Hard stuff precedes indulgence

It’s that time of year. Last weekend the Hay Festival (sponsored now by The Telegraph instead of The Guardian – what an intellectual, moral and political crisis that wrought), this coming weekend the start of the St Jean de la Blaquière quinzaine.

Hay provided an agonising dilemma for those who espouse literature at the expense of science. In “Darwin and Milton – Two Views of Creation” by the British Nobel-Prize-winning biologist, Paul Nurse compared “the vision of two of the Greatest Britons of all time.” Could anyone who honours me by reading Works Well have turned away from that?

Our fifth consecutive holiday at SJDLB will focus, as usual, on grandson Zach (seen here unseasonably opening a Christmas present). His first year at primary school ends and his reading is now good enough to absorb The Guardian sports section and to dispute critical opinion on various soccer teams. In my own mind I am preparing him for our visit to the bakery (which he calls The Windmill Shop). There he will discard simple felicitation and utter: Bonjour M. le Boulanger. Je suis en vacances.

SJDLB comes at a price: I am separated from you all. Such sweet sorrow.


IDEAL FOR BURGLARS Last week the house was surveyed for the PV cell installation on the roof. Kevin the surveyor brought his own collapsible ladder – compact enough to go on the back seat of a car, extendable to reach the roof comfortably. Made of aluminium but reassuringly heavy. A compass app on his smart phone told him which way my roof faces.

Learn to love the alphabet again

Know anything about monitors? Here’s the Lamborghini Murciélago of monitors – the Ilyama ProLite E2208HDS, a prematurely opened birthday prezzie from Mrs BB. What’s so special? Its size (22 in.), resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels) and price (£190). It should be standard for camera whiz-kids like Marja-Leena and Lucy since I merely point and shoot. But dullard wordsmiths gain too. Two text pages side by side and much cleaner rendering of typefaces.

HIGH-LEVEL CHAT I enjoy conversation but only with someone who matches my formidable forensic skills. Dr Paul Harris, my GP, meets the spec. I was in there this morning to discuss a skin complaint which he quickly diagnosed and then gave me a run down on its origins. These centre on my DNA’s “very clever” ability to counter the effects of UV light. Old Paul knows what turns me on.

We passed on to another of my failings – hyper-broncho-activity – which has been around for yonks and for which my previous GP admitted he could offer no help. Dr Paul says things have progressed and prescribed an inhaler. However I am to use it properly: the particles (tiny – a mere 2 microns) emerge at high velocity (200 kph) and I must co-ordinate my breathing when inhaling. Talk took in the structure of eye as proof that the Intelligent Design crackpots have got it wrong. I emerged intellectually refreshed.

NOVEL Another counsellor, Dr Plutarch, recommended adding various passages to GORGON TIMES, including an extra chapter. So the MS which I had revised down to 91,900 words now stands at 104,415 words. There’s a frisson on reaching six figures.

Steffie needs a sonnet

Four-square quatrains and a sonnet: An imaginary meeting with Stephanie Flanders

Giovanni through an open door
Drew her inside. I noticed, sought
To halt the disc but not before
She shook her head, her interest caught

Zerlina wrestles with The Don
As I restrained an active eye
Sensing that head of chic aplomb,
Those legs’ supreme authority.

Detached she sat, her thoughts beyond
The fate of Mozart’s heroines
Beyond the power of any bond
That lacked her expert disciplines.

The Don in Hell, she smiled at me,
And asked if sonnets could contain
The dullness of technicity
The theory of the sheer arcane.

“Of course,” I cockily replied.
“Then write me one about my trade,
And add the elegance denied
Me, sporting on the news parade.”

XXXX

Your brief surf-rides a global turbulence
Its chaos balanced by conflicting flow
Of interest, labour, monetary suspense,
The oscillations of the quid pro quo.
Uneasy in its equilibrium
This particle desires a steady state
A transfer from extreme to tedium
From procreate to quieter celibate.
But you and I and banks and presidents
And storms and droughts and maladies combine
To tilt the axis with our discontents
And crack the crystal’s talent to divine.
The figures rise and fall in your report
The past explained, the future chance’s sport

NOTE: 1. Plutarch lent me The Anthologist a novel by Nicholson Baker. A vestigial plot encircles a vivacious primer on how to write poetry. Baker disputes that iambic pentameter is the natural heart of poetic English and offers instead the four-feet line. I tried him out (see above) but found four feet restrictive and rumpty-tum. Hence the reversion.
2. Stephanie Flanders is the BBC’s economics editor. She knows her stuff, seems to be about seven feet tall and wears mini-skirts. She was also the source of a personal epiphany for me. After writing a passage in my novel about a woman having her hairstyle changed (with help from commenters) I discovered that Stephanie’s hair is coloured exactly the way I envisaged. This left me slightly breathless.

Why God made Englishmen

The Breton Duet, posted a week or so ago, was full of gobbledook and left its author somewhat ashamed. The following is an attempt to make it up to at least one of the dedicatees.

Sonnet – c. Aphrodite, b. Zeus, 92.9 Megamiles

In early time and space a full-length ball,
Sensing the growing pull of gravity,
Broke to the off and went elliptical
Spawned twenty-twenty times depravity.
But cricket will outlive this godlike jest
Partaking as it does of physics’ might
Electrons spin like Dyed-Hair at his best
Rotation is the heart of subtle flight.
Consider this: the ball’s two hemispheres,
One rough, one smooth, each passing through the air,
Swinging to churn the facing batsman’s fears,
A heavy burden on his strokeplay flair.
To this equation add the moment when
Tangential ball and pitch deceive again.

NOTE. Nothing in this, I’m afraid, for anyone resident in North America. Alas I shot my bolt with baseball over a year ago.

Novel progress 22/3/10.Ch. 17: 3178 words. Chs. 1 - 16: 73,302. Comments: Clare publicised.

Can gears be sexy (but brief)?

In inviting comment on a problem in the novel, I reduced the question to that of a principle or a technique. What I hadn’t made clear (to avoid complications) was that the passage was short, it fitted into a chapter several thousands words long and couldn’t be hugely expanded just to animate the problem. I took in suggestions where I could and, for what it’s worth, here’s the result. Hatch is speaking to other employees in a TV production company.

At three he faced half a dozen Gamester employees, all younger than him, all shabbily dressed, all incapable of sitting upright. “This is a techno-test based on understanding gears. The contestant arranges a sequence of gears - a gear-train - on this frame. If she’s done the arithmetic and got it right she turns this wheel here at the bottom a full 360 degrees and gets the necessary result on the sixth gear at the top.”

He paused, “I know ‘result’ sounds vague but I’ve been learning how to dumb down. My first idea was that the bottom and top wheels could be clock faces. That way two o’clock became, say, four o’clock. But it wasn’t dumb enough. Now I prefer the correct result being flagged as ‘Bingo’ in a panel. Or whatever.

“So, that’s what the viewer sees. The contestant does her sums, puts the gear-wheels in the right order, twiddles the bottom gear and ‘Bingo’. The arithmetic is simple and it’s based on the number of teeth per wheel. Plus one other factor. Can anyone guess?”

No one spoke. Hatch said, “I take it you all did eng-lit at uni. I can demo it, though cardboard wheels aren’t perfect.” Hatch slotted two wheels on to the frame so their rims touched. “I now turn the bottom wheel clockwise and you notice this drives the second wheel. But the second wheel turns – wait for it - anti-clockwise! That complicates the arithmetic a little and the contestant must take it into account.”

A long-haired woman in a kaftan said, “That point should be made clear for viewers. It’s got a low-grade woo-factor.”

“I’m glad you told me,” said Hatch, grinning. “Something terribly complicated that can only be understood by scientists?”
Novel progress 18/3/10.Ch. 17: 2653 words. Chs. 1 - 16: 73,302. Comments: Clare unhappy at home.

All hail Dawkins, Descartes and that lot

This is an attempt to match the more conversational style that Plutarch and Lucy use so well: a structure based on sentences rather than "poetic" clumps of words. Since this approach is still alien I fear I end up with lines that appear tongue-in-cheek. The sonnet, now slightly modified, first appeared on The Crow's blog and is in response to a link where science was being celebrated. Better still it manages to squeak through here by making a distant obeisance to my "mission statement" at the top of the page.

Sonnet – Lead kindly light
I sigh, I pluck the lute, I turn to Keats
The world, my mistress, is too grand for me.
Her essence is a series of defeats
For my blunt intellectuality.
I ache with lust and would grasp more of her
If I could understand her secrecy
But she is power and charm and gold and myrrh
Bound in the maths of atomicity.
I may not love her but at least I flirt
With tiny glimpses of her gorgeousness
The lens of science renders me alert
To here and there within her boundlessness
I’m pandered to by Maxwell, Gauss and Bohr
Whose flashes lit the dark I now abhor.

NOTES:
(1) Atomicity is a made-up word.
(2) Pander has a darker meaning.

Novel progress 1/3/10. Ch. 16: 2507 words. Chs. 1 - 15: 67,628 words. Comments: Hatch nonplusses Hester.

Bit of a ragbag

Sonnet - Metamorphosis

I am the victim of time’s violence.
This pressing sky, these over-sleekit roads
These blizzards of ebullience,
This rain, this fog that frequently forebodes
Much worse. All kept me from the barber’s chair
And let my hair presume to reach my brow.
My gliding form has lost its athlete’s flair,
And, seaweeded, retards the forehead’s prow
When cutting through the pool’s décolletage,
Requiring several towels to get it dry.
A Neptune slowed to Saturn’s gnarly age
My crawl-stroke wasted, power gone awry.
But could my new-born wastrel turbulence
Proclaim a poet’s mane of consequence?

NOTE: Not to be taken seriously. An attempt to break away from the 3½ quatrains that the sonnet form tends to impose. To me, habituated, it forms a different straitjacket.

UNAVOIDABLE Twentieth-century music! Twelve-tone shivers down the spines of those who drew up the drawbridge with Brahms. But the century includes Strauss, Elgar, Sibelius and Mahler. If you want to know how it all fits together (including jazz and pop) “The rest is noise” by Alex Ross, music critic of New Yorker, was enthusiastically reviewed in the UK and is brilliantly written – a must read. Your stepping stone to the Berg violin concerto, which, like Naples, you must experience before death. Or afterwards if there are suitable facilities.

DARWIN UPDATE BBC4 yesterday continued its wonderful series on hard science with, in effect, a lecture on the origins of chaos theory. Ah the mind of man. Ending with an unbelievable piece of software containing an algorithm which simulates evolution, a process which in real life takes millennia. An incompetent cartoon mannikin trips over then learns to walk with confidence and it’s the maths what done it.

Novel progress 20/1/10. Ch. 12: 1724 words. Chs. 1 - 11: 48,792 words. Comments: Unproductive day. Still on the M6.

It's not voyeurism it's maths

Womens’ shoes have not figured enough in Works Well. They’re important because my standards in pulchritude were established in fifties’ films when women stars were heavily made up, had hairstyles apparently achieved with a planishing hammer, wore sheathlike dresses even in the kitchen and walked around on stilettos. I’d always vaguely assumed this was standard footwear everywhere and it was only in, say, the eighties I realised this was no longer the case.

It’s no doubt crass but I secretly admire stiletto-clad feet. Possibly it’s a fetish. Certainly it’s unforgivable that women are still required to cripple themselves in order to pander to male preferences and in public I’m world president of the Anti-Stiletto League. But in secret…

I conclude the appeal lies in the shoe’s geometry. In profile the stiletto can be rendered as a triangle with a right-angle between the heel and the sole. The angle that matters is the one above the right-angle and it’s a case of the smaller the better; as the heel is lengthened this angle shrinks. Interestingly, though, there is a limit. The shoes shown are pretty near that limit since the tops of the feet are virtually in line with the front of the calf.

In the ballet dancer’s feet, conveniently x-rayed, the angle (in this case relating to a non-existent shoe) has diminished to zero. Leg and foot share the same vertical plane. What started out as an audaciously sexy re-arrangement of nature now becomes an anatomical deformity. There’s no percentage in losing the concept of the foot altogether. I’m glad about this.

Traffic, maths and Handel

FAST + SLOW = BANG! We were bedevilled by road safety signs during our trip to the Peak District but excess didn’t end there. On a ten-mile stretch south of Leek there are three dozen speed cameras. One small village was monitored by three pairs. This has the desired effect and traffic adheres to the limits.

Yet local drivers will have sussed it all out. Such cameras cost £50,000 and no local authority could afford that investment so many must be empty boxes. Use the road regularly and you get to know which are which – and speed accordingly. Crashes between speeding locals and slow-moving foreigners have no doubt become a spectator sport.

HAND-HOLD GUIDE No prizes for guessing why I responded to this from the Oppenheimer biography; “Weinberg… observed that mathematical formulas were like temporary hand-holds for a rock-climber. Each hand-hold more or less dictates the position of the next hand-hold… ‘A record of that is a record of a particular climb. It gives you very little of the shape of the rock’.”

LIFT UP YOUR EARS Saw a different version of Messiah at the weekend: Harry Christophers and the Sixteen - a handful of period instruments and a tiny (18 members) choir, albeit all professional, singing with passion, clarity and power. For those unfamiliar with live performances of this work there is a British tradition of standing up during the Hallelujah chorus, the reason being too tedious to recount. Mrs BB and I are dubious about this but, moved by the performance, we joined in - to be rewarded by a significant improvement in the sound quality. Who can understand or prescribe the so-called science of acoustics?

Does this convey his bigness?

When old dormice like us need to buy each other presents it’s a long-term, covert operation. Neither is inclined to wait months for something we want and bang goes another choice. The trick is to listen carefully to murmured exchanges during that somnolent Sunday-newpaper part of the week and then spirit away what’s been learned. That’s why I’m now reading “American Prometheus” a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, who masterminded Los Alamos then fell foul of the anti-Red witch hunts in the fifties. (Note: The protruding bookmark was a gift from Plutarch.)

Oppenheimer was a clever man – marvellous on intuitive leaps into obscure regions of physics. His cleverness is measured by those he worked with and who thought well of him. Since his golden period was when physics was turned on its head by quantum mechanics, his address book contained all the big names: Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Rutherford, Pauli, usw.

I’m well aware not everyone out there is turned on by physics so I need an analogy. Say you’re a committed Christian; imagine a time-warped contact with someone who had rubbed shoulders with the twelve disciples. Something on that scale. That’s all on Oppie, for the moment anyway.

MUG SHOT Lucy has just celebrated her acquisition of a new tea mug from a craft shop in Josselin, a Breton town I dimly recall – but for what? Beautifully photographed, checked out for lip contact, tis a thing to be desired. My mug, another gift from Mrs BB, may be my most treasured possession. Acquired over a decade ago from John Lewis, it is bone china, has a William Morris pattern and is of austerely correct design. Fits my lip perfectly.

Keeping faith with screw-caps

I have a horror of deathbed conversions, of being bullied by pain, fear or fatigue into embracing a received religion. I hope when that particular needle’s eye arrives I shall remain faithful to St Pragmatus, patron saint of the believable world.

Given my age and the growing relevance of Shakespeare’s most seductive, most sibilant line (If it be now, ‘tis not to come…) such considerations are important. Romanticism and fantasy are always at my elbow and require constant suppression. Briefly they got the upper hand at my birthday dinner last Saturday. I’d ordered a sauvignon blanc for starters and since the best stuff is brewed in New Zealand it came with a screw-cap which the restaurant owner proceeded to unscrew at the table.

I mock-complained. I told him that screw-caps are OK at home but in public one yearns for corkscrew panache. Complete nonsense, of course. Over the last ten years I’ve probably opened a dozen bottles of wine that have been corked (ie, undrinkable). None had a screw-cap. Yet because this was a jolly, sweaty social occasion I found it necessary to hark back mendaciously to one of those imaginary golden eras.

Corks are harvested from tree bark by curly-haired Mediterranean types who I’ve always suspected beat their wives. Corks can communicate a fungus to the wine resulting in a mouldy smell and taste. Screw-caps prevent this but they’re technoid. I’m ashamed I betrayed my intellect and resorted to jokiness even though jokiness was in the air. But I also worry about finding myself in a poor way, looking up and hearing a dark-suited man reading selections from The Song of Solomon. Beautiful but irrelevant. Will my belief in particle physics and the cell hold out?

New invention not needed

You can boil, fry, scramble or poach them. I like poached best but the process sets me on edge and it makes sense to turn to Mrs BB, the household’s ace poacher. I’d prefer to do it myself, but without hassle.

Yes, there’s a pan thing with detachable saucers but the result is not a poached egg. Baked, perhaps, or steamed. Time for technological ratiocination. I concluded I needed a bun tin with a separable bottom. Paying for this at Cooks Galley in Abergavenny I mentioned the reason. “Haven’t you heard of this?” they said. This was was a floppy plastic simulation of the outer petals of a water lily: Eddington’s Poach Perfect, £5.95 a pair. Does what it says it does. Hope I haven’t rediscovered the wheel.

LET’S HEAR IT FOR LIFE Physics gets a regular work-out on our minority appeal TV channels, biology less so. That’s why I grabbed the three-part series, The Cell, with both hands (Plutarch has already posted on the first installment). The disadvantage with physics is that, at particle level, it’s theory and maths; biology is the visible world. Installment two took us up to the thrill of the double helix, but setting everything beautifully in context.

Together with poignant support for Newton’s tribute to Descartes: “If I have seen further it’s because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Cell division was visible microscopically in 1875 but not understood. Nevertheless the viewer recorded, in pen and ink, the migration of stick-like things to either end of the cell. Now we know these sticks are chromosomes and video cameras record the moving process – exactly like those nineteenth-century drawings showed. The eye of the scientist and the eye of the artist: both wonderful

A momentary indulgence

It’s a turn-off, I know, but I need to write something about maths. Wrestle with it. I can’t do maths but I have a probably unjustified feeling I dimly understand its broader contours. Whatever, I am drawn to it unlike other seemingly impenetrable subjects like voodoo, haute cuisine and chess.

Fearful of bidding my readership goodbye let me invoke a 1960 article by the physicist Wigner called "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences". It starts with a truism – that physics has a mathematical structure. But then comes the rather more startling point: equations decribing relationships in physics often contain pointers about the way physics may develop in the future. I find this fascinating.

Lazy people like me have often referred to maths as a language, a way of saying something precisely and rigorously. It is of course but it’s much more. There is a case for saying that the maths of physics is physics. For Wigner adds that in some cases these so-called pointers to the future are far from airy-fairy; they may be regarded as empirical (ie, susceptible to development by observation, experience and experiment).

There are many examples but the classic one is the work done by Maxwell on elementary electrical and magnetic phenomena in the mid-19th century. His equations also describe radio waves which were discovered by Hertz in 1887 a few years after Maxwell’s death. And radio waves are at the heart of the later physics we all love and are totally baffled by. Hey, doesn’t this sort of stuff leave astrology bobbling about in its wake?

Sorry about that. Regard it as an aberration.

Near-perfect solution to old problem

THE PROBLEM Sausages curl when fried. This makes it difficult to hold them in position in order that heat may be applied to all four “sides” to ensure even cooking.

THE SOLUTION A stainless-steel fork with six 3 mm thick tines; the tines are inserted longitudinally along the sausages. Because the sausage sides remain parallel the sausages may be rotated in three 90 deg. phases, holding their lengthwise shape throughout.

CONCLUSION The prototype works in principle; its application reveals an unexpected benefit; a modified prototype will improve the operation.

OBSERVATIONS (1) No extra perforation of the sausage skin (leading to flavour leaks) is necessary. The skin of a link sausage already has two holes at either end.
(2) Two wooden spoons or spatulas effect the rotation; one to turn the sausage, the other to hold its neighbour stationary.
(3) Fork width was based on the diameter of the frying pan; the five tine gaps were based on a 30 mm theoretical width of a cooked sausage. The latter dimension proved too conservative. Increasing it to 36 mm will allow freer sausage rotation.
(4) Inserting a metal tine along a sausage aids evenness of cooking.
(5) There’s an aesthetic, as well as a gustatory, pleasure to eating an evenly fried sausage.

Fitting a doo-dah to the job

Ergonomics has nothing to do with ergo (therefore); it’s a latin/greek trick. The prefix is greek for work and the whole word is the study of man in his workplace. A comfortably grabbable kettle might well have been caressed by an ergonomist but easy to use doesn’t always mean nice to look at. The target rifle above no doubt fits the shoulder of the shooter (it’s adjustable) but it’s hardly elegant.

Ergonomics is often central to industrial efficiency, something I was supposed to know about when I was paid to write. A seminar on the subject I attended proved to be a reverse example of how careful design can help people do their job.

The seminar started – as many do – with a complete cock-up of what Americans call show-and-tell. Slides appeared upside down, in the wrong order, “flopped” or just not at all. Using the projector was non-intuitive; its ergonomics had not been tuned for the non-expert human. Speakers rested notes on a lectern that was too steeply raked; the notes repeatedly slipped off. Hilariously the microphone dangled from a necklace loop; when handed over, the next speaker had hell’s own job getting the loop over his head.

Journalism often means profiting from others’ mistakes. I reported the seminar straightforwardly, then added a comment piece. The Society of Ergonomists replied with a rueful letter which we published. During my career I attended many seminars on many subjects and I’ve forgotten them all. But not that one. Definitely a do-as-I-say, not -as-I-do.

Just copycatting

Like James Mason (“Halifax is merely the town that spawned me.”) I have publicly renounced my West Riding birthright but am paying the price. Those years spent breathing Bradford’s uncaring air means my head colds now develop into weeks of coughing that scour my bronchia and force me into bed with that hag Catarrh. This evening I had tickets for War Requiem but I detest people who peff-peff during the quiet passages and I have given them away.

I lack the energy to be original but luckily I can fall back on a journalist’s most convenient skill: plagiarism.

Back to that cat. Here’s why quantum mechanics is such fun. At one point Dirac (whose recent biography we must all read) needed some matrix theory. Oh woo-ah but stay with me. The result was this deceptively simple equation: a x b ≠ b x a. But whatizzit? Briefly: a multiplied by b is not equal to b multiplied by a. As the hateful Richard Littlejohn would say: you couldn’t make it up.

My final paid job was to edit a logistics magazine and it’s a field strewn with pomposity. Road hauliers became logistics experts by simply changing the words on the sides of the lorries. One rolled past me today bearing the stultifying slogan: Delivering Global Solutions. Abstract and meaningless. I much prefer another outfit which specialises in transporting chickens: Poultry in Motion.

Take a trip round my head

When I said I was reading John Gribbin’s In search of Schrödinger’s cat. Plutarch said, “Regardless of the outcome of the hypothesis the poor creature must die, in its sealed box, of starvation or asphyxiation or both.” This is not true and there is good(ish) news if you accept the parallel world theory: in one world the cat is, alas, definitely, dead (from rapidly acting poison) but in another it is, happily, alive.

But here’s something else. Lacking formal instruction in ”books” I have discovered there are those I cannot read. Conrad’s Victory, Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are among them and I’m talking deep, second-page antipathy. The Conrad shames me most. Gribbin deals with quantum physics and I am severely under-educated on that too.

But then most of us are. Einstein spent thirty years writing to Niels Bohr, an über-quantist, suggesting experiments which would invalidate quantum mechanics. All were scientifically refuted. For me to read Gribbin is like dosing the baby with gin. Yet I was pulled along by a narrative tension found in the best books.

Did I understand the book? QM is possibly the hardest subject in the world and I’d be a fool to say yes. But I read on, closed in by mist most of the time but occasionally seeing the mist thin. Am I boasting (I’ve done that before)? I hope not. I’m astonished such an abstruse subject could hold my attention for 275 pages. In positive support I acknowledge I bought the book and wanted to read it. Also it is a deliberately simplified account. But what goes on in our mind when we read a book we don’t really understand?

How not to court popularity

My mention of simultaneous equations in a recent post caused Avus to groan, adding it wasn’t his subject at school. I sympathise. Also, I know full well such references lay me open to charges of showing off and poncy-ness.

Maths wasn’t my subject at school either. An essay I wrote on my preferred career admitted to journalism because it was distant from that old bromide about life being based on mathematics. Apart from the previously mentioned “techno-epiphany” my interest in maths developed much later. And even then I have added little in the way of technical competence.

No great mystery. I see maths – utterly unoriginally – as a language. As such it’s quite stunted. Beware those who talk flossily about its beauty (unless they’re Paul Dirac and he’s entitled): they’re usually poseurs. Maths is a language stripped of nuance and would be a poor basis for a poem. It’s far too clear. Lack of immediate clarity is often at the heart of great poetry.

On the other hand, clarity can taste like chilled sauvignon blanc. It’s sharp and it engages your senses. Take the social device: “How are you?” It’s not at all clear. It could mean: “I’m saying this because I’m passing you in the street.” Or (among Brits): “Don’t for goodness sake tell me about your aches and pains.” If it could be expressed mathematically we could ensure it meant, quite specifically: “I’m getting in first with this meaningless formulation because I’ve forgotten your name.”

Not a kinder world but an unambiguous one. There is no other meaning to “One over two-pi root el-cee, is the resonant frequency.” And I hope everyone’s thankful for that.

A reward in this life and thereafter

It’s been done before but what the heck. What have these in common: Grazia Deledda, Werner von Heidenstam, Jacinto Benavente? Let’s make it easier. How about: Elfriede Jelinek, Wole Soyinka, Winston Churchill? That’s right. All six won the Nobel Prize for literature and the latter trio won it post-war.

I used to take flak from a physicist who cited the Nob/lits when jeering at the evanescence of literary taste. Whereas, he said, the Nob/physics not only include the names that should be there but also the deserving lesser lights. I sympathise with hard science practitioners who look on bemused as yet another fictional “genius” is popularly lauded then forgotten in months. Where are you now Wislawa Symborska, who took the cheque in 1996?

But let’s not cry too hard for the unsung quantum mechanics. Their tight world hands out prizes which come close to conferring immortality. Do these words mean anything: henry, becquerel, pascal? They are the internationally approved units for measuring inductance, the activity of a radionuclide and pressure/stress. They are also the surnames of three scientific giants.

Oh, it would be nice to get the cheque but just imagine if the scientific community decided that the quality (Chutzpah? Mendacity? Subversiveness?) of blogs would, from now on, be measured in bondens. Ahhh.

PERFECT NAME FOR A TWO-WHEELER (See below). It isn't a bike and it's not British. But nobody has bettered Vespa (means wasp in Italian).

Like a crystal ball, but more reliable

Having emerged from re-reading A la recherche… I needed a change of pace. James Lee Burke’s Cadillac Jukebox got me back to modern times which now resume with The Drunkard’s Walk or “How randomness rules our lives”.

This is not a clone of Eats Shoots and Leaves. It’s by a professor (Leonard Moldinov) and it explains the mathematics of probability and statistics. If you can add up you’re OK. Even readers of average curiosity should be interested because here mathematics solves what most lay people would regard as the impossible.

As well as illustrating the penalties for getting it wrong. The author was told by his GP that the chances were 999 out of 1000 he would be dead within the decade. This followed a blood test taken for a life insurance application. On a hunch the author had taken an HIV test and it came back positive. But his doctor “had confused the chances that I would test positive if I was not HIV-positive with the chances that I would not be HIV-positive if I tested positive.” With probability the words are as important as the figures.

Even given more than my self-imposed limit of 300 words I would risk traducing Moldinov’s carefully-worded prose. So read the book. The style is lively and non-technical and the examples are interesting (The somewhat maligned baseball player Roger Maris is sympathetically analysed). The examples include the mathematical side of coin tossing (with an empirical proof – new to me) and dice throwing, perversity in the face of overwhelming evidence, the danger of judging ability by short-term results and the fact that so-called “random”numbers are biased towards the lower digits.

Well-reviewed in The Guardian.