Quite a productive day in the circs - this new liquid Nurofen is quite something.

Chris Morgan (whose brother I met at the first Nissan event I ever attended) bought a great US guitar mag into the office which has a review article on USB audio interfaces. Well done that girl.

The technologist on the team is a guy called Ashley who packs quite a punch - we are all very worried about his daughter who had her appendix out approx 24 hrs ago. The saga of waiting around at the hospital is just unbelievable and I will spare you the details. A minor consequence of all of this is that I had to chair a seminar today but since the event had been my idea I can't complain.

I had forgotten how interesting the selected topic is. It sounds trivial - altering the base voltage in cars from 14v to 42v. In fact it highlights the fact that the car itself is a complex energy economy with the IC engine and the electrical system in a very subtle balance. On the one hand the 42v approach is more efficient and makes all kinds of sensible innovations worthwhile eg turning the IC engine off at traffic lights so that it doesnt waste fuel and dirty the air in a zone where air pollution is likely to be at a local maximum. If you simply switched to 42v then the increase in fuel economy is quite high - maybe 20-30% - although the benefit is unlikely to be completely taken in that way. New features will increase the weight of the car.

The seminar was given by Allan Williams from a US owned company called TRW which has a really impressive research centre in Solihull helped by the head of electrics and electronics from another astonishing UK owned company in Shoreham called Ricardo (who looked barely out of university to me).

Ricardo designed and installed the powertrain system for the BMW Mini - not a fact you are likely to see strongly featured in the publicity. Between the two of them they have an amazingly deep knowldge of the issues. These are the two "UK" companies who belong to a club convened by MIT on the voltage change issue. It costs �50k per annum to join and for the money you get access and an opportunity to influence the MIT research programme on condition that you dont give the knowledge to a third party.

The seminar was full of extraordinary issues. About 70 - 80% of all breakdowns on the road are to do with the battery. It would be possible to greatly improve preventitive systems in the car to reduce the incidence of battery triggered breakdowns. It would add around 10 dollars to the cost of a car - that is too much in the commercial judgement of most car companies and so the developments stay on the shelf. You can debate the issues here for a long time eg compared with the arrival of car tyre pressure sensors and the systems that will be built around them - mostly in response to the great Firestone debacle in the US.

The change to 42v isnt just about benefits - the increased voltage gradients throughout the car has a profound impact on "corrosion" phenomena - and pushes electrical engineers into territory that they are unfamiliar with. Car companies have expertise on corrosion of course but the experts work on car body issues. In future system design will have to involve new teams working in new ways.

I strongly believe that the people who are in the Department's team need to get as much of this info under their belts as possible - it makes their jobs more interesting and it adds to the professionalism of the outfit. But I get annoyed with the middle ranking staff when they don't value these learning opportunities properly - as some of them don't seem to.

The seminar was followed by a discussion in my office between Graham, Sue - who started this week - and myself on the Academy. No 10 phoned up just at the start of the meeting which is good in terms of impressing people but unhelpful in terms of getting the right outcome on the Academy - too much political symbolism invariably leads to suboptimal outcomes. In the final analysis it will be for Sue to decide how the Academy will develop - or to manage the decision making process. Graham and I were in "pitch" mode. Fortunately Sue and Graham worked together about six or seven years ago on a broadly similar project - they know each other well and Sue has a lot of relevant background. Since then she has worked in something called The Innovation Unit which is one of the saner parts of the Department.

There is still a lot of high politics around the way the Departmental Review is being implemented. Fortunately Tracy is very well connected to these processes. Crudely speaking it looks to me as if a lot of money is going to be taken away from the old "industry" parts of the Department and switched into areas that Mrs H feels more warmly about. Various people have been told to get on and just do it. The delicate state of Mrs H's relationship with the Treasury is another negative feature of the situation. I phoned Tracy this morning to make sure that Graham's boss Chris will be involved in a particularly important event in the next couple of weeks at which a lot of key decisions are likely to be taken. Without going into a lot of unnecessary details I think some major power-money shifts are not far away....Tracy agrees that their is a lot of ostritch behaviour amongst the potential losers.

Of course I am a fine one to talk about being an ostrich given the events of the year so far. But I suppose having taken the early (cold) bath I am now quite wide awake. Also the flux of the situation appears at the moment to have a current that I can use. However if there's one thing I have learned about time's like this is that you never know how the ball is going to bounce.

There's is some quite interesting analysis underway amongst a group of us looking at the value added position of various international automotive companies. Today we got round to comparing some metrics between the most profitable German and most profitable French car-maker - both of whom in absolute terms are making about the same level of profit - slightly under �2bn pounds a year - with not totally dissimilar products - cars which are fun to drive - and they both sell quite well in the UK. The interesting bit is the variances in certain ratios. The French company achieves value added per person employed around the same level as a number of UK automotive companies - the German figure is higher but so are the average wage levels. A couple of years ago it was fashionable to say that companies like this were much too small to be able to survive in the global market....so much for fashion.

Back at the ranch there was a lot of interesting letters on the mat - something from the Merton Priory bunch of eccentrics who seem to be keen on Murder in the Cathedral for the twofold reason that T S Eliot studied at Merton College Oxford and Thomas A Beckett studied at Merton Priory. In what might seem a similar vein there was some material from Sister Paula on the labyrinth event she is planning - I suppose you could make a link with the monasteries on Crete especially the ruined one I found in the limestone mountains on the Akytiri peninsular at Easter last year. The common element might be the massive potency - I did a couple of pastel sketches which are much more expressionistic than my usual stuff. Sister P suggests in terms of our personal meditationn we need to identify the person who is going to provide the golden thread as we go down into the shadows.

Also James sent a postcard of some people working on an accelerator at Cerne which I think my James will enjoy. (I once had a chance to go round the nuclear spallation installation at Daresbury which is close to the Lamborn Downs - great fun.) Mark mailed about Cubasis and Eejay - which struck him pretty much as it strikes me - this software is ridiculous. Then there was a credit card bill which bore the brunt of insuring James to drive the AX - oh well at least I get airmiles on this.

The Sister P material triggered some ideas of sequences I might develop - maybe using some of the alternative patches scattered across the soundbanks of Sound Canvas.