Tuesday 24-Apr-12

24/04/12 08:24 [Tuesday]
This morning larking about with my new phone I changed the setting for input from Swype to keypad. Now I am finding it much easier to input text, especially as I have also turned on predictive text.
24/04/12 09:55
I’ve discovered how to sync photos with my PC (and contacts and a few other items) but how to capture these notes I am making I am not quite sure.
24/04/12 11:04
I have found the Scottish National Portrait Gallery but I’m sure it’s different from how it was in 2003 when I last visited. I think it must be the same building but they have done up the café (which is as far as I have penetrated so far).
Speaking of making brief notes - these are memos but quite whether it is the correct medium to be using of all available on this new device I’m unsure - I can’t help but feel the modern trend of ‘tweeting’ does not represent a desirable thing as surely larger-scale structures get lost by the wayside as they must do to a degree also in collaborative working which is all the vogue these days. Perforce I am led to and do believe because there are so many ‘structures’ in the modern scheme of things that even an Isaac Newton could not cope single-brained.
24/04/12 12:38
(I cannot discover how to get this image round the right way.)

Having left the National Portrait Gallery I have come to the Princes Mall where I have had a lunch from Harry Ramsdens. I set all this down having in mind that in my younger days I used to think in terms of experience I had being lost forever if I did not record it. I used to believe recording my doings preserved my life in a sort of immortality. I still record my doings not to canvas some response from or effect on friends and family but rather so that they can live on in the minds/brains of miscellaneous readers.

24/04/12 13:22

If I email these notes to myself they are automatically backed up online and in the process are retrievable using a PC for checking and editing. I don’t think I would trust myself to upload stuff directly from my phone to my blog. Still I need to find out how to copy and paste from the memo notes I have been using thus far as my format.

24/04/12 14:19

I have discovered how to copy and paste but before finding out that I discovered you can send memo notes via email, that is as an attachment. This has the advantage that timestamp information is retained, but on the other hand whether a Windows PC can read the .vnt files I do not know.

(I cannot discover how to get this image round the right way.)

24/04/12 16:26

As we are presently between Berwick Upon Tweed and Newcastle Upon Tyne my thoughts are reverting to the same locus as when I was close to Newcastle before. What I was asking myself on that occasion a few days ago was why the Industrial Revolution did not happen earlier in history. If it was advantageous to run things by steam and people were clever enough to think how at the time they did, why did nobody think things up a century earlier, or earlier than that?

Before locomotives ran by steam (this in my mind as I was travelling by train) engines were developed for static purposes. At the Black Country Museum in Dudley there is a Newcomen engine and I think they tell you this was the first industrial steam engine (I say ‘industrial’ because there was a steam engine invented in Ancient Greek times, by a man called Hero, but it had no practical power). The Newcomen engine had the purpose of pumping water out of mines so the origination of it was deep-shaft mining. Therefore the Industrial Revolution was originated by the need to dig or anyway the occurrence of digging coal out of the ground. This is not back to front because before coal was dug up for engines it was dug up to keep people warm.

The conclusion is that the Industrial Revolution came about due to population density: at a time there were so many people in habitated cold places - notably Britain - that cutting down trees was an insufficient resource for warming them.