Wulf's Webden

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5 October 2024
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Sing Around – 5 October 2024

I led three songs at the sing around this afternoon. The first two were on banjo and were ones I’ve played before in other contexts but not led: I’m Not in Love by 10cc and New York Girls, a folk song from the late 19th century (or earlier). The first one worked nicely on the banjo but the key wasn’t great for my voice so I’ll have to do some adjusting. It is hard to settle on a key when practising at home because I’m not trying to project in the same way! This time I started on a C chord and the actual key was, I think, G major but I’ll need to do some more experiments for the best range for my voice. Warned by that experience, I took advantage of a break and reset New York Girls from G to C, which fitted better.

Towards the end, I also led a song on electric bass (borrowed from Kev): my old favourite, Diving Duck Blues, which I have road tested in G plenty of times!

4 October 2024
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Loco Stats

My Loco Beer is now fermenting with some “Midland” yeast from Crossmyloof Brew, their equivalent of the standard “Nottingham” strain. It turns out I did overshoot the target gravity, hitting 1.042, but not by as much as I thought. I have put the recipes I use into spreadsheets so I can calculate the ingredients (I’m not brewing 19l batches and I sometimes make substitutions). I’d entered 1.034 into one field as the target but it should have been 1.040, so I’ve generally been closer than I thought. Good job I’ve still got the book on hand!

That should take a week or so to ferment and then I’ll be ready to move onto the next one.

3 October 2024
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Loco Beer

More brewing today. This time the recipe was for Arkells 3B, which I understand to refer to “Best Bitter Beer”. I’ve made it before but not since early 2018 and, as I thought about what to call this batch, I thought of a conversation I’d recently had which touched on a massive Swedish-Swiss company called ABB. Apparently they do all sorts of things but I came across them in a very brief part-time job I did before finishing up my time at York as an early morning janitor for a branch of ABB transportation, which made railway carriages… which is why my ABB Beer has been christened Loco beer this time round.

I’ll get the vital statistic of the original gravity (OG) tomorrow morning once it has finished cooling but the process seemed to go pretty smoothly as a whole. It will be interesting to see if I get close to the target starting point of 1.034, which I’ve overshot by varying amounts on past goes.

I also sampled the first bottle of my recent Molly Ale (the small bottle from the end of the run with quite a lot of sediment). I managed to pour it fairly clear and it is tasting decent but I think I’ll give the rest until at least towards the end of this month, as it was only bottled just over a week ago.

2 October 2024
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The Last of the Coal

This cartoon, from XKCD.com, came out on Monday and alerted me to the final closure of the power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the UK’s last coal-burning power production site. Effectively digging up and burning an average of 3″ of land seems a pretty remarkable figure and I haven’t thoroughly double checked it but Randall Munro, the artist, is normally extremely meticulous about the smallest of details. I did find another site suggesting we have burned a mere 4.6 billion tonnes but that was specifically for coal burning power plants since 1882. Monro’s figure is for coal produced since 1853 and that would include uses outside of power plants (eg. direct heating, steam locomotives) and exports. Even if we do need to scale the total back, we’d still end up with 2-3cm, which would be noticeable if we could put all the coal back and instead scrape that amount off the surface of the land!

The UK had its first coal-free day in 2018 and has been running coal-lite since a couple of years before that. Perhaps the air will feel a bit clearer? Ratcliffe is only a few miles up the road from where I live although, speaking of roads, I suspect that is a more significant source of the local pollution I notice.

1 October 2024
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Oiled Windowsills

I’ve got a sneaking feeling that it might have been over a year ago that I bought some Danish Oil to treat the wooden windowsills at home but it was only over the past few days that I got round to applying it (three sills and also the wooden top of a sidetable).

The upstairs ones were pretty easy – a quick bit of sanding (assisted the attachment on my oscillating multitool) and I could get on with applying some coats of oil. The windowsill in the front room turned out to be much harder work, as it turned out to have been previously coated with some kind of rubbery, wood effect sealant which didn’t sand off very easily. As I discovered over the course of the hour or more it took rubbing it down, if you sanded too hard, the heat would build up and it would seem to melt on the sandpaper, clogging it up.

I finally got there and, now it has had its three layers of oil, it is looking much brighter than it did before, as the old surface was beginning to discolour. Hopefully this will enable the windowsills to stand up well when condensation drips down on them and it will be easier to maintain in future.

30 September 2024
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Vocal Challenge

Jane and I popped along to Loughborough University tonight to join the opening session for the university choir. Some of the music is straightforward and some of it is most certainly not in that category! However, we’ve decided to sign up – giving us about two months of rehearsals and then an end-of-term performance in early December.

I’ve done a lot of singing including a number of choir settings but most of that has been fairly easy, particularly the ones I have been responsible for conducting! This is definitely going to up our vocal game before the end of the year.

29 September 2024
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Free Solution for Better AI

In a discussion on the forums of Scott’s Bass Lessons, a thread was recently started where someone confessed to using ChatGPT to try and help with some harmony analysis homework and the disappointing results it had achieved. I chipped in early to note how “AI” systems have a tendency to move freely from well-attested facts to making up nonsense with no warning. Following the ongoing discussion, it struck me that the AI systems I have looked at all seem to be missing two vital factors – sources and workings.

Why don’t they provide copious footnotes? When they have drawn from a particular source, they could give a reference as you would expect in an academic paper. If they have synthesised several sources, they could list all of them and, where they have made deductions, that could also be made clear. That would deal with all the concerns about plagiarism and, if you were asking a system to inform you about a topic you aren’t an expert in, you would still have grounds to assess how much to trust it.

I suspect one of the reasons this practice doesn’t seem to be commonplace (I’ve not seen it on any of the ‘knowledge’ systems I’ve looked at) is that it would reveal how much is still smoke and mirrors. The Wizard of Oz turned out to be unimpressive when Dorothy looked behind the curtain and that might why the creators of AI systems don’t want to reveal the workings behind the answers given. However, I think it would improve our ability to both assess and eventually to trust the results.

I put this out there as a free suggestion both for those working on AI and machine learning in academic environments (where referencing sources ought to be second nature) and the systems themselves. Prove yourselves to not only be able to generate content but to do so with integrity and rigour.

28 September 2024
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Fat Lips

My lips feel well exercised tonight after the Training Band gig. Overall, it went very well. On the tuba end, my performance wasn’t flawless but both my duet with Jane and my tuba solo were decent.

It was a good aerobic work out. One of the ways I can tell is the amount of condensation inside the instrument when I got it home and opened it up to air (most of the liquid produced by instruments you blow into is condensation and not spit!). Another is that my lips feel that they’ve done a workout which, to be fair, they have.

27 September 2024
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Tomato Harvest

Harvest - 24 September 2024
Tomato Harvest (24 September)

This photo shows our tomato harvest from earlier this week. Still plenty more to come but it is a colourful reminder that we’re in business. It does feel late in the year but I need to press on with my plant database so I can find out if it really is any later than previous years. I tend to think of tomatoes as a summer crop but I often end up harvesting them even into early November so perhaps autumn is where I should place them in my mind?

26 September 2024
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CTB Gig – Saturday 28 September

This Saturday, Charnwood Training Band are doing their first independent gig in quite a while. We’re on at St Mary’s church, Stanton Under Bardon (LE67 9TN). Tickets are £4 on the door, including refreshments and doors open at 6:30pm for a 7pm start.

This will include our first performance of a portion of the New World Suite arrangement I was working on earlier this year. It will also feature a duet from me and Jane (Haydn Seek by R Percival) and my solo tuba medley, The Birth of Heavy Metal.

Tuba Parts
Tuba Parts

Yes, played on that tuba although it will be reassembled and oiled before the day!