Gardening, Art Appreciation, Walking and Reading

GARDENING

One of the larger groups, exceedingly well run by Margaret Massey, which, unusually, keeps going through the summer with visits to members gardens. For the rest of the year it meets monthly in the lecture room at Singleton Botanical Gardens and listens to a particularly good set of outside experts.

As I discover whenever the group visits our garden I am not the only one who is there for the tea, coffee, cakes and conversation! Nevertheless there are more than a few flower-mad enthusiasts in the group, including my wife Joan who will not stop, buying and cadging, until she has one of everything - a life's work if ever there was one. As for me, groundsman and building labourer, more recently specialising in disguising concrete blocks with natural stone, forever altering the levels in our garden, and now even being usurped from vegetable growing by a practitioner more knowledgeable in the green arts.

ART APPRECIATION (Modern European Art from 1350)

Another large group run by Mo Ellard and Margaret Winter, to which my wife Joan belongs. Dr. Barry Plummer, Chairman of the Friends of the Glynn Vivian, is giving a series of lectures illustrated by slides, which this coming year will consider 18th Century artists.

WALKING

This large group with morning Rambles led fortnightly by David Michael and Ambles led by Eileen Jones will suit those no longer game for the much longer walks of the Gower Society or The Ramblers Society. A pleasant healthy way to prepare for a Pub Lunch.

READING AGAIN

We have just had our first group meeting of the year at which Hilary Jones presented her choice of 'After You'd Gone' by Maggie Farrell. I suspect it will prove one of the more memorable choices of the year, beautifully written and with a well drawn small family of characters, religious bigotry, and a love affair curtailed by tragedy. Rather unusually, nothing seemed forced to suit the needs of the writer, all the events and characters rang true throughout. The narrative was particularly poignant for those in the group who had lost loved ones.

Luckily so far loss has not been my lot, nevertheless I couldn't but reflect that the very day that Joan gave birth to our last child she was warned by an experienced nursing friend not to expect to see me again. Thanks to Mr R D Weeks, the neurosurgeon at Cardiff Royal Infirmary, I survived that same day's foreshortened operation with literally hours to live. He later became better known as the surgeon who operated on Mervyn Davies, that great Swansea, Wales and Lions Number 8, in his hour of need.

With all that said it should have been a pleasant read - and it was .... but, I found the cinematic chopping and changing of time-scale and viewpoint challenging to say the least. A short chapter could often deal with three seemingly unrelated episodes decades apart. It is a book with two ends and a middle and it was only during the presentation that I realised I had misread the ending - the beauty of group discussion is that you see things you would never have noticed alone.

As an engineer, responsible for the designing and maintenance of complex digital control systems, I was a great believer in KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). In my view the only route to reliable engineering solutions. Simple solutions are usually the most difficult of all to find (though they seem obvious in hindsight) - but they are usually elegant. So why do modern novelists seem to go out of their way to make things more complicated and confused than they are? The writers of classics never did.

As the token male in the reading group (that's one of the penalties - or are they joys - of the U3A and reduced life expectancy) I should have explained in the group discussion that books like Maggie O'Farrell's, After You'd Gone, with its realistic thought provoking views of the human condition, pass gender boundaries, even though the characters in view are mainly female.

Someone, who knew we men were argumentative self centered beings, suggested that the male characters in the book were less realistic on the premise that a loving, long-suffering husband was 'too good to be true'. I swallowed my response , 'aren't we all'. But went on to muse that it's grannies that 'ruin' boys - my mother told me.

ENGINEERING AND COMPUTERS

If you want some examples of simplicity in engineering innovation then for a homely example think James Dyson and his vacuum cleaner. He started with the idea to move a simple technique from industry to the humble vacuum cleaner, to swirl the air sucked in and let the resulting centrifugal force separate out the dirt, dust and fluff. Add a touch of the Pompidou Centre design principle of making a feature of the workings and you have his iconic design. Want a real world example of a cyclone, or 'twister' as the yanks call it, then recall that a tornado sucks roofs off houses, no wonder the early examples his vacuum cleaner were reputed to damage fragile carpets.

Or Alec Issigonis's whose idea for the Mini was to use front wheel drive and turn the motor sideways, thus at a single stroke improving traction, reducing the length of the bonnet and increasing the useful interior by allowing a flat floor. That powerful simple idea forced an elegant compact solution to the problems it posed for transmission design. It was highly successful and now virtually all family cars follow the same principles.

Or if you must have visual elegance think engineer Michel Virlogeux and architect Norman Foster and their Millau Bridge. Just a century on from Brunel's equally impressive Clifton Suspension bridge.

But the best example of all is how the now microscopic transistor replaced the ever increasing complexity of the electronic valve. The transistor is like a toasted cheese sandwich in which the filling has opposite electrical conducting characteristics to the crusts. That simple idea was followed by several decades of exponential growth in which the transistor got ever smaller, and because of this, ever faster in operation and ever cheaper to manufacture.

In 1961 I was one of those who designed conventional electronic (valve replacement) circuits with the very first silicon transistors which cost £5 each. Today there are tens of thousands in PC processors chips which sell for £50, far less given the value of today's money. In a computer processor and its memory millions of transistors are used simply as a two state (0/1) switches. But when engineered (interfaced) to real life hardware and powered by increasingly sophisticated software logic they enabled the digital revolution we see today.

Digital simply implies things which are built from binary computers. A digital camera is nothing but a computer and memory with a lens and an electronic retina. The real power is in the systems engineering and especially the software, that's what turns a computer into a PC, camera, mobile phone, or TV. It almost defies comprehension that its vast memories and powerful processors contain nothing but billions and billions of ones and zeros.

The digital computer is incredibly fast and all but totally reliable at elementary integer arithmetic, elementary binary logic, memorise and recall . It performs according to a software program which are instructions to itself conveyed in a sequence of binary patterns. Some instructions can change this fixed sequence by jumping to a new section of program and this is what allows the software to have architectural structure.

Binary numbers are sequences of just two possible digits, one or zero. Binary counting goes, 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000, 1001, 1010, 1011, 1100, which is simply a different way of representing 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 . Each left shift in binary implies the number is doubled whereas the decimal system we are used to moves left in multiples of ten. Thus decimal shifts left in units, tens, hundreds thousands whereas Binary shifts one, two, four, eight, sixteen etc. Nothing could be more basic.

Binary logic has just two opposite states (one and zero) which can be thought of as, true and false, on and off, yes and no. It's important to understand that we are talking of binary logic not binary arithmetic, these ones and zeros represent logical states not binary numbers.

The simplest form of digital logic is the AND gate, which electronically is a circuit comprising little more than a single transistor. It has two inputs and a single output, each can have only the 'one' state or the 'zero' state. The logic of an AND gate is that if both inputs are set to 1 (1 & 1, or more elegantly represented by 11) then the output will also be 1. However if the two inputs are set to any of the other three logic patterns 00, 01, 10 then the output will be zero.

A simple example is to show the AND gate modelling the operation of a light circuit in the home. Assume the first input is set to the state of the Main Switch in the house where (Closed=1, Open=0) and the second input is likewise set to the state of the Room Switch. So if the Main Switch is Closed AND the Room Switch is Closed then the Output of the AND gate goes to 1 indicating that the Light is On. Turn either switch to Open (0) or both switches to Open (the three other possible combinations) and the light will go Off.

But I digress. I didn't know how far when I started writing about engineering but you will see that the theme of simplicity and elegance is close to my heart and I would hope to explain. I believe I can show it is close to the nature of some of our groups than you might realise. Would you care to speculate which?

FINANCIAL CRASH

16 September 2008. That is the date of the latest update, the day after the financial markets crashed. Why did they crash? Because the whole banking system had got so complex and so successful that for years no banker bothered to understand the risks they were taking. As the old saying goes 'they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing' - and I am speaking after decades in which the best young brains have been enticed to work in the financial markets, for only they could be taught to deal quickly with such complex trading. No-one apparently questioned the long term sustainability (reliability) of their practices.