I've been thinking about my father a lot in the last tuthree days. Yesterday, Wikipedia's On This Day reported the anniversary of the Battle of Barossa (1811) an Anglo-Portuguese victory against a much larger force of French infantry in the Peninsula War. Since I was a boy, I've had a boy-like interest in the Napoleonic Wars possibly because of a namesake. Barossa rang a bell because it was one of the (successful) British battles that named a class of Royal Naval destroyers including Corunna, Agincourt and Alamein. Just after I was born, my father was appointed to HMS Barossa (D68), so the ship was for a while a fourth child in our family. His loyalty to his commands was almost absolute. In the school where my brother and I started our very expensive education, the boys (all boys natch) were assigned to a colour-coded 'house' named after a Hampshire river. The Brother in Beaulieu, self to Hamble. This was only really important at the annual summer sports day when small boys in white shorts were pitted against each other to amuse the parents. My father refused to support either of his sons' teams but rooted instead for Meon because HMS Meon was his current home-from-home. And yes, there is a coxennion with the Australian Barrosa Valley and its wine.
Today is the anniversary (1987) of the Zeebrugge disaster; not to be confused with the Zeebrugge raid (1918). The disaster reveals some interesting science as well as being a rather good example of a "for want of a shoe, the horse was lost" normal accident. MS Herald of Free Enterprise was designed to be a hyper-efficient RORO ferry serving the English Channel. We nowadays think that roll-on-roll-off ferries are the only conceivable way to transport cars across water. But I can remember my father driving up the quay in Fishguard until each wheel of the family car was settled in two enormously strong coir hammocks. The jalopy was then swung up into the air by a quayside crane and deposited on the deck of the Rosslare ferry. Clearly this method of loading becomes impossible if more than a handful of people had cars to bring with them on holiday. That might have been as late as the annual Irish family holiday 1961. Shortly after that RORO ferries became the standard.
The Herald was designed to work more efficiently than the competition. Efficiency could be passed on to passengers as competitive prices and Townsend-Thoresen, the owners, could sell more tickets. The ship was designed for Calais rather than Zeebrugge so she didn't really fit the loading ramps of the port, accordingly, on arrival in Belgium the forward ballast tanks were flooded so that the ship kneeled into the dock. The cars were herded on as quickly as possible - turn-around time is where efficiencies can be achieved as we all know from Ryanair. It was the habit of the crew to leave the bow doors open as the ship started off across the harbour to clear out the exhaust fumes of the busy loading process. The doors were to be closed before the ship went out past the breakwater into the open sea. The man responsible for closing the door was having a snooze in his cabin, the officer responsible for ensuring the door was closed made an assumption that the snoozer was doing his job, another senior crew member didn't act because it wasn't his job, the Captain couldn't see the doors so assumed they were closed and there was no warning light on the bridge designed to tell him otherwise. Oh, and they all forgot to adjust the trim so that the RORO ramp was back up to the requisite 1.5m above the water level. So the ship left the safety of the harbour exposed to the rough North Sea.
Four minutes later a wave slopped in through the doors and sloshed about the enormous free surface (20m x 120m) of the car desk. 10cm of water across that area is 240 tons which was probably less than the weight of the vehicles but they were stationary (and positioned to even up the ship's trim) while the water was moving with the least change in the heel of the ship. A slight list to port was pushed further by the tons of water which brought the left corner of the loading door nearer to the sea, more water rushed in and 90 seconds later the whole ship turned on its side and sank; providentially onto a sandbar so there were some survivors even though the water temperature was 3oC. 193 people died. Many people behaved in a heroic manner: one man made himself a human bridge between two sections of a stairway and allowed people (complete strangers) to scramble over him to safety. Various ships in the vicinity put themselves at grave risk to pick off survivors before they froze and drowned. As the tide rose in the dark, the rescue workers reluctantly stopped work; when they returned at first light everyone on the ship was definitely dead from hypothermia and exposure. In the SS Estonia, a more dramatic RORO disaster in the Baltic in 1994, the survivors were much more skewed as to their age, sex and fitness profile.
The free surface effect is most exaggerated when water, which is heavy and the opposite of viscous, is involved but the shift in the centre of gravity which is the core of the problem can occur with any unsecured load especially in containers only partly full: fuel-oil, coal, wheat, fish on trawler decks. In the days of sail, storm damage might break internal bulkheads to cause the load to shift and the crew were put to back-breaking labor in atrocious conditions to shift cargo and restabilise it. That's when they earned their tot and lobscouse.
My father, a sea-captain himself, was quite uncompromising in his assessment of the responsibilities of the officers and particularly the Captain of the Herald. In his book, the buck stopped with the Captain, it being his job to make sure that systems are in place that prevent accidents happening and if something goes wrong that there are plans in place to minimise the damage. You can't blame your officers, let alone the men at the work-face; you can't look to your owners let alone the share-holders. "It would have been better for Captain Lewry if he had gone down with the ship" was The Da's assessment from behind the Daily Telegraph as he read reports the following day.
Thursday, 6 March 2014
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
Helicobacter cobberi
That's just bonzer because we've seen that some royal shits have achieved the same success while some very nice deserving scientists (Burnell, Best) have not. In contrast the 2005 Medicine and Physiology Award was a Goldiloxian "just right". You'd hope such people to be proud of their success and find the time to share it with others . . .. . . and of course they have. Here's Barry Marshall sharing himself and his ideas in China. I don't think the kids are smiling from ear to ear to please the Party Photographer; I bet it's because Baz has just cracked a joke. I take the liberty of calling him Baz because all Australian Barrys are "Baz" and this one is not a stuffed shirt whod' insist on Professor Marshall. But let's go back some 30 years to see how an insight (kaCHING!) became a hypothesis, how that hypothesis was tested and how it led to an exceedingly elegant break-through in medical practice. It also involves courageous self-experimentation in the spirit of JBS Haldane.
In 1979 Barry Marshall, then aged 28, was appointed Registrar at Royal Perth Hospital, where he met pathologist Robin Warren over their mutual interest in bacteria associated with pathological conditions in the GI tract. Marshall tells their story in Stockholm, which I strongly recommend, not because he's funny (which he is), but because he carefully documents the development of the project. Here's a wikipedia timeline for the discovery acknowledging the key players over at least 200 years. Before M&W, peptic ulcers were epidemic in Western society and Tagamet/Cimetidine had recently become the drug of choice. It worked by inhibiting acid production in the stomach - a factor known to be associated with ulcers. Marshall was outraged that Tagamet was netting GlaxoSmithKline $billion$ each year but had a near 100% relapse rate: drug off = ulcer back. A drug for share-holders if ever there was one. His comprehensive reading of the literature suggested that Bismuth, a heavy metal chemically similar to Arsenic, had been long known a) to kill bacteria and b) to provide relief from heartburn and ulcers. Prescriptions for Bismuth had fallen off when penicillin was discovered (1928)and developed as the antimicrobial of choice. M&W found some ulcerated patients on whom to carry out some controlled experiments and showed that after a course of Bismuth (that was alchemically foul to take orally) a significant proportion of these people were cured (relapse rate 60% compared to 100% with Tagamet!). The key insight/belief was that Bismuth worked by killing the small helical shaped bacteria that seemed to be associated with some stomach ulcers.
One of the great side-stories is that M&W had great difficulty is culturing these previously unnamed and uncharacterised bacteria which they took to calling CLOs (Campylobacter like organisms). One weekend the Path Lab at the hospital was overwhelmed by an epidemic of MRSA so that the ulcer petri-dishes, which should have been assessed on Friday after the standard 48 hours, were left until the following Tuesday. At that time, colonies were revealed which had not been apparent under the standard protocol because CLOs grow rather slowly in the lab - although they gallop ahead with the best of them in the stomach. This was one of the key facts that caused the internal-medicine experts to cry "rubbish" when M&W first started to publish their results because any fule kno that nothing can grow in the stomach. Marshall persisted in his investigations because people were dying under his care and he knew that he could save most of them if he could just tie up the loose ends of his hypothesis. Another contemporary example of Australian certainty had a less auspicious ending.
One of the loose ends was to see if they could induce new ulcers in healthy subjects with an application of these CLOs, which were eventually called Helicobacter pylori. They tried with piglets and came away with no conclusive results. It should be, must be, is impossible to carry out such an experiment on humans in any institution/country that has an Ethics Committee. So Marshall, with the support of Warren and some other colleagues (he wasn't an entirely loose cannon Dr Jekelling about the hospitals of Western Australia), chugged down 109 CFUs (that's a billion bacteria) of CLOs and waited to see what would happen. Three days later, he felt a bit off and his Mum told him that his breath smelled off, and a couple of days after that he puked up, so he was definitely infected. The vomit he voided was peculiarly acid free and this turned out to be interestingly diagnostic. Because H. pylori has an enzyme called urease which breaks down urea - a simple chemical which you're likely to find in lots of foodstuffs - into ammonia and carbon-dioxide. The latter is the key ingredient in regulating acidity in the blood and also here neutralises the hydrochloric acid that naturally seeps into the stomach to help promote digestion. So urease makes the interior of the stomach less extreme and more friendly for H. pylori to grow in. M&W mobilised this knowldege to develop a neat non-invasive test for H. pylori infection. Pop a pill of some urea made with carbon14 , wait 30 minutes and then sample the breath, if C14-rich CO2 emerges then urease - almost certainly from H. pylori - is present.
Then, for the first time since medical school, Warren the pathologist wielded an endoscope under instruction from the internist patient and they got to see a blossoming of bright red ulcers where none had been before. As importantly, they were also able to see and culture more than 109 CLOs - so these bacteria definitely could go forth and multiply in the inhospitably acid environment of the stomach after a couple of weeks of testing, Marshall called "enough", gave himself a dose of antibiotics and returned to his normal ulcer-free state. Those few days had been remarkably informative but they were still an anecdote where data was required. Those data were gathered in due course; and a new, remarkably efficacious, cure (not a mere treatment of symptoms) for peptic ulcers had been discovered. It took 10 years for the rest of the medical establishment to catch up with these pioneers, and 20 years for the significance of the discovery to bed-down with the Nobel Prize Committee.
Hats, with or without corks, off!(You can never have enough tired national stereotypes)
Tuesday, 4 March 2014
Music in my heart
It's Mardi Gras, it's Pancake Tuesday, traditionally celebrated with Gusto (he knows all the best bars) and carnival and I've just posted something deeply depressing about Fritz Haber. As an antidote and to raise our spirits in these troubled times youtube offers you some music (links-thanks to La Manch', La Ru' and others):
- Rachmaninov BIG hands.
- Total eclipse three hands.
- 2CELLOS.
- Eight cellos.
- Vienna's Vegetable Orchestra.
- Carrot clarinet.
- Flashmob Ode an die Freude. Can never have enough Joy
- Pachelbel. You can never have enough of the canon.
Ammonia
Ammonia (Manumia you can never have enough Wings) is, by some accounts, the foundation of every human thing on the planet. At least as important as concrete, steel or styrofoam hamburger boxes. 80% of the atmosphere is Nitrogen N2, which is remarkably unreactive, because the triple N≡N bond between the two N atoms is very strong. But nitrogen is required in large quantities to make proteins and the living world needs proteins (as enzymes, receptors) to carry out all their metabolic activities, including making more proteins. I've mentioned this before in the context of where Ammonia got its name. There are two ways we can convert N2 into a bio-useful form. Using a convenient enzyme in some living organism OR a brute force chemical approach.
Just a few days ago, I was talking about how the elegant biochemical option was used to generate large quantities of acetone during WWI. Chaim Weizmann mobilised an enzyme from Clostridium acetobutylicum to convert abundant starch into scarce acetone, and was rewarded with his own country. Acetone is a key precursor for cordite which is used to propel bullets and a lot of those were used up in Flanders between 1914 and 1918. The British government, for whom Weizmann worked, also required a lot of nitrate to make TNT (three molecules of nitrate for every molecule of Tri-Nitro-Toluene) and other more powerful explosives. But they didn't need to make any nitrate (elegantly or expensively) because they could go and dig as much as they needed out of the ground in places such as Chile where generations of birds shitting on the rocks of the dry coast extending south from the Atacama Desert had created layers of 'guano' many meters thick and easily shovelable. Nitrates are highly soluble and elsewhere birdshit gets dissolved and washed away by the least shower of rain.
The Germans, boxed into continental Europe and with the Royal Navy interdicting any external trade, needed explosives as much as the Brits but had to make their own nitrate. Fritz Haber, their wunderkind chemist, developed a brute force (no surprise here?), high energy solution to this problem of reactive nitrogen insufficiency. The formula is represented thus.
It was for developing this process that Haber won his Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1918. The Nobel committee weren't particularly interested in the war-time applications but it was obvious to everyone that nitrogen 'fixed' by the Haber-Bosch process could be used to supplement and replace the bio-generated fixed nitrogen that was at the heart of rotating crops: Wheat - barley - potato - fallow or Maize - soya - maize - soya. Fallow means leaving the field to grow grass and vitally clover (Trifolium spp.) and grazing animals on the pasture; the bacteria (nitrogenase) in the clover and the animal manure both contributing to the fertility of the field in the following year. Soya or other beans also fix nitrogen. There are other reasons for rotating crops and not having a mono-culture which hinge on keeping pests and parasites at bay, but that's another day's story.
We demonize Haber nowadays because of his enthusiasm for chlorine and other chemical warfare agents and for being a man-of-his-generation (i.e. bit of a shit) to his long-suffering and brilliant wife, but I put it to you that we have far more reason to curse him for developing a cheap way of making ammonia. My argument is much the same as that for which we have cause to curse Norman Borlaug lynch-pin of the Green Revolution. Borlaug is frequently hailed as "The Man Who Saved A Billion Lives", but that's nonsense. He changed the economic, ecological and agricultural conditions in a way that encouraged a billion subsistence farmers in the third world to try for another baby so he is more realistically named "The Man Who Created A Billion Lives", like some super-Shockley sperm-donor. The half-a-billion tons of nitrogen fixed by the Haber process every year has been another essential leg to the rocketing agricultural productivity we call the Green Revolution. The number of humans of the planet has increased from a, perhaps sustainable, 1.5 bn in 1900 to more than 7 bn now. Borlaug and Haber have fed them (they say that 80% of the nitrogen in our own proteins has been fixed by the Haber-Bosch process) but their needs for mobile phones, dining tables, plastic washing-up bowls, designer footware and electric light have denuded the planet of trees, depleted mineral resources that have taken a billion years to accumulate and sent it all up in a plume of CO2 which will melt the ice-caps so that the sun can sauna us all to death.
V e r y s l o w h a n d c l a p.
Just a few days ago, I was talking about how the elegant biochemical option was used to generate large quantities of acetone during WWI. Chaim Weizmann mobilised an enzyme from Clostridium acetobutylicum to convert abundant starch into scarce acetone, and was rewarded with his own country. Acetone is a key precursor for cordite which is used to propel bullets and a lot of those were used up in Flanders between 1914 and 1918. The British government, for whom Weizmann worked, also required a lot of nitrate to make TNT (three molecules of nitrate for every molecule of Tri-Nitro-Toluene) and other more powerful explosives. But they didn't need to make any nitrate (elegantly or expensively) because they could go and dig as much as they needed out of the ground in places such as Chile where generations of birds shitting on the rocks of the dry coast extending south from the Atacama Desert had created layers of 'guano' many meters thick and easily shovelable. Nitrates are highly soluble and elsewhere birdshit gets dissolved and washed away by the least shower of rain.
The Germans, boxed into continental Europe and with the Royal Navy interdicting any external trade, needed explosives as much as the Brits but had to make their own nitrate. Fritz Haber, their wunderkind chemist, developed a brute force (no surprise here?), high energy solution to this problem of reactive nitrogen insufficiency. The formula is represented thus.
N2 + 3 H2 → 2 NH3 (ΔH = −92.4 kJ·mol−1)
No I don't really know what it means either. But two things are important: 1) on the left side of the equation there are 4 molecules and only 2 on the right; 2) the negative number indicates that the reaction is exothermic - it generates heat. But more important, and what doesn't appear in the equation, is that there is an enormous 'energy of activation' for this reaction - basically to break open the strong triple bond. This activation energy needs to be brought down as far as possible to minimise the amount of heat (expensive) required. You can do this by using an enzyme like nitrogenase which is found in N-fixing bacteria in the roots of leguminous (peas, beans, clover, vetch) plants. Or you can trick about with various chemical catalysts that metaphorically hold the N≡N bond steady while you beat it with a big stick. Developing economic catalysts was one of Haber's contributory break-throughs. Another brilliant idea was to apply pressure to the system to encourage the four initial molecules to rank-up and convert themselves into two and drive the reaction right. A gram-molecular weight (mole) of any gas fills the same volume: 22 litres, regardless of the complexity of the molecule, so the right side naturally takes up half as much space.It was for developing this process that Haber won his Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1918. The Nobel committee weren't particularly interested in the war-time applications but it was obvious to everyone that nitrogen 'fixed' by the Haber-Bosch process could be used to supplement and replace the bio-generated fixed nitrogen that was at the heart of rotating crops: Wheat - barley - potato - fallow or Maize - soya - maize - soya. Fallow means leaving the field to grow grass and vitally clover (Trifolium spp.) and grazing animals on the pasture; the bacteria (nitrogenase) in the clover and the animal manure both contributing to the fertility of the field in the following year. Soya or other beans also fix nitrogen. There are other reasons for rotating crops and not having a mono-culture which hinge on keeping pests and parasites at bay, but that's another day's story.
We demonize Haber nowadays because of his enthusiasm for chlorine and other chemical warfare agents and for being a man-of-his-generation (i.e. bit of a shit) to his long-suffering and brilliant wife, but I put it to you that we have far more reason to curse him for developing a cheap way of making ammonia. My argument is much the same as that for which we have cause to curse Norman Borlaug lynch-pin of the Green Revolution. Borlaug is frequently hailed as "The Man Who Saved A Billion Lives", but that's nonsense. He changed the economic, ecological and agricultural conditions in a way that encouraged a billion subsistence farmers in the third world to try for another baby so he is more realistically named "The Man Who Created A Billion Lives", like some super-Shockley sperm-donor. The half-a-billion tons of nitrogen fixed by the Haber process every year has been another essential leg to the rocketing agricultural productivity we call the Green Revolution. The number of humans of the planet has increased from a, perhaps sustainable, 1.5 bn in 1900 to more than 7 bn now. Borlaug and Haber have fed them (they say that 80% of the nitrogen in our own proteins has been fixed by the Haber-Bosch process) but their needs for mobile phones, dining tables, plastic washing-up bowls, designer footware and electric light have denuded the planet of trees, depleted mineral resources that have taken a billion years to accumulate and sent it all up in a plume of CO2 which will melt the ice-caps so that the sun can sauna us all to death.
V e r y s l o w h a n d c l a p.
Monday, 3 March 2014
Cantor counting
A month ago I had occasion to use Terence's all-embracing aphorism homo sum - humani nihil a me alienum puto, in the context of what should and should not be allowable in discourse. Because something makes you feel uncomfortable is not sufficient reason to close up shop on its depiction or discussion. I'd like to be able to lay claim to a narrower constituency which I won't affect to render in Latin, so Yoda-speak will have to do: "Scientist I am, beyond me nothing within its boundaries is". Which makes it sufficiently obscure and oracular, but I've already admitted that wide chunks of physics send my brain teetering over the abyss or at least skittering down the inclined plane.
I'm teaching elementary math to our Yr1 biologists, or at least I am hosting a forum whereby the youngsters can use Khanacademy to practice their skills in geometry and algebra. It reminds me that, when I was their age, I was quite nifty at mathematics and could knock off a bit a calculus, or trick about with set theory. But I know that there are limits to what I can get my brain to accept.
Today is Georg Cantor's birthday. He was born on 19th February 1845 in St Petersburg Санкт-Петербург Petrograd Leningrad St Petersburg (they've changed the name a few times). The 19th February was an example of the holdout that the Russians kept from embracing the Gregorian calendar until long after the rest of Europe. 19/02/45 was called 03/03/45 by everyone to the West of the cultural capital of Russia. Cantor was smart and forced us to think on the nature of infinity in mind-melting ways so that since his time we recognise that there are some infinities that are bigger than others.
He showed first that the infinity of odd numbers is the same size as the infinity of all countable numbers although reason tells us that there must be twice as many of the latter. He did this by explaining s l o w l y his idea of mapping. He said that you could pair off the two sets of numbers two at a time
1=1 2=3 3=5 4=7 5=9 6=11 . . . ad infinitum
until they had all gone, so they must be equivalent in size. Qualified Shazzam!?
If you can accept that you can push yourself to accept that rational numbers (fractions+integers to us) are also countable in the same way. All you need to do is organise your data in a particular way so that you can tick the numbers off sequentially and know you're not missing any out. Cantor's insight was to set up all the fractions (which includes all the integers because 1 = 1/1; 2 = 2/1 etc.) in a grid and count them off along the blue diagonal against the counting numbers. So far, so good? Cantor then went on to apply similar reasoning to show that the points on a line were equivalent to the points in n-dimensional space. This wrecked even Cantor's head and he famously wrote to his correspondent Dedekind "Je le vois, mais je ne le crois pas!" ("I see it, but I don't believe it!").
You might think that you (or at least mathematicians) can count any set of anything - but you can't. And Cantor elegantly showed that the real numbers are not countable, that there must be some real numbers that fall between the cracks of the rationals . . . and so the infinity of reals must be bigger than the infinity of the countable. Real numbers are the rationals (integers and fractions) PLUS the irrational numbers that cannot be represented by a fraction. Although 22/7 is a damned good approximation for the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle, any fule kno that this ratio is represented by π Pi 3.1415926... Another beautiful real is the golden ratio ϕ Phi 1.6180339... Last year, I laid out a bizarre connexion between the three most famous irrationals.
As with the diagonalised fractions, Cantor challenged us to give him any ("big as you like, big as you can imagine, ALL of them") set of real numbers and he would write them in a list one above the other (for convenience just dealing with the digits after the deci-point):
71828 18284 59045 23536 ..... (e)
14159 26535 89793 23846 ..... (π)
61803 39887 49894 84820 ..... (ϕ)
77777 77777 77777 77777 ..... (7/9)
.....
.....
Cantor then showed that we couldn't have included ALL the real numbers in the list because he could imagine/create/write a number that was different from the first number in its first digit AND different from the second number in its second digit AND different from the third number in its third digit etc. That argument could be re-employed in the new N+1 list, with another number. Sooooo, the infinity of real numbers is bigger than the infinity of rationals.
So far my head isn't piled up in a heap at the bottom of the cliffs of insanity, but beyond this much of mathematics quickly wings off towards the horizon leaving me behind in a pedestrian grounded world knowing my limits.
I'm teaching elementary math to our Yr1 biologists, or at least I am hosting a forum whereby the youngsters can use Khanacademy to practice their skills in geometry and algebra. It reminds me that, when I was their age, I was quite nifty at mathematics and could knock off a bit a calculus, or trick about with set theory. But I know that there are limits to what I can get my brain to accept.
Today is Georg Cantor's birthday. He was born on 19th February 1845 in St Petersburg Санкт-Петербург Petrograd Leningrad St Petersburg (they've changed the name a few times). The 19th February was an example of the holdout that the Russians kept from embracing the Gregorian calendar until long after the rest of Europe. 19/02/45 was called 03/03/45 by everyone to the West of the cultural capital of Russia. Cantor was smart and forced us to think on the nature of infinity in mind-melting ways so that since his time we recognise that there are some infinities that are bigger than others.
He showed first that the infinity of odd numbers is the same size as the infinity of all countable numbers although reason tells us that there must be twice as many of the latter. He did this by explaining s l o w l y his idea of mapping. He said that you could pair off the two sets of numbers two at a time
1=1 2=3 3=5 4=7 5=9 6=11 . . . ad infinitum
until they had all gone, so they must be equivalent in size. Qualified Shazzam!?
You might think that you (or at least mathematicians) can count any set of anything - but you can't. And Cantor elegantly showed that the real numbers are not countable, that there must be some real numbers that fall between the cracks of the rationals . . . and so the infinity of reals must be bigger than the infinity of the countable. Real numbers are the rationals (integers and fractions) PLUS the irrational numbers that cannot be represented by a fraction. Although 22/7 is a damned good approximation for the ratio between the circumference and diameter of a circle, any fule kno that this ratio is represented by π Pi 3.1415926... Another beautiful real is the golden ratio ϕ Phi 1.6180339... Last year, I laid out a bizarre connexion between the three most famous irrationals.
As with the diagonalised fractions, Cantor challenged us to give him any ("big as you like, big as you can imagine, ALL of them") set of real numbers and he would write them in a list one above the other (for convenience just dealing with the digits after the deci-point):
71828 18284 59045 23536 ..... (e)
14159 26535 89793 23846 ..... (π)
61803 39887 49894 84820 ..... (ϕ)
77777 77777 77777 77777 ..... (7/9)
.....
.....
Cantor then showed that we couldn't have included ALL the real numbers in the list because he could imagine/create/write a number that was different from the first number in its first digit AND different from the second number in its second digit AND different from the third number in its third digit etc. That argument could be re-employed in the new N+1 list, with another number. Sooooo, the infinity of real numbers is bigger than the infinity of rationals.
So far my head isn't piled up in a heap at the bottom of the cliffs of insanity, but beyond this much of mathematics quickly wings off towards the horizon leaving me behind in a pedestrian grounded world knowing my limits.
Sunday, 2 March 2014
A handful of Books
Lists of books especially those which You The Reader must read can be pretty tiresome and I've written a short one myself last year. The implication of a list that specifies author and title is that the writer's taste will track or overlap the readers and has the rather prejudiced undercurrent that there are absolutes in literature. I say prejudiced because there are +200,000 books published in English England alone each year (and another 20,000 at least in English in India) and there must be hidden gems in there that Dr Opinionator-O'List hasn't troubled to read because they haven't been reviewed in The Observer. And last year's 200,000 too!?
So I was delighted to read a list by Janet Potter at The Millions that has actionable ideas about how to decide what to read but mentions no specifics. That gives space to find your own books in the particular and peculiar circumstances to which you are exposed. Before the WWW, which emerged from the brain of Tim Berners Lee about 20 years ago, there was the internet. It was heavy on text and light on images, but allowed people with similar interests to communicate without being in the same room. I used to tune in a half dozen USENET 'newsgroups' which allowed threaded conversations to develop on particular topics within particular arenas. alt.rural serviced my need for information and advice about killing chickens, maintaining dirt-roads and building tree-houses. rec.arts.books was a talking-shop for readers. Someone on r.a.b. advised us to read Bill "before-he-was-famous" Bryson's The Lost Continent, it's a voyage round America and into a personal past. I laughed so much there was a puddle.
I've written before about the unexpected books which I have found in a section of the copyright library of Trinity College Dublin where the books are shelved as they come in, so particle physics rubs shoulders with piratical psychics. It was there that I rounded on Oliver Rackham's Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape. I spent the whole of the next weekend entranced by this "complete history of Britain's trees, woods and hedgerows". I never looked at the landscape with dull glazed eyes after that. I came across Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan in a dark corner of the school library when I was 16, read the next two books in the trilogy and felt I had licence to be not quite normal since. Peake's Gormenghast books " . . . give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience" as CS "Narnia" Lewis put it. Those wild fantasies were written as Peake slipped remorselessly into Parkinson's and dementia. The tragedy of his decline is laid out in a heart-breaking memoir A World Apart by his wife Maeve Gilmour.
I have a copy of Days of Our Years by Pierre van Paassen, which is inscribed, on the fly-leaf, "Louis W Pitt Jr. / from Mrs George M. Jones / Graduation from Episcopal / June 1940". I bought that in a library book-sale in Boston in the early 1980s. It is also a travel book, starting in Gorkum in Zuid-Holland where it looks across the river at Brabant, and bucketing round Europe and Africa and the Near East through the 1920s and 1930s. As a journalist he covered Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War but he always worked out his own story from events rather than accepting press releases; this was not well appreciated in those troubled and polarised times. Accordingly, he spent 10 days banged up in Dachau in 1933 and was later expelled in turn from both France and Germany. Despite being a Unitarian minister he was a committed Zionist before there was anything like a state of Israel. An interesting man, so. But wholly sunk into oblivion nowadays.
This book, a very early Penguin, is inscribed, not on the fly-leaf but on the only white part of the cover, "Wilfred Xmas 1939 fr. G". Wilfred is my Grandfather who died when I was three, so he knew me even if I didn't know him. I'm guessing that G is my great-aunt Gwen his oldest sister, who died long before I was born. I think that's near enough to Janet Potter's advice "You should read the book you find in your grandparents’ house that’s inscribed - To Ray, all my love, Christmas 1949.” Now I really will take her advice, because much as I cherish the memory of my Grampa, I haven't read his Christmas present yet. And it's the weekend! Must stop bloggin' there's books to read.
So I was delighted to read a list by Janet Potter at The Millions that has actionable ideas about how to decide what to read but mentions no specifics. That gives space to find your own books in the particular and peculiar circumstances to which you are exposed. Before the WWW, which emerged from the brain of Tim Berners Lee about 20 years ago, there was the internet. It was heavy on text and light on images, but allowed people with similar interests to communicate without being in the same room. I used to tune in a half dozen USENET 'newsgroups' which allowed threaded conversations to develop on particular topics within particular arenas. alt.rural serviced my need for information and advice about killing chickens, maintaining dirt-roads and building tree-houses. rec.arts.books was a talking-shop for readers. Someone on r.a.b. advised us to read Bill "before-he-was-famous" Bryson's The Lost Continent, it's a voyage round America and into a personal past. I laughed so much there was a puddle.
I've written before about the unexpected books which I have found in a section of the copyright library of Trinity College Dublin where the books are shelved as they come in, so particle physics rubs shoulders with piratical psychics. It was there that I rounded on Oliver Rackham's Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape. I spent the whole of the next weekend entranced by this "complete history of Britain's trees, woods and hedgerows". I never looked at the landscape with dull glazed eyes after that. I came across Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan in a dark corner of the school library when I was 16, read the next two books in the trilogy and felt I had licence to be not quite normal since. Peake's Gormenghast books " . . . give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience" as CS "Narnia" Lewis put it. Those wild fantasies were written as Peake slipped remorselessly into Parkinson's and dementia. The tragedy of his decline is laid out in a heart-breaking memoir A World Apart by his wife Maeve Gilmour.
I have a copy of Days of Our Years by Pierre van Paassen, which is inscribed, on the fly-leaf, "Louis W Pitt Jr. / from Mrs George M. Jones / Graduation from Episcopal / June 1940". I bought that in a library book-sale in Boston in the early 1980s. It is also a travel book, starting in Gorkum in Zuid-Holland where it looks across the river at Brabant, and bucketing round Europe and Africa and the Near East through the 1920s and 1930s. As a journalist he covered Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War but he always worked out his own story from events rather than accepting press releases; this was not well appreciated in those troubled and polarised times. Accordingly, he spent 10 days banged up in Dachau in 1933 and was later expelled in turn from both France and Germany. Despite being a Unitarian minister he was a committed Zionist before there was anything like a state of Israel. An interesting man, so. But wholly sunk into oblivion nowadays.
Saturday, 1 March 2014
Take a leek - today
The leek has great culinary virtue being winter-hardy and available in the early Spring for a much needed boost of greens after a winter of salt pork, beans and dicing with botulism. As its Latin name proclaims it is a member of the great, wonderful onion family which gives us onion (A.cepa), garlic (A.sativum), shallot (A.oschaninii), ramsons (A.ursinum), chives (A.schoenoprasum) and about 250 other, more exotic species. Leeks are especially good in quiche . . . with gruyère . . . and bacon . . . and excuse me while I find a tissue to deal with my drool.
The Welsh language is, with Breton, one of the P-celtic languages; distinguished from Q-celtic varieties spoken in Ireland, the Isle of man and Scotland. The difference hinges on a consonantal shift from K sounds to P sounds (mac - map - son; cúig - pump - five etc.). Irish, the language, has for the last 120 years been key to consolidating a national identity. At the foundation of the state of Israel, Hebrew was only known in yeshiva to help read antient scrolls of the torah and mishnah. By a concerted effort of education it was recreated as a modern language with words for television, tank and turn-table. The founders of the Irish state aspired to achieve the same but chose to do so by thrashing a grammar and vocabulary into the unwilling heads of school-children. Accordingly most Irish people leave school with a rapidly forgotten set of rote-learning and parroted phrases - and a determination to put their remaining language-acquisition skills into German, eSpanish or Mandarin. In Wales OTOH, 500,000 people (about 20%) are reasonably fluent in their language and speak it every day. There is an oft suggested but cravenly never implemented idea that if we forbade the stroppy-and-contrary Irish to speak their native tongue, fluency would quickly become universal.
As it says on part of the 1977 Voyager plaque now leaving the Solar System:
"Iechyd da i chwi yn awr ac yn oesoedd"
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