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2026-03-24

Week 272: It’s a long way to Heilongjiang

I’m writing this sleep-deprived, having come down with a nasty cold at the weekend that has kept me awake for the past two nights. I hope it won’t be too incoherent as a result.

My week didn’t start auspiciously, either. I had to re-prove my identity to one of my bank accounts by uploading a photo of my driving licence – in case I had ceased to be myself in the past few years, I suppose – as a result of which left my wallet on my desk at home before cycling down to Peckham for the day.

I didn’t realise until I tried to get it out of my pocket to open the door. I just turned straight around and cycled home. At least it was a mild and sunny morning for it, although there was enough pollen to leave me sneezing.

On the way, I spotted a sticker on a lamppost advertising another “Unite the Kingdom” jamboree of littering and racism in May. That will be a weekend to avoid central London.

Traid on Rye Lane were doing one of their periodic sales; this time, everything was £2, so I thought it was worth a look. I found a nice hooded cotton/linen lightweight jacket from Uniqlo that’s perfect for the warmer weather. It’s not brand new, but it doesn’t look like it was worn more than once or twice. I’ll take that for £2!

I narrowly escaped falling victim to a similar fate as L— the week before, in the same place, when someone on a rental e-bike (Forest, this time) raced down from the Millwall path onto Senegal Way in front of me without slowing or looking.

Rental e-bikes are useful and clearly popular, but they do seem to attract some especially insouciant riders who put everyone in danger. They’re full of instrumentation and comms hardware in order to track their location and operate the service, so I wonder whether the companies could be made to take more responsibility for their riders. Perhaps accelerometer data could identify hazardous riders, or location data could be used to reduce the maximum speed near junctions. I don’t think they’ll do anything without legislation or the threat of losing licences, though.

I had a much-needed haircut. My hairdresser, whom I’ve been visiting for over a decade, had been away visiting her family in Malaysia for over a month. That’s long enough for me to really need a haircut, but not long enough to go to the hassle of finding someone new. She’s back now, and I look better for it.

We went to the Tate Britain to see the Turner and Constable exhibition before it closes next month. I came away with a distinct preference for Constable’s work: in comparison, his paintings seem livelier, and more human, whereas Turner doesn’t even really seem to like people. Given the choice, I prefer realism over classical scenes. On the other hand, my absolute favourite picture was Norham Castle, Sunrise by Turner, painted late in his life, a canvas of pure light.

On the way back, we passed a Chinese-registered car, just parked on Millbank. How did a car from Harbin, a landlocked city in Heilongjiang province in Northern China, come to be parked in London? How would you even drive here? And why? It’s one thing to transport a supercar halfway across the planet, but a Chinese-made Toyota?

Links for good or ill:

• The major-minor mode dichotomy in music perception. A systematic review of literature on how we feel about major and minor keys. Even in Western music, the association of major with happy and minor with sad is relatively recent.
• Children’s associations between space and pitch are differentially shaped by language. The idea that musical pitch is “high” or “low” is not universal, and not necessarily even particularly intuitive; in this study, they found that the Turkish concept of “thin”/”thick” is internalised at a younger age than “high”/”low”.
• Hister is a search engine that indexes websites you’ve visited.
• Reverse Drafting Club: “Reverse drafting is the process of unraveling fabric swatches and diagramming their construction using weave draft notation. It’s really fun! So fun that we started a Reverse Drafting Club to work remotely on this practice with friends near and far.”
• Tiled Words is a sort of crossword/Scrabble mash-up daily word game.
• March, 19-21: God is a comedian. “Friday’s press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.”
• The 49MB Web Page. “I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones. […] To truly wrap your head around the phenomenon of a 49 MB web page, let’s quickly travel back a few decades. With this page load, you would be leaping ahead of the size of Windows 95 (28 floppy disks). The OS that ran the world fits perfectly inside a single modern page load.”
• The pet I’ll never forget: Penny, the pigeon who never left my side. “[Pigeons] are so misjudged: they’re incredibly intelligent, loyal and affectionate. Just like Penny was. I was never lonely while she was in my life.”