King of the Mountains

The Washington Post recently printed an article about the interaction between military robots and their human operators. You can find it here.

Interesting reading, a mix of sad and funny. I’m particularly taken with the tale of the soldier who took “his” robot fishing, and could picture the scene when another returned to base with a box containing the remains of the robot. But this isn’t just a case of people doing strange things under stress.

Think about your car, your computer, your boat, indeed anything else complex that you own. Have you ever felt that it seems to have a soul? I suspect most of us have. It’s a basic human urge to interpret the behaviour of a machine as a show of emotion. Add a little stress, which can be as light as attempting to cross an unfamiliar city at a busy time, and you rapidly find yourself thinking of your car or bike as having personality. Certainly I refer to my car as “she”. You’ll probably find that most men do. If anyone complains I point out that all ships are female, so why not refer to a car in the same way?

There is no way in which a car can be capable of emotion. But try telling yourself that after it apparently found an extra few bhp from nowhere and enabled you to avoid getting hit by that truck. Or why it feels far livelier on a holiday trip than on the daily commute. Or how it managed to outpace something far newer and more powerful. It’s undoubtedly due to your experience of the car but that doesn’t change the fact that you’ve formed an emotional bond. 

This is probably not a bad thing. Think about it, are you likely to scrap something that you feel emotion for before its time is up? Are you likely to scrap it at all? You’re more likely to repair rather than replace, and that’s a good thing for the world as a whole. It uses far fewer resources to make a few spares than to make a complete new widget.

In 1957 a proposal was made by the head of the Netherlands state railway, F.Q. den Hollander to assemble a network of luxury express trains linking European states. The name given to these trains still reeks of glamour: Trans Europ Express.

Initial participants were West Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy and the Netherlands. Later Belgium and Luxembourg would join. There were numerous innovations intended to speed these expresses; passport control (in pre-Schengen Europe passports were still checked at each border crossing) would take place on the move, the trains would use diesel power to avoid problems with differing electrical power supplies, only first class accommodation would be provided and the trains would be of the multiple unit type to avoid time-consuming shunting at terminals. The first services began on 2^nd June 1957.

In 1974 the network reached its peak, and began to die off. German expresses were renamed “EuroCity” or EC. The TEE name retreated to the realms of the enthusiasts and nostalgia-ridden. And yet, the concept has not died. We are currently seeing electric trainsets built that are able to handle multiple voltages to allow through running into neighbouring countries. The destination boards may no longer say TEE, but anyone who witnessed the original TEE services would not see a huge difference. Meanwhile, Deutsche Bahn’s museum section has an immaculately restored electric loco and a set of matching coaches that operate charters as the TEE Rheingold, much as they would have done originally. It has even attracted the attention of musicians, the German group Kraftwerk titling an album “Trans Europ Express”.

At this point you may be wondering why this is important. There is in fact a very good reason. A network like this offers the best chance of dissuading people from using short-haul air travel and thereby reducing the heavy carbon dioxide emissions from aircraft, to say nothing of the noise pollution and vapour trails caused by aircraft. While a train still uses energy, it requires far less power to keep a TGV at cruising speed than an aircraft. The time taken to cross Europe may be longer, but surely we should consider whether in this age of cheap web-based teleconferencing we really need to travel long distances on a regular basis anyway? If people managed to do business in 1957 with just reliable rail links then we should have no trouble now with the incredible strides in technology since that era. We simply need to move away from the idea that we can travel anywhere in Europe in an hour for comparative pennies before we are forced to by rising oil prices.

So on the 2^nd of June raise a glass to F.Q. den Hollander and the TEE. Their best years have yet to come.

The blackbird labours under the unappealing name Turdus merula. Hardly fair. These are some of the most characterful birds in any garden. Usually you’ll find that you have a breeding pair as they are very territorial. Ours seems to have a long-standing turf dispute with next door’s. Mostly this manifests itself as one perching on the garden wall and singing. The other will then dive-bomb the perching bird and chase it halfway to Scotland.

The individual bird studied appears to have very little fear of humans. Mowing the lawn will cause it to immediately swoop on the mown section in search of insects, where it will bounce around for hours in search of tasty morsels. Likewise it will make ear-splitting chattering sounds in a hedge right next to you. It also has the intriguing habit of perching in the top of the silver birch from whence it emits a variety of interesting whistles, chirps, and modem sound effects. Quite where it has picked these up from is something of a mystery, as modems are not commonly heard outdoors. 

The battle of the apple tree entered a climactic phase today, with repeated skirmishes from several guerilla groups.

Oh, ok, the sparrows seem to regard one of the apple trees as being of great strategic importance. Possibly this is due to the quantity of blossom on it, which must make for an eye-catching sight and provide good cover. Equally it could be the central location and ability to take off in any direction if attacked. Or it could just be that they’ve found somewhere safe to perch and chirp away merrily. The little chap perched on it responded to our reporter by emitting the usual song and then taking off like a SCUD missile. Further enquiries have been equally unsuccessful, especially as the researcher, while able to recognise a sparrow from, say, a car ferry, cannot recognise individual sparrows.

Tomorrow: The blackbird that perches in the top of the silver birch and does modem impressions. Or is it a car alarm? Or a steam train? Or a video recorder that just ate a tape? More to come from the battle of the birdies!