Bigging up the prefixes

I was doing more lonesome driving than usual recently and tapped into a seam of Tim Harford's BBC More or Less episodes. One was about the naming of parts prefixes for increasingly large and small numbers. If your audience is numerate it's quickest to read and most reliable to evaluate to use suffix superscripts to indicate the size of a number. Avogadro's number is

• a) the number of molecules in a mole [= gram-molecular-weight not Talpa europea yeh daftie]
• b) 6.02 x 10²³  if you can manage superscripts ²³ in HTML
  
• c) calculators often render this as 6.02e+23
• d) 6.02 ^ 23 is also acceptable to sciency ppl
• e) 602,214,080,000,000,000,000,000
  

But these are all hard to interpret in audio mode, so there Avogadro's number is 602 sextillion. Seems that until recently Système International SI units had no official prefixes for numbers larger than 10²⁴ or smaller than 10^-24. But stellar distances and computer storage is driving to agree terms for counts larger than this. For a while ten years ago, different teams were pushing for the adoption of Hellabyte or Brontobyte for 10²⁷ bytes but this got side-eye from the SI Metrology committee because the one letter abbreviations H for henry the unit of electrical conductance and B for byte were already spoken for; and that would lead to needless confusion.

At a November 2022 SI meeting is Versailles [France not Vərsaylz, KY yeh daftie] prefixes for 10²⁷ ; 10^-27 ; 10³⁰ and 10^-30 were agreed. Here's the full list:

quetta  Q    10^30 ** quecto  q    10^-30
ronna   R    10^27 ** ronto   r    10^-27
yotta   Y    10^24 ** yocto   y    10^-24
zetta   Z    10^21 ** zepto   z    10^-21
exa     E    10^18 ** atto    a    10^-18
peta    P    10^15 ** femto   f    10^-15
tera    T    10^12 ** pico    p    10^-12
giga    G    10^9  ** nano    n    10^-9
mega    M    10^6  ** micro   μ    10^-6
kilo    k    1,000 ** milli   m    0.001
hecto   h      100 ** centi   c    0.01
deka    da      10 ** deci    d    0.1

As a camel is said to be a horse designed by a committee, the SI General Conference on Weights and Measures has delivered a bit of a kludge. For the higher / more recent designations there is a neat symmetry: Q R Y Z reflects q r y z.  But P peta 10¹⁵ is not the reciprocal of p pico10^-12 nor is M mega 10⁶ the reciprocal of m milli 10^-03. 

And I can tell you that μ for micron is a typographical disaster for students and scientists being far too frequently replace by u or "mu".  But my annoyance is really focused on making two-letter da the official SI abbreviation for deka when the most recent meeting redoubled the precedent for capitals being big Q R Y Z with l.c. letters being q r y z. Historical inertia has fixed k for kilo and h for hecto rather than K and H. No room for complacency here.

Strict SI logic would suggest that 10^30 should be quecca but queca means fuck in Portuguese, so they went with quetta - a city in Pakistan - instead.

Grab your bags - it's Sunday

Misc stuff:

• BBC More or Less asks about numbers . . . of Irish Pubs [whc prev]
• Shagsper's b'day 
• Dialectical Scotch.
• How's your Switzerdeutsch? Ladder making in Sattel, CH
• Felled trees bring brook trout Salvelinus fontinalis
• Making a rabbit deterrent catapult.
• USA: CO vs WY
• Dogs on leash near sheep FFS please [cw: dead lamb]
• Blob's been there before [cw: ill manners]
  
• Deer getting a hair-cut
• I'll never complain about our blackbird again 
  
• UK readers: Sainsbury is likely ripping you off
  

Butter called Sal

Years ago, I was a saddo single person living round the corner from a supermarket. After work (I had a job and the money that brought so I could shop), I'd wander up and down the aisles trying to think of something to cook for my saddo single dinner. I made disastrously foolish decisions on multi-pack Kit-Kats and cheap stir-fry. At the tail end of Orthodox Easter, we were down on Costa na Déise for a few days of elder-care . . . round the corner from a supermarket.

After dinner, a cry went up "More dessert is needed" - because who wants an apple? Dau.II and I took one for the team and went round the corner in search of something adjacent to  lemon posset  [whc prev]. The closest strike was Supervalu Sicilian lemon yoghurt but we also came away with 94g of "Munchies Gold Caramel Flavour Sharing Bag". As y' do, when investigating a new-to-me product, the ToC was closely scrutinized:

Sugar, Vegetable Fats (Palm, Mango Kernel, Sal, Shea, Rapeseed, Sunflower), Glucose Syrup, Invert Sugar Syrup, Sweetened Condensed Skimmed Milk (Milk, Sugar), Whey Powder product (Milk), Skimmed Milk Powder, Wheat Flour (contains Calcium, Iron, Thiamin and Niacin), Butterfat (Milk), Cocoa Butter, Dried Whole Milk, Emulsifier (Lecithins), Cocoa Mass, Whey Powder (Milk), Raising Agents (Sodium Bicarbonate, Ammonium Bicarbonate), Barley Malt Extract, Salt, Lactose (Milk), Caramelised Sugar, Natural Flavouring, Maltodextrin, Safflower Concentrate 

It's candy, so you'd expect a lorra sugar but we were intrigued by the gallimaufry of exotic vegetable fats [Palm, Mango Kernel, Sal, Shea, Rapeseed, Sunflower]. Sal?? never 'eard of it! But Sal [ripe seeds L] turns out to quite a big thing in India: a tree known as Shorea robusta; a member of the Dipterocarp [aka two winged seeds] family. Sal trees are sacred and under the protection of Vishnu. The mother of Gautama Buddha is said to have clutched a Sal branch while giving birth to Hissonour. 

Apart from the religious stuff, the seeds are the size of a seedless grape and 14% fat which is extracted to produce a buttery spread, which is solid at room temperature. Those who live in or near to Sal forests use the sal-ghee for cooking but entrepreneurs also convert the goop in soap, varnish, paint and lubricants. I suspect that the food engineers at Nestlé don't care much what sort of vegetable fat goes into the Munchie vats. The fat-ingredient is likely subject to the vagaries of global markets and the marketeers kick the ToC list to safety by including any-and-all species which might be in our 94g.

A final observation: pretty much the only customers in the shop at 8pm on a Monday evening were single silverbacks with more or less empty baskets. I imagine [I may be over-empathizing] that, like saddo me 20+ years ago, these old chaps are wandering around killing time in the aisles because 

• TV is utter bollix; 
• the Men's Shed is on Wednesday;
• Supervalu is warm and dry
  

I owe my sou' to the company sto'

I was talking to Dau.I The Book a tuthree weeks ago and heard that she was reading The Company Town: The Industrial Eden's and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy [2010 Basic Books] by Hardy Green. History, urban blight, industrial process are all in my wheelhouse, so I ordered it up as an Earbook through Borrowbox. Audiobooks are typically 8-15 hours long; Borrowbox has a loan-period of 20 days. You'd think that would be plenty time to finish. But no longer spending 90 minutes M-F commuting to work, and having a rich other life, means that it can be a gallop to wrap it up and return the book to circulation.

Industrialization and capitalism means that products and processes tend to get centralized and specialized. In early modern towns, numerous crafts, services and and workshops fulfilled almost all the needs of almost all the local inhabitants. The blacksmith could shoe a horse, forge a pike, make a gate or a grate and fix anything that was busted. Clearly not all the required resources [wood wool iron] were locally available but artisans and creators could modify the product to use [cheaper] local material. Slated roofs replaced by thatch; cob or timber walls if geology hadn't delivered good building stone. Builders and makers were flexible generalists.

Replacing the work of human hands with the power of water, coal and machinery is a scalable transition: one child can manage more than one steam-powered loom. Increased production means lower prices and more specialization. The modern 'blacksmith' shop produces only saws or only nails - in enormous quantities. The early entrepreneurs did still need warm bodies to change the bobbins, check for quality or pack each dozen of product into a box. Big enterprises dwarfed the labour market and needed to bring additional workers on-board quickly and cheaply. Many early magnates took it upon themselves to house these extra blow-in laborers . . . and the company town was born. Many of these were named for /by / after the Magnate: Corning NY; Gary IN; Hershey, PA; Pullman IL; Lowell MA [Pics]Hardy Green surveys the landscape of Company Towns and finds that, while all were patriarchal, only some were run by evil capitalist, anti-union gougers [Henry Clay Frick as pantomime villain]. To a greater or lesser extent, the Company appreciated that happy workers were more productive workers: so some built schools, hospitals, play-grounds and churches . . . even though these amenities didn't directly boost the share-holders' bottom line. When the share-holders were all family, I guess they could do what they wanted. 

The book's envoi looks at the enormous server farms owned by Google and Microsoft. Here the local polity will bend over for shagging to attract an industrial behemoth: build the shed, the roads, the cabling and offer tax-breaks. But they don't need to deal with sewerage because a data-centre the size of Lowell, Mass. capitalized like a small country will nevertheless only employ a few handfuls of tax-payers locally.

Cipher me this, Shagsper

Puzzle mavens, ahoy!

Following on from my solution to a 100 year old postcard cipher, I draw your attention to a plea for help from the Old Library at Trinity College Dublin. If they really wanted help, they'd have send out a call to the TCD Alumnus Association which is chock-a-block with old academically-inclined buffers holding, collectively, a very wide range of knowledge and intellectual wrangling tools. But they didn't do that, so I only heard about problem from RTE last week.

There are 250 known extant copies of the First Folio edition 1623 of Wm Shaxpere's collected works; and Trinity has one of them. None of the existing First Folios is still in its dust-jacket and they all have been 'used' to some degree. In contrast the second half of my 24 volume Complete Works of Walter Scott: none of the previous owners had even cut the pages, the 16-page signatures of the books had been folded and sewn together leaving the task of separating the outer edges of the pages to the reader.

The TCD First Folio has a burn mark - where someone allowed a candle to topple over? and muddy doggy paw-prints on another page. But the most intriguing unique feature is 20 lines of squiggles on the reverse of p.305 [see L]. Their top minds haven't been able to crack what it means. Can you help. I can't find a good copy of the relevant page on the interweb - what you see is what I screen dumped from the RTE video.

Mid Apr 023 Sun Bit

Wotta potta pourri:

• Outdoors
  
• Billy Reed, Antrim Harriers, does the Barkley.
• Baffin Island a go go
  
• Branch choppah for big limbs
• Stump crusher stronkenkiller
  
• Sheep grazing solar farms
• ♬ ♪ ♫ ♩
  
• Ciaran Algar Until we meet again.
• Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares
  
• The right to be legless in the West
• Makin' plywood
• Tiny house land
  
• Cost of living antient Rome 
• Tuskar Rock
  
• Europe's oldest map
• Designer drugs depriving diabetics
• Academic success - confounding single-sex schools with affluenza 
  

Swiss Family Baumwächterhaus

Did I mention that Gdau.I and Gdau.II are visiting their aged grand-parents around Eostretide? I did. The two small people have been there before. But since the 100-acre wood was cleared a bit, they have made it their kingdom. At the end of last Summer, after they left, we discovered a roughly circular brash-fort, which would be defensible against any attack by zombie attack rabbits. It was either the work of human hands . . . or an enormous ground-nesting raven. 

Every child needs a tree-house! Nothing would satisfy their Auntie Dau.II but that she we would construct such an edifice. It is a known fact that zombie attack rabbits are at nothing w.r.t. aerial assault, so really anything off-ground will work. But Health and Safety has moved along a piece, since I nailed an old pallet 6m up in the fork of a large ash-tree 20 years ago. The flooring and balusters were actually quite stable but 6m is a looonnng way down even for light, bouncy, flexible humans.  If you have a spare €1,000, you can get a flat-pack tree-house and put it up in your treeless suburban garden. In my thrifty, make-do worldview all tree-house should be made from scrap. Ideally, they should be made by the relevant children. Gdau.I and Gdau.II have proved their brash-fort groundwork chops. We have a compromise: a structure sufficiently engineered to satisfy Health&Safety but austere enough that the girls can give it their own stamp.

An initial scoping survey through the woods located 4 ash-trees forming the apexes of a wonk 1.5m quadrilateral. ash-trees are done for anyway because of the cursed ash die-back, so I have little compunction about giving them a second life as the pillars. When we ordered up the matériel for the 2016 wood-shed we calculated needing 130 6x1 = 150x25mm cedar planks each 8ft = 2.4m long of western red cedar Thuja plicata boards for the hit-and-miss walls. My calculation included a little excess for cock-ups && the supplier threw in a few planks-for-luck && all the planks were at least 2.4m long && we were able to get use from some off-cuts. Therefore we had clutter a generous stack of boards left over when that project finished. Some of those boards contributed the basic structure which we have anchored to the selected trees with coach bolts.

You really want your sea-legs up there when it's breezy! And that's a good argument for allowing some play with the fasteners. If I was a proper salty dog, I'd construct the whole thing from spars and cordage. otoh, the advantage of a flat floor is that it is realistic to install two small chairs and a dinky table for the tea-party.