Was it the Navy?

At around 10:00 on the 17th July - which I now believe to have been the Queen's birthday - we were visiting St. Helen's on the Isle of Wight, benching it behind the sea mark which used to be the church, more or less in the middle of the snap (from OS) above.

To our left, we had what appeared to be a small warship. On the horizon, just to the right of the tree. Was the Navy on the move?

I logged into Google, and thinking to help, I marked the spot with the Snipping Tool. That did not work.

I then tried zooming in and made it clear that I had added the spot.

Google Images did rather better this time, thus demonstrating that he does not necessarily make use of all the information available to him. And he goes no further than confirming what I had already suggested to him.

At this point, neither of us thought of making use of the sort of identification charts which I believe to have been standard issue for the bridges of warships in the second world war. You really did want to know what this large and threatening looking ship bearing down on you was. Friend or foe? Attack or run for it? To which end you would want front and back views, as well as the side views offered above.

So now it was the turn of Gemini. And he tells me about all kinds of stuff that I can do, starting with the King's Harbourmaster at Portsmouth. And, to be fair to him, he did not know that I had a low grade image available - unless, that is, he was in correspondence with his colleague Google Images.

I then find that while finding out about now, today and tomorrow is easy enough, going back a week or so is more complicated. Paying one of the commercial providers of this sort of information is one option, doing a bit of serious digging for yourself is another.

And no doubt if you are in the Navy, information of this sort would be readily available.

It dawns on me that if you are going to keep track of all this sort of thing over time, you are going to need a very big database. Probably unrealistically big, at least for the time being, all these huge data centres being built all over the world notwithstanding.

PS 1: maybe it is time to buy shares in Computacentre. I think that they are into data centres. People with whom I had a fleeting relationship during my time with the Home Office.

PS 2: and while we are on the armed forces, I noticed the piece at reference 3 the other day. Another massive, complex project being offered to us by the defence industry. Are we buying another expensive white elephant? What is its intended role? One hardly needs such things for passive defence. What about the old Russian mantra of cheap, cheerful - and lots of them? Glad that is not my decision. 

Depressing though that there is still a decision of this sort to be taken - all the efforts of Buddha, Christ, the United Nations and so many others to get us on a better track notwithstanding.

I wonder what Simon Jenkins would have to say about it - a chap with a long record of knocking big government projects, projects largely driven by that disease called expensive management consultants. See, for example, reference 5.

Conclusions

A useful lesson in the limits of open-access, general purpose AI. And the Navy probably was there.

References

Reference 1: https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/khm/portsmouth.

Reference 2: https://www.computacenter.com/en-gb.

Reference 3: A stealth fighter jet could blow a hole in Healey’s budget: To fly, Tempest and the GCAP need to defy the history of failed joint national projects  - John Gapper, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Combat_Air_Programme.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/01/brum.html.

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