Author of the 'Three Lyons' children's book series. Classic 1930s adventure stories, based around central England, with plucky kids and lashings of ginger beer.
Central England
Joined November 2023
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Jack Ramble retweeted
Buckminster Fuller, who was wrong about a lot of things in a way that was usually more interesting than other people being right, noticed something in the 1930s that still holds true.
He noticed that technology does not primarily get bigger. It gets thinner.
The transatlantic cable got lighter per unit of message. The building got lighter per unit of enclosed volume. The engine got lighter per unit of horsepower. Each generation of a technology tends to accomplish the same function with less stuff, and then with less stuff again, until at the limit the stuff approaches zero and only the function remains.
He called this ephemeralization : doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.
And here were it gets interesting. What got eaten, in the first wave, was objects: my door key became a fingerprint.
What's happening today is the second wave: the AI paradigm shift. It’s our thought patterns, our decisions, our generative processes, our creativity, and our communication and coordination with each other that is being ephemerized.
And I think judgment abstraction has two consequences.
First, the output is not checkable at a lower cost than producing it. To verify a summary you must read the document. To verify a strategic recommendation you must do the strategy. The thing that made calculators safe (verification being orders of magnitude cheaper than generation) simply does not hold for the class of work being absorbed now. Which means verification won't happen because the economics forbid it. A check that costs as much as the work is not a check. It's a second attempt.
Second, the stairs are being removed as a consequence of using the lift. The way you stay able to judge a draft is by having written drafts. The capability is maintained by its own exercise and by nothing else. So the fallback and the thing it's a fallback for are the same muscle, and the system that replaces the muscle also stops the training.
This is Lisanne Bainbridge's irony of automation, which she wrote down in 1983 and which the aviation industry spent the next forty years rediscovering at great expense: automate the easy 99% and you have designed a job where a human with no recent practice must handle the hardest 1% with no warm-up, at the worst possible moment, on the basis of a mental model the automation has been maintaining on their behalf.
Airlines eventually responded by mandating hand-flying. No knowledge-work organization on earth currently mandates hand-thinking.
Today is All Hallows.
Today, remember your ancestors.
We are now in Remember Remember Season.
Remember your ancestors.
Remember your monarchy.
Remember your war dead.
Forget at your peril.
Jack Ramble retweeted
After forty years in front of the camera, I’ll be directing my first feature film, SO HELP ME GOD: a Civil War epic about a Union soldier named Albert Townsend, who should have received the Medal of Honor but didn’t.
Clerical error.
I learned of Albert through his descendants’ archival research. What I found was more than an injustice waiting to be corrected. It was a story of friendship and extraordinary courage: an unassuming young man becoming a soldier who held his ground, and his principles, under fire.
That’s a story worth telling on the largest possible scale. And we’re inviting the people who want to see it told to help bring it to the screen, as investors in the film through Republic.
We intend to do it justice: real cannons, one hundred horses, and the cast in period-accurate uniforms. We’ve brought on Mark Huffam, whose work includes Saving Private Ryan, Game of Thrones, and The Martian, to produce it. He knows what it takes to make an epic, and how much depends on the human story at its heart.
At the Medal of Honor Heritage Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I introduced the project alongside Civil War historian Brad Quinlin, members of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, and representatives of Civil War Roundtables. We’re also supporting the campaign for Albert’s posthumous Medal of Honor. His descendants are still fighting to see his courage properly recognized.
This picture is about friendship, love, and honor — and common people rising to accomplish extraordinary things. I want to give that story everything it deserves.
I hope you will lift the banner with us.
Learn more about the film and the opportunity to invest:
sohelpmegod.film
Jack Ramble retweeted
On the morning before the Battle of Trafalgar Lord Nelson wrote a prayer in his journal:
"May the great God, whom I worship, grant to my country and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious victory, and may no misconduct in anyone tarnish it; and may humanity after victory be the predominant feature in the British fleet.
For myself individually, I commit my life to Him that made me; and may His blessing alight on my endeavours for serving my country faithfully.
To Him I resign myself, and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend. Amen."
On this day in 1805, the British fleet under Lord Nelson demolished the Franco-Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar.
The victory secured British dominance of the high seas - a dominance that would last over a century - but the cost of victory was heavy as we lost our greatest hero...
Nelson was mortally wounded during the battle after being shot by a French marksman.
He expected every man to do his duty, and by God, he did his.
Jack Ramble retweeted
Encore des nouvelles plutôt rassurantes de l'hôtel de Ville de Limoges. Je viens de parler avec Muriel Laskar, adjointe au patrimoine (oui, à Limoges, contrairement à Paris, ils ont un adjoint au patrimoine...) : le salon bleu et son plafond n'ont pas brûlé (1/3)
Jack Ramble retweeted
La Ville de Limoges et la Fondation du patrimoine lancent une souscription publique pour sauvegarder et restaurer l’hôtel de ville.
Plus d'infos 👉 swll.to/8B3s9
Faire un don 👉 swll.to/ynFRl1A
© Photo - Sdis 87
Jack Ramble retweeted
An old ape named Shift finds a dead lion's skin floating in a pool. He sits down with a needle and thick thread, and every time a bird flies over, he stops sewing and waits for it to pass. He knows exactly what he's making, and he doesn't want anyone in the sky to see it.
C.S. Lewis wrote that scene in 1956, in the last Narnia book. It's the one most of us never got to as kids. I only read it a few years ago.
When his friend Puzzle the donkey comes back from market, Shift ties the skin onto him and tells him to stand in the shadows. Then he tells the whole of Narnia that Aslan has come back.
Lewis tells you how it works. No one who had ever seen a real lion would have been taken in for a moment. It only works from far away, at night, by firelight, with the donkey kept quiet while the ape does all the talking.
Puzzle gets scared and says what if the real Aslan comes. Shift laughs and says Aslan never turns up nowadays. Right then there's a crack of thunder and the ground shakes under them. Puzzle says it's a warning. Shift says yes, it's a sign, and it means Aslan approves.
Now Gerwig's Aslan has Bowie's face and Meryl Streep's voice. The lion who sang a whole world into being in The Magician's Nephew, the voice so deep it shook the ground, talks like someone else now.
Shift did the same thing. He kept the lion's face and changed who was talking.
Lewis is gentle with the donkey, and I want to be too. Puzzle isn't evil. He's tired and trusting, and someone he believed kept telling him he wasn't clever enough to judge for himself. Lewis saves his anger for the ape with the needle.
A dad told me he was reading that first chapter to his kids and had to put the book down, because it read like these Hollywood headlines.
Pick up the real books. Read all seven out loud, every night, until your kids know that voice. A child who has heard the real lion can't be sold a donkey in a skin.
C.S. Lewis’ family has issued an official statement supporting Greta Gerwig’s Narnia and praising her lifelong passion for the books. bit.ly/4Buu39d
ALT C.S. Lewis’ Family Officially Addresses Greta Gerwig’s ‘Narnia’ Movie
Jack Ramble retweeted
Some people assume councils or lieutenancies define England’s counties. They don’t.
Every historic county is at least 800 years old; many are over 1,000.
Lieutenancies date only from the 1540s, and county councils from 1889.
So neither can define counties that had already existed for centuries.
ALT Map of England's counties - from RealCounties.com
Jack Ramble retweeted
Out today! The second single from A Cambridge Christmas is Matthew Owens’ arrangement of The Holly and the Ivy. Listen out for the woodwind dancing merrily above the melody – like little Christmas elves!
lnk.to/HollyAndIvy
I would be remiss if I did not mention that today is the feast of St Edward the Confessor.
teapawt.org/Ramble_Jack/status/197…
Here is the original parish church, in town:
Saint Edward the Confessor's.
There is stained glass made by Morris and Co, including designs by George Frederick Bodley (north and south rose windows), Edward Burne-Jones (north aisle east window) and John Henry Dearle (south aisle window).
The wall surrounding the churchyard and the lychgate are listed Grade II. The churchyard contains two early medieval (11th century) crosses which are listed Grade II and are also protected as scheduled monuments.
The churchyard is notable as a place for viewing a double sunset on and around the summer solstice. The sun has been observed to set twice behind a hill some six miles from Leek. The phenomenon was first described by Robert Plot in a 1686 publication.
There is also a story that the Jacobite army sharpened their swords on the gravestones when they passed through the town.
This here, is the best of what being British is all about.
youtube.com/watch?v=Mbh1Jm_q…
Jack Ramble retweeted
The online launch for The Buildings Archaeologist is happening tomorrow evening (Wednesday 7 October) at 7pm 🙂
More info & bookings...
eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-build…
Don't forget the John Rylands!
ALT The upstairs reading room in the John Rylands' Library
I'm off to Manchester for the week tomorrow. I've not been for over two years, so I'm really looking forward to it and I'm going to try to resist too many revisits to places. The @YalePevsner city and county guides are only 20 years old, but Manchester has changed so much in those years that they seem to belong to the past.
Jack Ramble retweeted
A signed and dedicated paperback of my memoir on 'The Making of Swallows and Amazons' is being auctioned by @ChildrenInRead in aid of BBC Children in Read @BBCCiN
@ArthurSociety @NancyBlackettUK @CumbriaCrack
jumblebee.co.uk/auction/deta…
Today was the Golden Spurtle World Porridge Making Championship.
Cooks from around the globe competed to make the best bowls of porridge!
youtube.com/live/1fllcnfWmZY
Jack Ramble retweeted
Rice paddies heat the planet about as much as every aeroplane in the sky, and nobody has made a documentary about your pilau.
A flooded paddy is a man-made swamp. Under the water, with no oxygen, the same family of microbes that live in a cow's rumen break down plant matter and give off methane. It is a rumen with the cow taken out. Rice accounts for around a tenth of all the methane humans cause, and about 1.5% of all greenhouse gases, which puts it level with global aviation.
The response so far:
- Streaming exposés on rice: none
- Celebrities going rice-free for January: none
- Rice-free Mondays in school canteens: none
- Carbon labels on a bag of basmati: none
- Countries taxing it: none
Denmark, meanwhile, will bill its farmers for every cow and pig from 2030.
The cow's methane comes from grass, which pulled that carbon out of the air last spring, on ground too wet or too steep to plough, and it arrives with beef, milk, leather and a fertilised field. The paddy's methane arrives with a bowl of starch.
The chemistry is identical. One of them is a plant, and plants do not get prosecuted. The climate case against your dinner depends on only ever pointing the instrument at the animal.
Who decided which methane counts?
