post later in the afternoon.  Oh well.  In any case, a well observed eclipse.

Engineering Persuadable Matter

My latest publication, commenting on a paper about agential chemistry, from my own computational perspective.  This topic falls in the intersection of Artificial Life and Unconventional Computing, forming a research area I am intensely interested in.

Susan Stepney. Engineering Persuadable Matter: A Comment on Armstrong’s ‘Life, Mind and Matter’. Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 14(3):33-42, 2025.

Rachel Armstrong (2024) advocates for a new approach to ‘agential chemistry’, a form of ‘new materialism’ that allows matter to take an active role. Here I comment on some of these ideas through a computational lens: the consequences if agential chemistry can perform computation to advance its own agenda; how it might provide the structure and dynamics needed for computation, and the metadynamics for open ended systems; and how it opens the possibility of a new technological discipline of engineering ‘persuadable’ agential matter.

While searching for an image to use to spice up this post, I came across an interesting Medium piece that forms a nice overview of some of the issues, from a neural AI perspective.  And has the pretty image I use above (click to embiggen). 

misty morning

 Early morning view: the world has gone away...

07:33 GMT, looking west

It's always worth checking

I was writing some Python code today, and I had some logic best served by a case statement.  I remembered that Python doesn't have a case statement, but I decided to google to see if there was a suitably pythonic pattern I should use instead.

Aha!  Python v3.10 introduced a case statement, and I'm currently using v3.13.  Excellent.  I scanned the syntax, then added the relevant lines to my code.

After I'd finished that bit of coding, I went and read the official Python tutorial.  Of course, Python being Python, its 'case' statement is actually a very sophisticated and powerful 'structural pattern matching' statement.  I might have some fun with this...

So, every day in every way, at least Python is getting better and better.

Reservoir computing benchmarks: a tutorial review and critique

Our latest paper, reviewing a bunch of standard benchmarks for Reservoir Computing, digging into their histories, and why some of them might not be the best approach to be using.

Chester Wringe, Martin Trefzer, Susan Stepney. Reservoir computing benchmarks: a tutorial review and critique. International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems, 1-39, 2025. doi:10.1080/17445760.2025.2472211

Reservoir Computing is an Unconventional Computation model to perform computation on various different substrates, such as recurrent neural networks or physical materials. The method takes a ‘black-box’ approach, training only the outputs of the system it is built on. As such, evaluating the computational capacity of these systems can be challenging. We review and critique the evaluation methods used in the field of reservoir computing. We introduce a categorisation of benchmark tasks. We review multiple examples of benchmarks from the literature as applied to reservoir computing, and note their strengths and shortcomings. We suggest ways in which benchmarks and their uses may be improved to the benefit of the reservoir computing community.

If you don't subscribe to that journal, you can find the same text (if not as prettily typeset) on the arXiv, at   arXiv:2405.06561 [cs.ET]

partial lunar eclipse

A photo, with a digital SLR and an ordinary lens, of the partial lunar eclipse this morning, looking nice and red:

By the time a longer lens was fitted to the camera, low cloud had bubbled up and hidden the moon.  (We should have been better prepared: we will be for the partial solar eclipse in a fortnight.) In fact, the moon was nearly set anyway, as can be seen by "enhancing" the picture above, making the horizon visible:

A bit later, the sky was light, with an amazing contrail disappearing into the distance, as if following the setting moon.

You can identify on this picture where the moon was above, by comparing horizon profiles.  (The spike pointing to the moon is the pylon on the right.)  And yes, that position is still in cloud.

sunset with a bonus

Gorgeous sunset, with a bonus Venus -- can you spot it?  (You will probably need to click on the image to make it full size.)

18:30GMT, looking west

Here's a clue:

king of the castle

We had a tree cut down recently. One of the neighbourhood cats clearly likes this new perch.

what a difference a day makes

Yesterday, we had had nine sunny days since the beginning of the month, and the solar PV plot looked amazing.

Today broke the streak.  It was not sunny: it was full cloud cover all day, with a bit of brightness around noon.  The solar PV plot now looks very different, with a lot of (pale) orange filling in the minimum to lower quartile range:

Nine sunny days in March

I make a variety of plots of data from our solar PV system.  One set is of the power generation over the day, plotted on a background of the month (so far) averages.  February looked like this:

The horizontal time axis runs from 3:00am to 9:00pm GMT. The vertical axis runs from zero to 8kW. The orange regions indicate the minimum, lower quartile, median, upper quartile, and maximum generation at that time, over the month. The line indicates the actual generation at that time.  Several days have very little generation, with the black generation line hugging the x-axis (February this year seemed a particularly dark month), so the orange fills the shape.

March so far has been somewhat different:

Nearly full sun every day; hardly any orange in sight on the plots.  Even on the 7th, originally forecast to be dull, there were only a few dips in an otherwise bright day.  It has been very mild, even warm.

The weather is due to break tomorrow.  Ah well, it was glorious while it lasted!

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLIX

The latest batch:

not in a pear tree

 View from our kitchen window:

snapped on my phone through the kitchen window, so a little bit of reflection on some pics

This red-legged partridge was pecking around under the birdfeeder, on which was a great tit flinging seed around.

By the time we got a proper camera with a bigger lens, this bird had flown.

four or five planet evening

Clear skies, cold still weather: good seeing.  So, about half past six this evening, we looked for the planetary alignment.  We saw (with the naked eye) faint Mercury close to the still faintly pink horizon, spectacular Venus dominating the western sky, bright Jupiter near the zenith, and red red Mars a little further round.  Binoculars made them brighter, but still point like, except for Venus.  I could convince myself I could see Venus’ phase, but it was so bright, it was hard to be sure.

Later, 8:30-9pm, it was much darker, and we used the big telescope.  Venus and Mercury had set by then.  Jupiter was lower down, but still visible: we could see all four Galilean moons, and some dark bands on the planet itself.  Mars by then had moved close to the zenith.  Last time we tried to view it at that angle, we couldn’t see through the finder, so we bought a 90 degree adapter for it at AstroFest a few weeks ago.  It works!  We got to see the red planet as a disc.  Beautiful.

We had a quick look at the Pleiades, as they were in the vicinity.  My god, it’s full of stars!

We then used the autofinder to try for Uranus.  We could see a bright object near the centre of the field of view.  It could have been a very small disc of a planet, or just a point source of a star.  I choose to believe it was Uranus.

So, definitely four planets, and maybe even five.

relaxing train

While waiting for my train from Glasgow Queen Street to Edinburgh, for the first leg of my journey home, I was amused to see the destination on this other train:

view from a hotel window

I'm in Glasgow, visiting some colleagues at the University of Strathclyde, for our new LoCoMo project that started after I retired!  Yesterday afternoon we had a good chat about a paper (from a different project) that has been stalled since pre-Covid times, and figured out how to solve the issue.  I have been tasked with writing the new section we agreed on, as I now have the time!  Today we talked about the new project.  Tomorrow I'm looking forward to a lab tour, to see what the experimentalists are up to in quantum computing with Rydberg atoms (we are doing some vaguely related theory, but looking at cool kit is always fun).

Meanwhile, this is the view from my hotel room window (nice hotel: very quiet!)

scanners upgrade in vain

 Last night, my Windows 11 machine did an update, to version 24H2.

Today, my Canon scanner didn't work.  After switching it off and on again, and unplugging and replugging the cables, I resorted to Google.  Apparently this is a "known problem" (since December 2024!), and the solution is ... undo the upgrade.

Start > Settings > System > Recovery > Go Back

I now have version 23H2.  And my scanner works again.

new toy

AstroFest has a lot of exhibitors.  Last year we bought a small SeeStar telescope, and a dome for the big telescope we bought back in 2020.  This year we were a little more restrained.  

We had recently been looking at Jupiter with the big telescope; we had also tried for Mars.  But Mars is high in the sky at the moment, which means the telescope is almost vertical.  We have a 90 degree adaptor for the eye piece, but not for the finder scope.  It was too difficult to limbo down to look up through the finder, so we didn't see Mars.  Thanks to this year's AstroFest, we now have a 90 degree adaptor for the finder, too.

A quarter of a century ago, August 1999, we viewed the total eclipse of the sun.  For that, we bought a Lightline Solar Projector, a clever cardboard tube and lens contraption that allowed us to project an image.  We have been using it since to view the sun, but it's not particularly good for seeing sunspots, and is getting a bit battered.  We have a solar filter for the new SeeStar telescope, which gives us a spectacular view, but takes a while to set up.  While wandering around the exhibits, I saw a variety of "solar binoculars", binoculars with built-in solar filters, so they can be used to directly view the sun (and nothing else!)  I was debating whether to get a pair, when one of the other attendees struck up a conversation.  She said she had bought a pair previously, and had spent many a happy time watching the sun.  She convinced me, so I bought a pair.

The weather forecast is cloudy for the next week.  So I'll have to wait to try them out!

view from a hotel window

Another year, another AstroFest.  We stayed at a different hotel this year (next door to the previous one), in the hope it would be quieter: it was!  But the view wasn't quite as interesting:

Two days of fascinating talks again, on aurorae (the ones last year were some of the most southerly viewable ever), Mars, forthcoming eclipses, astrophotography (the quality of "amateur" photography today is streets ahead of professional photography several decades ago), black holes, observatories on the moon, star surveys, the UK Space Agency, star formation, the Antikythera Mechanism, exoplanets, and Enceladus.  Something for everyone.

And the exhibitors had bigger than ever telescopes on offer, including one mount with four large telescopes on it!  A bit beyond our budget, but nevertheless, the shape of amateur things to come?

The train down (Thursday afternoon) was 12 nearly empty coaches.  The train back (Saturday evening) was eight packed coaches: we had to stand.  Two different people offered me their seat: I must look older than I think I do!  I politely (I hope) declined: I had after all been sitting down all day at the event.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLVIII

 The latest batch: