Season of mists

the wood fire handbook: the complete guide to the perfect fire [sic, in the gorgeous design of this mini coffee-table book they’ve forgotten where the capital letters are in the font tray] was part of my Christmas loot and also part of my 12 days of Christmas reading binge when the internet went down. It’s fierce didactic; Vincent Thurkettle is quite school-marmy in his style of transmitting a life-time’s accumulated knowledge about the properties and handling of fire-wood.

One of the key issues in successful wood-burning is seasoning the wood. It is one of the reasons why wood is split and each species and each micro-climate will have its special requirements for being seasoned effectively. Ireland is going to take longer than Corsica; pine Pinus sylvestris is going to take longer than oak Quercus petrea. Seasoning is really about drying out the wood until the moisture content is lowered sufficiently for the stuff to combust. As Thurkettle says, ash Fraxinus excelsior is a peculiar boon for the woodpile because it will burn green or unseasoned but it will burn a damn sight better, and hotter, if its moisture content is 20% rather than 50%.

When I first came to The Institute, I had great fun (and learned a lot) teaching Environmental Chemistry. It was mainly about the chemistry of water: so very important as it’s the soup that sustains all life. One of the many peculiarities of water, compared to other hydrides of the first line of the periodic table methane CH₄, ammonia NH₃, OH₂, hydrofluoric acid HF is its fabulously high freezing and boiling points. It’s the hydrogen bonds innit? It has a really high specific heat – which means that it retains heat really well and is thus the optimal, not merely the cheapest and most available, stuff to have in radiators. It also has huge latent heat. This is usually measured in Joules. For each gram [that’s, by definition, a cc = cu.cm] requires 4.2J to increase its temperature by 1^oC. To get from freezing to boiling point water therefore requires 420J/g.

And this has to do with the price of milk seasoning wood? Well if the wood weighs 1 kg and is 20% water and the ambient temperature outside [winter] is 0^oC then it’s going to require 200g x 100^oC x 4.2 = 84kJ to raise the temperature of the water in the log so that it can start its final [boiling] shedding of water so that the carbon in the wood can start to burn and produce heat and a carbon footprint. If you bring the log inside next to the fire [20^oC] only 80% of this energy will be required in your fire box. If the wood is green, if it burns at all, it will require an *additional* 300g x 100^oC x 4.2 = 126kJ.
But this is all in the ha’penny place because the final stage of conversion into steam involves a ‘phase transition’ from liquid to vapour. The hydrogen bonds of water makes it very sticky and for a molecule to wrench itself from the cosy bosom of its liquid state into the independent, zingier, life of a molecule of water vapour requires a fabulous 2260J/g. To get from 99^oC to 100^oC takes 4.2 J/g but the final lift off requires 500 times the energy! For your 1kg green log this is 500g x 2260J = 1.13mJ [+ 126kJ + 84kJ to get the log up to 100]. This latent heat is one of the reasons why a steam burn is so serious. The vapour molecules are still fizzy with the extra energy for lift-off. Thus, while you can with practice get an egg out of boiling water with your fingers, you want to stay well away from the spout of the kettle.

This is why it is a super good idea to reduce the moisture content of your logs. You want the existing fire to be heating the room and your family rather than merely getting the next log up to escape speed.

Bellos II

One of the advantages of being without the interweb for a few days is that you get the chance to read some books instead. I think I read more books during the 12 days of Christmas than I managed in the rest of 2016. A few years ago someone, quite possibly me, gave Dau.II a copy of Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos. I guess that happened because people has decided that Dau.II is a bit of a quant despite, or perhaps because of, never having been taught The Calculus or matrix multiplication in school. Maths is often taught by anxious teachers who are at the edge of the competence and their fear and loathing is transmitted like a virus to their pupils. Bellos is an enthusiast but one who is capable of bringing the reader along with him. Mathematicians, as any expert, have to beware of the Curse of Knowledge which leaves followers bruised in the wake of a turbo-turmoil of ‘explanation’. Adventures in Numberland is to be recommended for channelling the enthusiasm and giving it sufficient context and backstory that the reader is effectively edutained. I’ve hammered Gödel Escher Bach – the eternal golden braid because the author, Douglas Hofstadter, rapidly disappeared up his own chuff and beat a few of his hobby-horses to death before the reader’s aghast eyes. Nobody asked him for a sequel.

If you have a contract to write a book – of so many pages – about mathematics, you’ve going to leave a lot on the cutting room floor. Nobody, least of all your publisher or agent (who will have been educated in the Arts Block), is going to expect a comprehensive overview of the history and effects of mathematical understanding. For that you may go back 80 years to Mathematics for the Million by Lancelot Hogben [prev]. The first chapter of that book is called Mathematics, the mirror of civilisation, which sets out the pretension of the book.  It’s actually brilliant and should be given to any teenager you know who is vaguely numerate. It might serve as an antidote to the dreadful, dull dull dull experience the poor youngster is currently getting in school. Bellos didn’t need to write a history of math, so he could cherry-pick conundrums which were neat, quirky, peculiar and to which he knew the answer.

In 2014, on the wave of his first book’s success, Bellos was persuaded to write a Son of Alex: Alex Through the Looking Glass – how life reflects numbers and numbers reflect life. The title gave me pause because it was too clever by ‘alf, in the style of Douglas Hofstadter. It was one of the boxful of books that Dau.II has no space for in her one tiny storage closet. We agree that Bellos II is his Second Eleven. The best players in his mind have already been out on the field in his first book. If there is to be a sequel, then there is no need to be comprehensive in the first volume and if neither book is comprehensive there is no need to read the whole thing to find out what happened in the end. As it happens there aren’t even eleven chapters, only 10, in the second book, although some chunky appendices make up effectively an eleventh chapter. I did read all the chapters but not all of them with equal care and attention.

The best was an investigation of the quirks of numerology that is expressed by Benford’s Law of First Digits [prev]. This is the peculiarity that if you look at any string of numerical data that spans several orders of magnitude – population of cities or countries; all numbers that have appeared in The Blob or in the last newspaper you read; the tallies in the Domesday Book – 30% of them will begin with 1 and 18% will start with 2 but only 5% will start with either a 7, 8 or 9. A random number is 5x more likely to start with 1 than with 9. Now that is counter-intuitive but the phenomenon occurs so widely in such disparate groups of numbers that it is effectively a natural law. You can monetise this by betting in the pub on, say, the cash total for a random receipt in your neighbour’s wallet. If you give even odds that this number begins with 1,2, or 3 vs 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 you’ll make money steadily.
One interesting aspect of the law is that it is scale invariant. If you multiply all the numbers by 2.54 converting whatever is being measured from inches to centimetres the numbers all change but they are still in the Benford proportion.  Let’s do it, for illustrative purposes, doubling each number

1st Digit Ns	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
1st Digit 2Ns	2,3	4,5	6,7	8,9	1	1	1	1	1

In other words if your number begins with a 1X its double is either in the 20s or 30s. All the long tail become 1s under the doubled regime.

This consistency is not apparent if you *add* a fixed amount to the numbers in your dataset. And you can use this information for doing forensic accounting: if the numbers in the accounts of Sue, Gabbitt and Runne, solicitors, are not Benford-like you can suspect fraud and dig deeper. It’s like Dau.II and her restaurant’s relationship with the Food Safety People. If her records are all in order and up-to-date, the inspector is likely to put the mess in the kitchen down to a busy day. If the written records look patchy or have the toilets checked at the precisely same time each day with the same signature, then the inspector might look more closely behind the fridge.

Discrepancies also leapt from the pages of the returns for the Iranian presidential election in 2009, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saw off the reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi. When you look at the ballot-box totals, Mousavi’s are Benford compliant but Ahmadinejad’s are not. Presumably Ahmadinejad’s machine had stuffed extra votes for their man into some or all of the boxes. They would have been okay if they’d doubled the count for their man in each constituency.

Note: The title is as a witty but irrelevant play on Dau.I’s favourite band Bell-X1

GCHQuiz clues and answers

I don't want to do this to death. But now you can have a final go, with clue, at the New Year Old Quiz and then look below the fold for the answers. Then we can all move on to sort out a real problem: refugees, cancer, global warming, source of really good pancakes . . . take your pick.

8 Concealed animal
Here is a list of animals. But which other animal is hiding?
RACCOON, PARROT, LEMMING, KOOKABURRA, AARDVARK, LINNET, OTTER
Clue: have you got double vision?

13 A round of drinks
What could follow Mojito, Eggnog, Riesling, Lemonade, Ouzo, ?
Clue: Where would you START with this wine?

3 Calendar Foods
If we eat Fish on St David's Day, Crab on US Independence Day and Goat on Christmas Day, what do we eat at Hallowe'en?
Clue: What start sign are you?

15 Letter Sequence I
What is the next entry in each of the following:
M, V, E, M, J, S, U, ?
E, Z, D, V, F, S, S, A, N, Z, ?
Clue: Which planet is this German Count on?

18 Friends in other countries
Gary has friends in countries all round the world including Argentina, Denmark, Russia, Sudan, and the USA. Which country is Gary in?
Clue: Look within the country names.

23 Link
What links: D, X, 4th, Y
Clue: speak them out loud and go with the flow

29 Odd one out
Which is the odd one out: FIRM, HELM, SOAK, WASH
Clue: can you see the wood for the trees?

59 Odd one out
CHAT, COMMENT, DIRE, ELF, FORT, MANGER, PAIN, POUR
Clue: don't think in English

64 Arrange the pieces in alphabetical order
ARCH, FROGS, PLAN, WEE
Clue: Think chess

55 Two words
The following 18 words fall into two sets of nine, according to two other words:
DAM, DRONE, INLAND, INTER, KING, LACE, LADY, LICE, LINGER, NICKED, RENTAL, ROLE, SON, STIFF, STING, TINS, USED, WING
Clue: Try adding words and if that doesn't help, ask your parents.

Chop chop

The Beloved gave me a couple of garrrdening books for Christmas. I will be sure to dress up as Mellors with baler-twine round the leg below the knee to stop rats running up my corduroy trouser legs. We’ve had a wood-burning stove in the living room for as long as we’ve had a floor to stand it on, but I’ve never bought fire-wood. Everything that’s gone up the chimney has been from fallen-branches, wind-throw, and a certain amount of tree thinning and clearance to make room for something else. Almost every storm seems to deliver some fire wood, sometimes in catastrophic amounts. I’ve cut and split and stacked 20 winters of wood fuel, so it might seems as if a book on the subject is too little. too late. Then again, I’m humble enough and know enough to know that I don’t know it all. Vincent Thurkettle is wonderfully English-rustic name and he’s the author of the wood fire handbook: the complete guide to the perfect fire. I’ve been romping through the book sitting beside the wood-burning stove and periodically nipping out to split a few more logs.

Thurkettle is not interested in felling, although he can do that, and his description of this key woodsman process is only two pages and 3 wholly confusing diagrams long. Better stick to youtube for your instruction. But he’s a lot to say about wood-stacks and splitting logs to fill them. Some of his advice will be obvious to you, although I’d not seen it articulated before, and I was gratified to see that, in my seat-of-the-corduroy-pants practice. I had been “speaking prose all my life” as M. Jourdain has it.

• The physics of driving a 2kg maul head at immovable chopping block means that the force is transmitted to the earth below: you will soon compress the dirt below the block so that nothing with grow there afterwards. 
• You can also shatter a concrete driveway under the block 
• . . . and make sure there are no pipes below ground: you don’t want to be cracking a sewer pipe just there.
• Never strike the back-face of the axe with a hammer to force the blade deeper – it distorts the hole which holds the handle in place.
• If the top face of your splitting stump is slightly off-horizontal then you can balance logs which have been cut slightly off right-angles.

One reason to split all logs is that the bark of many tree species is water-proof.  A log still fully coated in such bark is going to take a long time to dry out. Un-round logs stack better, firmer and safer than rolly ones. And the same goes for the open fire-place. Flaming round logs could roll off the heap of embers, across your Persian carpet and burn down the house; a split log less so. Happy splitting.

Eating for England

Tsk tsk. First a commissariat error about butter over Christmas, then almost immediately an internet access error from watching too much Sherlock. We pay for an allowance of 60 GB /month at the rate of about €1 each day; that doesn’t seem too much for 24/31 contact with the family and checking the weather.  And, of course, fattening up the Blogspot servers with daily Blobs. But with all the idle youtube watching, I guess we’re not nett contributors. 60 GB is a LOT of youtube! When we run over the 60GB limit, our ISP ‘helpfully’ allows us to run up an account balance at a rate of €60 /GB or about 30x the prepay rate. This is punitive, and proper order: people should put a check on their consumption of tat. The ISP won’t force a second mortgage on your house however and after 2GB of overrun they bring down the shutters.

One of the advantages of being without the interweb is that you can return to other, older, media for edutainment and information. I can for example find out all I wish to know about 19thC Generals or Kepler’s Laws of Motion from my almost complete Encyclopaedia Britannica. But that antient asset is no use for getting the deets about the latest celebrity passing into the great unknown; and makes no mention at all of Ardmore, County Waterford. Accordingly, I’ve been reading . . . pages . . . in books . . . like, with paper. Naturally, it having been Christmas, there are new books to read but I haven’t gotten round to them yet. I’ve rather been reading from a box of books belonging to Dau.II which I repatriated from The People’s Republic of Cork between Christmas and New Year. As she works in the catering trade, many of those books are food related, mostly gifts for which there is no longer space in her tiny apartment. There is little room for clutter or sentiment there.

That’s a long-winded introduction to say that I’m zipping through Eating for England E4E by Nigel ‘Foodie’ Slater.  I’d read his Bildungsroman Toast several years ago and like his style. Both books are reflections on growing up in England in the 1960s and they give me a frisson because that’s what I did. To grow, a chap must eat, and as children, Nigel and I had very little control over what appeared on the plate. What he nails with hindsight is the post-WWII opening of the British kitchen with alien food, which extended the choice in weird and wonderful ways. In Toast there is a hilarious incident when Nigel’s father decides that they will among the first in England to eat spaghetti Bolognese. Spag-Bog has now become a loved part of the English kitchen canon but the Slater first footers were challenged. They decide, correctly, that parmesan cheese (then bought in a wretched little cardboard shaker) smells like sick and push the whole meal into the garbage. Now of course, we call it umami and scarf up as much as we can – especially when ‘free’ at Italian restaurants.

Eating for England is much less coherent that Toast, there is no story, not even an emergent one from the fact that Slater has anecdotes about both his mother and step-mother but fails to explain how that transition occurred – you have to [have] read Toast. E4E rather consists of a series of essays which read a little like a) a blog from their length b) Bill Bryson from the ironic humour and petulant exasperation with other people c) Jan Struther’s Mrs Miniver from the black & white nostalgia lens through which the past is viewed.  There must be little enough in the book which relates to the day-to-day experience of a girl in her 20s living in Cork.

One of the peculiar themes in E4E is the British obsession with sweets and biscuits and Slater nails the taste, texture and engineering properties of Murray’s Mints, chocolate digestives, Spangles, Bourbons. Several of the lines which he and our generation consumed with gusto are no longer available because we realised that they were cheap, crude, luridly coloured and possibly carcinogenic. Back then there was no compulsion to have a table of contents on the back of the packet. If there is one thing by which we moderns compare badly with our previous selves it is in choice . . . and waste. We lived in simpler times back then and, notwithstanding the Slater’s parmesan fiasco, ate what was put on our plates and put on our plates all the food we bought. Now we are seduced by the variety and buy both this and that with the inevitable consequence that some of the food goes direct to compost without passing through our guts. Tsk, indeed.

Like Bill Bryson, Slater can run out a telling turn of phrase:

• On the ubiquity of ‘nut-cutlets’ as the vegetarian alternative: “ . . . if someone doesn’t want to eat meat, the chances are they don’t want their dinner to look like it either”
• On picking a care-home for his elderly and beloved aunt: “ . . .chosen not for its convenient locations, or even for its price, but because it was the only one I could find that didn’t smell of pee”.
• On the drink the same aunt has before a lunch out “. . . a sherry the colour of a mahogany commode”.
• On trifle: “Once gracing our tables like a favourite and slightly tiddly old aunt, our cherished party dessert now resembled nothing more than an old tart in a leopard-skin coat”

But I was inspired by one of these essays in the week after New Year, when The Institute is still on vacation, to finish the last of the Christmas ham, fried with half an onion chopped with the last of the Christmas Brussels sprouts, for my lunch. Excellent . . . and 1960s’ thrifty.

John Berger has left The Party

Over Christmas we were reflecting on the year just gone and counted up the people who counted for us who had died in 2016. The list was long and we hoped that would be the end of it - the death of people who had put their heads above the parapet, who had exposed themselves to fire to make life more interesting for us, sitting safe. Seemingly not so, because John Berger, author, critic, artist and Marxist passed on, in his turn, on 2nd January 2017. I wrote a trib to him in November to celebrate his 90th birthday.

I stand by every word, but there's more; because 90 years at The Edge generates more Ways of Seeing than can be tied up with a neat pink bow in 700 words. What we see is framed by what we know; and what we know is informed by what we read. And I've read a lot since Christmas - we had an internet hiatus that prevented me from watching trutt on youtube for seven days - including Caitlin Moran's [multiprev] Moranifesto. Moran is the poster girl for talent, back-bone and home-education being enough to pull yourself out of a council house on the edge of nowhere to the very centre of the media circus. I'm tuned to read this anthology of her radical columns from The Times because I've got two sassy home-educated grown-up daughters who will allow me to trot out the lazy platitudes of the patriarchy (they're polite) and then pull me up short if/when I say something really dopey and poorly thought out. Indeed, the copy I read was in the box Dau.II asked me to repatriate with some crates last week. Moran, like Berger, has positions [positions are better buttressed and have solider foundations than mere opinions] on many aspects of the world we live in and because she is a different sex, generation and class - but the same colour, and colour of passport, so not completely alien - her positions frequently force a re-think of mine.

One of her essays is about awards, of which she's nabbed a few for her earlier books. She makes two substantive points. First, the women at awards ceremonies are hungry and in pain because, before appearing to Their Public, they have been on a 6 week crash diet to look trim; and they've spent 6 hours primping their poor face and hair and squeezing their wretched chinese feet into a pair of heels that make walking difficult and running impossible. The men otoh just need to shrug on the tux and a pair of comfortable black interview shoes and jog down to the nearest tube station. The flip side of this is that the women are described by how they look - demure, chubby, splendid in blue - but the men by what they have done - ground-breaking, bold. The women have been objectified.

A few years before Moran was born, John Berger had his annus mirabilis when: his BBC film series Ways of Seeing was launched; he won a string of awards for his novel G; and his book A Fortunate Man laid bare the life and works of a rural doctor. In the second episode of Ways of Seeing, Berger has a go a Kenneth Clark - whose earlier, lavish, gorgeous, BBC series Civilisation had spawned a coffee-table book and introduced high art to the TV-watching classes. “In his book on the nude, Kenneth Clark says that being naked is simply being without clothes. The nude, according to him, is a form of art. I would put it differently: to be naked is to be oneself; to be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself. A nude has to be seen as an object in order to be a nude.”

So whether she knows it or not, Caitlin Moran owes a small debt to one man who helped (not a one man effort, for sure) clear the decks of poorly thought through, effectively invisible, patriarchal objects so that she and another generation of women could begin the process of building another view of how the world works. Berger's art criticism was informed by his politics and his politics were a necessary goad to make comfortable, middle-class, white blokes like me reconsider some of our certainties. I don't want to live in a Marxist paradise, but I need to hear what Marxists have to say.

Suzanne Moore, the angry journalist, has a personal tribute which cleverly starts off by objectifying John Berger for his piercing blue eyes. She points out that, in the episode of Ways of Seeing about the objectification of women, he finally shuts up and gives the screen over to a group of women to to discuss the issue. Those women at least are given a voice as well as a body. Others criticise Berger and  Ways of Seeing for being superficial, which is true only because he set out his stall with such generosity that others could trade the stuff on his table.

Thelma and Louise

The road-trip has a revered place in literature. Maybe not in your literature: you may have read the entire works of Simenon or all the volumes of Proust’s à la recherché du temps perdu, which don’t seem to GO anywhere. Maybe it’s my peripatetic ‘navy-brat’ childhood or my long walks through Iberia, but I like travel books. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig [prev]; One’s Company by Peter Fleming; A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby and the Lost Continent by Bill Bryson are embedded in my head not least because the last three at least made me laugh out loud. ZAMM isn’t a laughing matter but is nevertheless profound.  Of course the quintessence of road-trip in book form is Jack Kerouac’s On The Road which more or less gave the name to the genre.  And the road movie crystalizes the concept in under two hours: think Easy Rider or Thelma and Louise. Forget Bored of the Rings, though: far too much filler not enough laughs.
It’s not every week that I get a chance to go road-trip with my offspring. In 2004, The Boy and I walked the 100km from Portugal to Santiago de Compostella and my feet took years to recover from the brutal pace of day 3: 24th July 2004. Two years ago, Dau.II and I went on a journey to The Edge while making puddles in the bottom of a small boat on Lough Derg. We’re still recovering from the shared terror. This winter [can’t say this year anymore because it’s a new one] both the girls came home for Christmas which was wonderful. But all things must pass; and Dau.II had to go back to work before the New Year rush.

One of the peculiarities of Christmas gift giving within families is that, because they all love each other very much, they can get too much on the same wave-length. On my 13th Christmas I got two (2!) chemistry sets because two different rellies had recognised a developing Bob the Scientist before the recipient had recognised it in himself. Another year at about the same time, the five members of my nuclear family received twenty (20!) mugs at Christmas, some from external sources but many gifted internally. For Xmas 2016, Dau.II got a new set of four (4!) pillows to replace the ratty, lumpy, mitey, wretched things she’s been sleeping with for the last 3 years. She also got a large pair of throw cushions for her living room and the usual clatter of books, cheese, and a hot-water bottle. It would have been possible to schlep all this stuff on to the bus and off at the other end but I offered to drive her back to Cork instead. She said thanks and offered to pay me in grocer’s crates, of which her restaurant has accumulated a large and inconvenient store. Sometimes the crate has travelled so far through so many handlers and suppliers that is isn’t clear who owns the damned things.

On the last Thursday of 2016 we set off in the fore noon planning to get to Cork City by tea time. The great think about a long drive in the car is that there are no distractions (except for a bit of navigation, a bit of shopping and a bit of admiring how a crisp, sunny winter’s day impacts one’s mood) so we were able to talk round the houses about work, and life and balance; and food safety; and science and standard operating procedures SOPs; and of course the Universe and Everything.

We looked at the map and decided that rather than scudding past on the bus or being a hurry to get there in the car, we’d stop off in Ardmore, maybe the oldest ecclesiastical settlement in Ireland, and have a look at an invitingly sandy strand round the corner called Whiting Bay. And it was so. We paused in Ardmore long enough to hop widdershins on one leg round the medieval round tower [R]. Actually Not! That is a sure fire way to fall pregnant and neither of us wanted to have that happen at this time. The faded, eroded, medieval bas-relief sculptures that decorate the ruined ?cathedral? beside the tower are mournfully evocative of long, long ago. Although Ardmore is only a small village [pop about 300] we got hopelessly lost in a maze of narrow roads zig-zagging up the cliff-face but eventually escaped to Whiting Bay; which was worth seeing but not worth going to see.

As so we swept into Cork empty-handed: no buoys, no rope, no fish-boxes. But who needs fish-boxes when they are going to collect 25 fit-for-food-use grocery crates? An added bonus was that Young Bolivar, not seen since September, was working a shift in Dau.II’s restaurant and offered to help carry the crates out to the car. Just a perfick day, I’m glad I spent it with you. Damned glad we didn’t drive the car spectacularly off a cliff at the end, as well.