↑ Hedge End 1/2 mile

For a minute I thought an old half baked scheme I’ve been pondering to update town twinning might have been given a new lease of life: according to the Hedge End Blogger there are plans to install a ‘heritage sign’ in Hedge End. By pure chance, and with a completely random grant from Hampshire County Council, it seemed like Hedge End would be getting the perfect place to tie the physical and virtual world together.

Except, on closer inspection, it looks like the sign won’t be in Hedge End at all; it will be outside! Assuming I read the directions right anyway. Apparently there was a strong case for putting it in the middle of nowhere. The actual reason is a mystery to the internet as far as I can tell but was presumably something to do with being on the route into Hedge End from the motorway.

I would have much preferred Keith’s suggested location, near the library, for a couple of reasons:

• I would get to see it more often (I rarely go past the proposed location)
• for those of us without a smart phone, the library would also ideal for a taking out a loan device to see the virtual element of the mad twinning plan

Oh well, maybe an entirely virtual sign post could point the way to the heritage sign.

Update: found the right minutes with the vote to put the sign, ‘opposite Lamp 13 in Upper Northam Road…’ Nothing about the reason as far as I can see but Keith has shared that on his blog. I also remembered where I’ve seen one of these things before: Otterbourne. (26 September 2011)

Photo © Reuben Whitehouse (CC BY-ND 2.0)

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Clayton Tunnel

Tomorrow is the last of the 2010 Heritage Open Days and while searching through for something to do this weekend I spotted Clayton Tunnel North Portal on the list.

(c) Aaron Concannon. Some rights reserved.

By strange coincidence I finished my MSc 13 years ago tomorrow and my dissertation was based on the Clayton Tunnel accident. As Jo rightly points out, it’s not really that freaky a coincidence, but why let logic spoil a good story! My project was basically about modelling the accident, which is nicely explained by this more recent poster. After digging around some old files, I discovered a diagram of the tunnel:

…some screen shots of some exciting grey telegraph dials:

…and a bunch of other images; thirteen years on and .gifs are still going strong. The actual dissertation on the other hand was a little more tricky to look at. After several unsuccessful attempts with Microsoft Word Viewer, Lotus Symphony and Google Docs, OpenOffice finally did a passable job opening the ancient Word format:

Being able to step in and take on an agent’s role is one of the best ways to gain understanding about a system. In the Clayton Tunnel accident, and I suspect many other situations, there are interactions between agents that depend on the other agents having a different perspective on the model. Brown and Killick provide an excellent example of this. At one point in particular the difference between their views of the world results in the last mistake leading up to the accident. As far as Killick knows there are two trains in the tunnel whereas Brown is only expecting there to be one. Now when Killick sends, “is tunnel clear?”, to Brown as a train leaves the tunnel, Brown relies, “tunnel clear”. The modeler is omniscient about the model and hence can’t step in and act on behalf of agents with a limited view of the world without bringing with them knowledge the agent shouldn’t have: there’s a conflict of interests. This limits the modeler’s ability to accurately reproduce an agent’s behaviour.

I wonder if the Open Document Format will prove to be any more future proof. (I still have an original print out just in case!) I keep thinking it would be interesting to recreate the project in Second Life or Open Sim at some point. Maybe I’ll give it a go if I get a chance, although I would be surprised if either of those are around in the same form in 10 years time, unlike the tunnel.

Sadly the Clayton Tunnel tour was fully booked so we’ll have to find something else to do instead. Maybe it’ll be open again next year.

Local Heritage

After reading about Diamond Geezer’s endangered bollards, I wondered whether there were any threatened sites near me. Turns out the field I live in is pretty dull but there is one on the list right next to where I work!

Despite working in Hursley for over 10 years I’ve never been to Merdon Castle, mostly because it isn’t open to the public. Still, might have to investigate one lunch time.

Site of Merdon Castle

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