The Art of Creation

It's John "Python" Cleese's birthday today [1939]. This time last year his autobiography "So, Anyway ..." was published: to mixed-to-savage reviews: Reactograph; Mail; Spectator. The deal with modern publishing is that you set off on a punishing round of book-signings and 2 minute interviews on talk-shows . . . otherwise the book won't sell and neither your agent, the publisher, the editor nor you will make any money. The talk-show host will not have read your book, the questions will be pedestrian and you have to be out of the studio on a flight to Wichita within the hour.  Occasionally, if you are a big enough star, you'll get to be interviewed in a theatre by someone who has read your book and, furthermore, brings something of their own to the table. That makes it much more interesting for everyone concerned and if it gets recorded and popped up on youtube, then you might sell many books.  This is how I tuned into John Hodgman interviewing John Cleese in an extended 'chat' about the book.  John Hodgman is the thinking man's comedian, very cerebral and ironic. I came across him in an early TED talk several years ago: clever-quirky.

It's quite an interesting dialogue when they start to talk about creativity. Cleese, being an intellectual "ahem! Cambridge" as well as a comedian, actor, writer and director, has read Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation, which has a chapter investigating humour and Henri Bergson's book about laughter
Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique. Cleese goes on to say that he read these fat volumes to see if they had anything to add to his own experience of inducing, or failing to induce, laughter.  There is a certain hubris in that equivalence: Three Men in a Boat (?!):

1. As a journalist and writer Koestler may have done more than any single person to expose the hypocrisies and sullen violence of totalitarianism - read Darkness at Noon: you'll worry less about having enough credit for your iPhone. 
2. Henri Bergson was the giant of early 20thC French philosophy who, in his spare time, won the 1927 Nobel Prize for Literature. The long list of smart people who have taken the trouble to disagree with Bergson indicates how disturbing his ideas are. I'm not going to bother reading Le Rire, even in English translation: I know I shall get strangled by the long words.
3. John Cleese.

That analysis is quite catty but not half so grumpy and bitter as the reviews of Cleese's book cited at the top. Koestler's Act of Creation [Executive summary] I have read, not least because it spends a chunk of time looking at creativity in science as well as in humour and The Arts. Indeed it is as good a bridge as any for the gap between the Two Cultures which all my needle about the Arts Block attempts to expose. Koestler suggests that creativity hinges on "the perceiving of a situation or idea ... in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference". This was classically vindicated in [my telling of] the solving of Fermat's Last Theorem by Andrew Wiles.

The Hodgman interview led me, via the youtube sidebar to a very similar situation at College Tours with Twan Huys and an introduction and subtitles in Dutch. Now I know that stage-fright is plankenkoorts.  One of the many points made by Cleese is that, for him [and by extension any creative person], you need calm and quiet to hear the discord in your mind whose resolution leads to an Aha! moment.  As he sees it, there is very little space in the modern world to hear the still small voice of calm through the earthquake wind and fire of social media immediacy and dingling smart-phones.  I would add
           [4. Bob the Scientist]
that you have to have something in your head to set up the incompatible frames of reference. In science, that requires embedding yourself in the literature, experimental results, half-articulated ideas and rival theories of your field.  Only then do you have a chance of making a really creative contribution.

The final question in the College Tours encounter asks Cleese if he has any advice for the youth of today. His answer is that, after 75 years on the planet he has come to believe that a lot of his progress [and by extension the progress of other creative people] has been due to luck.  That's a rather bleak assessment, although it handily exposes the illusion that the world ticks according to a meritocracy.  But he the adds that the correct response to a random world is to be persistent. The chances of you landing the dream contract or the optimum life-partner on the first go-round are vanishingly small but they can be substantively increased if you keep plugging away. That's helpful advice. I'll add that you should also cultivate a degree of self-belief lest you be undermined by a succession of rejections from people who are far less talented than you are.

Pecorino romano

Pecorino [L mmmmm, so good] is one of the famous Italian hard cheeses; the other being Parmigiano Reggiano aka Parmesan. Unlike Actimel, a modern hard-marketed "good-bacteria" confection, hard cheeses have a history and tradition going back at least as far as the ancient Romans. We have some idea about how the Romans made cheese back in the old days because Lucius Junius Columella (b Gades=Cadiz in the year 4 CE) wrote De Re Rustica The book about Roman agricultural practice. His advice was to use rennet from lamb Ovis aries or kid Capra hisrcus but he also acknowledged the use of vegetable rennet from the dried thistle Cirsium vulgare flowers. Varro [previously], the other go-to-guy for Roman food lore, reported the use of hare Lepus europaeus rennet. Regardless of the source of rennet, cheese-makers should use a weight equivalent to a single denarius or the size of an olive to every bucket of milk; not more: over-egging the pudding lets the enzyme work through all the protein and start action on the fats so you finish up with a rather rancid [butyric acid etc.] product. From Columella's descriptions, the methods for making cheese have remained essentially the same for 2000 years.

This ceramic fragment [R from the BBC] was found just outside the village of Stilton in 2006 by a local potter called Richard Landy. Hat-tip to Gdau's mother (and a person in her own right!). It was identified as a cheese press by the County Council Archaeologist Dr Philippa Walton and dated to the 3rdC CE, because it was recognisably similar to lots of other contemporaneous artifacts which have been called cheese presses since Victorian times. Cheese makers beg to differ. If it's a cheese press then you would expect to find a 'follower' for every press but, in the experience of one farmer-cheesemaker-archaeologist, such flat disks to serve as a lid for the press have never been found.  Others point out that the flared sides of the press would allow several to be stacked one on top / inside the other.  And WTF, the cheesies ask, is with the deep ridges in the base?  The holes are for draining the whey, of course, but no modern cheese has these [decorative? homage to the Earth-mother?] concentric groove-and-ridge arrangements. The consensus seems to be that cheese "press" is wrong-wrong-almost-right: cheese drainers is more likely.  The likelihood of these artifacts being connected with some sort of dairy process was underlined by a 2012 study from Bristol U [and Gdansk and Princeton]: Mélanie Salque and her boss Richard Evershed ran a much older pierced pot-sherd through their gas chromatograph and discovered a cornucopia of fats, alkanes, di- and tri-acylglycerols, ketones and alcohols. Just what you'd expect if you allowed milk to deteriorate for 7000 years. When we make Christmas cake in January it allows for 11 months of tipping an occasional  shot of whiskey over the top to improve the flavour.  Maybe the grooves in Roman cheese served as gutters to allow a similar dosing-for-incorporation with brine, or lead acetate, or whatever-you're-having-yourself.

If you haven't got a potter in the neighborhood to make you a roman cheese press, you can still give your cheese a damned good squeezing using a 'stilton knot', whereby three corners of a square cheese-cloth are gathered together and tied with the fourth.  The knot can be incrementally forced against the cheese mass as it loses moisture, so that you finish up with a neat round of cheese with a distinctive belly-button on the top.

The Blob had a slice about Roman bread from Pompeii a couple of months ago. I can see I'll have to follow this up with a more complete investigation of Roman diet including their notorious fish-sauce and the details of peeling grapes.

Sunday surf share 251015

It's St Crispin's Day and the 600th (!) anniversary of the slaughter at Agincourt.

• I'm sure, therefore that you want to hear Harry the King giving it socks to the happy few.
• I saw this by chance last weekend and it's truly extraordinary. An extended family dancing in each other's company: mostly very young chaps and lassies who don't seem to be ashamed to keep a 300 year old tradition alive in North Carolina - it's 1964.  And the most extraordinary thing - they are all, from 8 to 80, thin.
• Recipe gifs: sweet biscuits . . .Pizza dip .  . . more moving food. 
• Art meets Science. The American Society for Microbiology ASM has just announced the results of its competition to make good art [Gaiman exhortation] using  petri dishes as your canvas. You have to know your bugs for this: Serratia marcescens [previously] is a particularly vivid red, for example. Hat tip to Marcella.
• I was all wet about Hurricane Tropical Storm Patricia yesterday.  The monster made landfall almost exactly halfway between the two biggest population centres in the region and promptly turned into a comparative pussy-cat - albeit a wet one with a lot of rain dumped in Mexico.  There may be nothing left by the time it crosses the border in Texas.
• Feel-good story of a low-tech modern medicine solution to glutaric aciduria type 1 (GA1) a devastating inborn error of metabolism, like PKU. via neatorama.

Bob Pretty

I have an understandable interest in Bobs. Bob the Island, Bob the Point, Bob the Province, Bob the Builder, Bob the Asteroid, Bob the Socratic, Bob the Gypsy, Bob the Thunderer, Bob the Farrrrmer, Bob the Cheap have all made an appearance on The Blob, some briefer than others.  Then I was looking across the room at the floor-to-ceiling book-case from my home-base on the sofa and thought it was time to offer tribs to W.W. Jacobs.  Who he?  I mentioned him a while ago as a off-piste author whose works I cherish.

I discovered his writings back in the days when I used to do yard-sales and church-sales accumulating historical atlases and Swahili dictionaries against the day when we would have more children who would need education. Many WW Jacobs stories are nautical in nature, echoing and elaborating tales remembered from his childhood fossicking around the London docks of Wapping and Bermondsey where his father was a wharf-manager. As a navy brat, I am favorably predisposed to books that go down to the sea again to the lonely sea and the sky [cue Masefield sounding like WB Yeats; or less sententious by Tom O'Bedlam]. As he was born in 1863, Jacobs' experience was at least as much with wherries, barges and lighters as it was with craft driven by steam or diesel engines. He did write several novels but he also submitted a great number of short-stories to the periodicals that flourished before wireless and television cornered the market in light entertainment from the 1930s. You may find wearing his attempts to render phonetically the dialect of his working-class protagonists but the same could be said of Kipling who had shares in the company that produced apostropes:

The uniform 'e wore   
Was nothin' much before,   
An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind, etc.

Jacobs' reputation now lies almost entirely on his authorship of a ghost story called The Monkey's Paw which has frightened the bejaysus out of boy-scouts for the last 100 years and was filmed in 1948 and more recently in 2013. I've no time for that sort of stuff but his gentle, ironic, funny stories about ordinary folk in slightly out of the ordinary situations are worth the ten minutes it takes to read them.  A very common trope in the collection is to have the story started off one of two elderly men.

One is the nightwatchman on a London wharf who has a fund of comeuppance tales about three sailors ashore between v'yages. Their names are Peter Russett, old Sam Small and Ginger Dick and they usually contrive to piss all their money away in an astonishing variety of ways almost before they've found lodgings ashore. The stories are simple enough but you want to watch out for the throw-away remarks which are doubly funny because they are unexpected. The innocent are there to be bilked as the sheep are there to be shorn but nobody dies. Peter's Pence is reasonably typical.

After he married, Jacobs moved with his family to the suburb of Loughton in Essex before it got entirely drowned in urban sprawl.  He recast the village as 'Claybury' with a pub called the Cauliflower which has a permanent resident in an long retired peasant who idles the days away cadging drinks off passers-by. Anyone who buys the old codger a pint will get a story as sure as you can now get money from an ATM if you have a PIN. But it's delightful how many ways a stranger can be artlessly persuaded to do the right thing by the oldest inhabitant. The anti-hero in this thread of tales is Bob Pretty, the local poacher, fixer and bamboozler who always turns out to be innocent of whatever outrage is committed on the other villagers and is painfully hurt that any of his neighbours would think badly of him  . . . again.

It looks like almost the entire oeuvre of WW Jacobs has been put on line by The Literature Network.  It's not as good as reading his stories in an old cloth binding printed in 1924 but it's all there.  Enjoy, I did.

The Winds of Change

Just four weeks ago, I went all Armageddon on you by flagging a temperature anomaly in the North Atlantic.  The naive physics of it is that a cu.cm or ml of water weighs, by definition, 1g; whereas a cu.cm of air weighs 1.2mg.  Water has about 800x the mass per equivalent volume. Increasing the temperature of 1 lt of water by 1^oC will bring up the temperature of 800 lt of air as things equilibrate.  That's what causes the winds: as this warmed air surges upwards and is replaced by cooler air from the surface surroundings.  Not quite a Dresden fire-storm but the principle is the same. I suggested that the pool of cold water in the Atlantic may shift the Gulf Stream further South and make for a cold dry winter here in Ireland. On the other side of the World, The Blob has been warming the air above and shifting the weather in quite unpredictable ways.

Nearer the tropics in the Pacific, El Niño is shaping up to be the second most massive example of this cyclical weather pattern since records began.  Previous biggies have been 1982-83 and 1997-98 and last night the meteorologists were telling us that El Niño had spawned the heftiest wet wind-storm ever recorded with sustained winds over 320 km/h and gusting even rougher. This would make it a category 7 hurricane if the scale didn't stop at category 5 = anything above 250km/h. To put that into parochial perspective, the Darwinday Storm of February 2014, had highest recorded winds of about 160km/h and that's the gusts not the sustained blowing. We're still clearing up the consequences. Hurricane Patricia, as they have called this monster is going to make landfall against the West Coast of Mexico this weekend with unbelievable storm-surges to flush everything that falls out to sea. 250km/h will take your car over a roadside hedge.  It is certainly comparable to Typhoon Haiyan that ripped through the Phillipines in 2013: Tacloban experienced 5m high storm surges at that time, which looked frighteningly like a tsunami. The best guess is that the force of Patricia will be broken by the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental but carry on into Texas where it will deliver up to 200mm of rain - 2 months supply - in a few hours. Sometime later it will be hosing down over our friends in New England and the Canadian Maritimes. STOP PRESS: the force of the storm is dissipating rapidly as it hits the coast between Puerta Vallarta and Manzanillo.  The people who abandonned their vacations at P.V. may have over-reacted.

In the medium term, they are also predicting a wet winter in California, which might sound like a good thing after a four year sustained drought has withered the fruit on the orchard trees. Nobody wants the rain all at once, though!  Furthermore, there is historical precedent for mega El Niños to swap out for a compensatory La Niña - the drying antidote to to the excesses of El Niño. There is a cunning plan afoot to re-introduce beavers Castor canadensis to the wilder upland parts of California to slow down the travel of water and retain it in slower, ponded rivers and streams. The clean fresh water of rain is getting to be an ever more precious commodity.  We don't have a great record for conserving it and trickling it out; beavers couldn't do a worse job!

What it looks like to Millennial Me is not so much that we have global warming but that we are due for much greater extremes of weather as the homeostasis of the last several thousand years breaks apart. I'm telling you this now, friends, so you can get to the shops before your neighbors. First World list including Spam, pepper-shaker and non-dairy creamer.  Costco's $800 Armageddon Food Package is more about shelf-life: "Freeze-dried foods have a shelf life of up to 25 years.  And the list of essential hardware is long.

Sphere

Sometimes you are brought up short by a revelation about something you've known for 50 years.  In the course of my very expensive education, I learned, and embedded, stuff at the age of 10 or 11 which the current generation of students are being taught at the age of 18. Take Latin: I was utter crap at Latin in school; I never did the home work and when required to 'construe' [translate] the doings of Caesar or Pompey would blurt out complete nonsense. But some of it stuck and it helps making sense of species names in biology. I won't easily forget how to calculate the area of a triangle [h * b/2] or the beautiful derivation [R] for that rote-learned formula.

In QM [remedial math] class last week, the kids were required to calculate the surface area of a solid hemisphere having been given the radius and the formula. It's not difficult but requires attention to check that all the elements have been accounted for before lashing down the answer spat out by the omni-present calculator.  The two elements are the area of a the flat circular base + the area of half of a sphere with the same diameter.  π*r² + 2π*r².  Last week, I was explaining to one of the lads that a solid hemisphere requires not only half the sphere but also the base [a very Latin construction that - non solum . . .  sed etiam was a cliché that appeared regularly in Caesar's Gallic Wars].  I am often brought up all standing by the holes in the education of the young: you can assume nothing as 'obvious to all thinking people'.  I final digression: in the pre-Quiz I set in the first class was "If the hub-caps on my car are 35cm in diameter [I measured, it's a Yaris], what is their surface area?" about 20% of the kids didn't know what was a hub-cap so their answer A = 35 x 35 = 1225 sq.com was correct in their hub-capless universe.

When you write π*r² + 2π*r² it becomes 'obvious' that the area of spherical part is exactly twice that of the flat base.  I may well have noticed that in my math-laden teenage years but it struck me as being almost mystically surprising and internally consistent last week.  It's obvious that you require more paint for the curve than the flat base but exactly 2x as much?

The fact that a sphere's surface area is 4π*r² is more difficult to prove than the triangle, so I'll refer you to two quite different methods on youtube: mostly geometry and mostly calculus.  Another observation known to Pythagoras and his pals was that the surface area of a sphere is exactly equivalent to a circumscribing cylinder [L] excluding the lids on the cylinder. The cylinder area is easy to work out if you can imagine getting some tin-snips [pause to deal with "Excuse me Dr Scientist, what are tin-snips?"] and cutting up the seam [think tin of beans] of the cylinder and flattening it out into a rectangle.  The shorter side or height of this rectangle [shown L] is 2r and the longer side is πd or π2r so the area is 2r * π2r = 4πr² !

I'm sorry if you think this is all obvious to the point of dull but it's qualitatively the sort of wonder that later and greater mathematicians reserved for the extraordinary connexion between π [the ratio between a circle and its diameter], e [the base of natural logarithms]  and i [the square root of -1] known as Euler's identity [formula R]. Gauss [the little snot] from his seat on Cloud Nine of Mathematics said "if this formula was not immediately obvious, the reader will never be a first-class mathematician".  It leads to a thigh-slappin' math-geek joke:
Q. How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. One! = -e^iπ
And while we're on nerd-geek hilarity, I'll share a limerick that was going the rounds when my long-dead dad was in school and has recently surfaced to delight a smart young medical student of my acquaintance:

a dozen, a gross and a score
plus three times the square root of four
divided by seven
plus five times eleven
is nine squared and not a bit more

Aspirin

Aspirin is just about the only medication I take.  I used to pop vitamin C as we approached Winter but the evidence for its efficacy is so marginal that I decided this time last year that I wouldn't put myself in thrall to 50mg of grass-skirt and maracas.  I was going up to Dublin after work a couple of weeks ago and felt the beginning of a whiff of a headache, so I chewed up one aspirin and before I got to the motorway, the headache was gone.  Call it placebo, but for me it almost always works thus.  But then I only take about one aspirin a year so it's not a  reliably large dataset. I don't do paracetamol [aka acetaminophen phenacetin]: it just wasn't part of our very limited pharmacopoeia when I was growing up.  I've also absorbed the information that death by paracetamol is a particularly grim way to kill yourself because it destroys the liver without, usually, drifting you off to quietus.  By the time symptoms start, and they are horrible, or you have second thoughts, it is too late to administer the antidote.

Aspirin, au contraire, has a chance of precipitating Reye's Syndrome - especially in children.  But that definitely hadn't surfaced as a possibility when I was young.  Reye's is a peculiar disease that triggers liver malfunction and occasionally this upsets some homeostatic balance so that fluid builds up on the brain: even if your kid is not one of the 20% who dies, a trip to intensive care is often indicated and there is a strong likelihood of long-term damage. That is one side of the risk assessment.  The other side is that Reye's is extremely rare: about 6 cases for every million children and that made it difficult to make the association between aspirin and the clatter of characteristic symptoms of encephalopathy which were described by Australian physician Douglas Reye and his colleagues in 1963. The association with aspirin, especially when used to counter the temperatures induced by influenza and other viruses was noted by Dr Karen Starko and others after a case/control study in 1980.  It took 6 years and several other studies to convince the FDA to change the warning labels on aspirin. Sales of aspirin took a hammering after the news got out and those of paracetamol got a complementary boost.  It's a good example of the precautionary principle: better not to use aspirin with children because the adverse consequences, though rare, are really adverse. The incidence of Reye's has collapsed over the last 30 years and is now bumbling along at about 1 case per million.  There are far more likely causes of childhood mortality to worry about - like taking your child to swimming, cello, hip-hop or drama classes in a car.

I thought that was all we had to know about aspirin but last week I came across a 2009 article by Karen Starko [again] in which she claims that aspirin has probable cause for being implicated in the disproportionate death rate among fit young adults during the 1918 influenza pandemic.  This has always been a bit of a mystery: it's usually the very old or very young and/or poorly fed who peg out when there are epidemics. In my own mind, I've explained it (superficially) as getting killed by an over-active inflammatory response to the viral insult. What kills you in cholera is that the toxins produced by Vibrio cholerae trigger an immune response that calls for a dramatic flush-through in the intestine: you die by dehydration.  If you can keep clean fluids up for a couple of days then the bugs calm down and/or go elsewhere and you survive. Dr Starko observes that one of the symptoms of aspirin poisoning is pulmonary oedema: you can't breathe efficiently if your lungs are full of fluid.  Back in 1918, doctors were recommending quite large doses of aspirin to reduce the influenza-driven pain and fever and may, unwittingly, have killed even more of their patients than normal. Could be; hard to test; and we're unlikely to repeat the mistake after all the Reye's brouhaha.

One other bit of murk in the history of aspirin is a controversy about who did what in the laboratories of the German chemical giant Bayer. The standard story is that aspirin was first synthesised by a Bayer chemist called Felix Hoffmann.  This is what Hoffman put about, even citing a specific date - 10 August 1897 - when the protocol was finally sorted out. This was disputed by his line-boss Arthur Eichengrün who maintained that Hoffman was just a pair of hands doing Eichengrün's bidding. Shades of Lemaitre and Hoffmann here: everyone wants to be associated with a success strory. The fact that the older man was trying to defend his reputation writing from the Theresienstadt concentration camp adds a bit of needle to the haystack of claims. Eichengrün was banged up in the camp because he had failed to make it sufficiently clear that he and his company were 'Jewish'. Even without the stuff about aspirin, his reputation would be held up high by his development of protargol in 1897; it was for two generations the drug of choice against gonorrhoea.