All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
links

Catching Up …

Blimey it’s busy round here! Even when you aren’t trying to get rid of a really dirty cold. At last this morning I have a chance to try to catch up a bit as I’ve been excused supermarket duty, so here is your occasional catch-up on links to items you may have missed. In the order I have them noted …

Does chocolate make you clever? Probably not but countries with a high per capita chocolate consumption also have more Nobel Prize winners.

Rules are there for a reason, allegedly. There aren’t for us to pick and mix the ones we like. A short excursion into why this is.

The received wisdom is that children are natural scientists. But apparently they aren’t, though they are inquisitive — and there’s a difference.

Apparently city birds are adapting to an unusual predator: cats. Yep, over generations the birds are modifying their behaviour towards what is for them a relatively novel enemy.

So who do you trust to tell you the truth? Nobody much it seems.

Mary Rose won’t die! Now scientists are identifying the shipwreck’s elite archers by the fact that their skeleton show signs of RSI.

Who killed Tycho Brahe, the 16th century Danish astronomer? Jennifer Ouellette investigates and discovers that the answer is: nobody.

Please tell me it is 1st April! Apparently San Francisco are trying to ban the obese from wearing clothes. They reckon it’s going to shame them into thinning. I think (hope) it might backfire.

According to the sources who know (ie. the Daily Mail) the Pope is stealing our traditional Christmas. Why should we care?

Earlier in the week the Police shut part of Whitehall because an idiot climbed a statue and then stripped. As usual the reaction is completely OTT. While I don’t condone the damage to the statue but public nudity is not per se an offence. I suspect that if the police had ignored the whole thing the guy would have got bored and gone away within 5 minutes, instead of which they make a huge drama out of it.

Can you identify corporate logos? Probably. Can you identify tree leaves? Probably not. A nice diagram from Evopropinquitous as an antidote to this state of affairs.

Diamond Geezer goes in search of the birth of our favourite supermarkets. Did you know Waitrose was founded by Messrs Waite, Rose and Taylor and their first store was in Acton? Or that Liptons (remember them?) started in Glasgow? No neither did I.

Here’s an important post on a rare but important sleep disorder. But because it can be very like some other sleep disorders it may not be so rare.

How do you lose an island?


The Geese Book, a delightful medieval manuscript is now available online. Here’s a report and here’s a link to the actual book.

And finally here’s one for all you geek girls out there. Hack your vibrator so it listens to your body. This is how Beth did it. And Emily is in awe!

Have fun!

amusements

Let Them Dance

Christmas is coming, and it’s time to have some fun with the TV schedules.

This evening we made the mistake of catching a bit of Strictly Come Dancing, the appallingly horrible BBC TV show. Oh dear, even with the sound off it was verging on the vomit-worthy.

But we thought what a wonderful line-up the BBC could put together for a Strictly Christmas Extravaganza.

As it would be a one-off special we decided it should be just 8 couples; so 8 “slebs”, four of nominally each gender. We decided that for a real laugh they should be:

Ester Rantzen
Vanessa Feltz
Harriet Harman
Camila Batmanghelidjh		 Robbie Coltraine
Graham Norton
David Beckham
Tony Blair

So who would you choose to make right prats of themselves?

personal, pleasures

Reasons to be Grateful: 54

Well the week started off OK but it has ended crappily as I awoke on Friday morning with a filthy head-cold. Friday was a struggle, Saturday was a no-go area and today I’m feeling about back to where I was on Friday; so hopefully I’ll be a lot better tomorrow after a decent night’s sleep.

So anyway, this is week 54 (so we should finish the first weekend of the new year) of the experiment documenting five things which have made me happy of for which I’m grateful this week.

  1. Sausages. We’ve had two absolutely delicious sets of sausages this week. The first were Park and Black Pudding from Waitrose. The second are the stars, from our favourite butchers, Hiltons in Pinner: they make their own called Pinner Royal. These are award-winning sausages and maybe the best I’ve ever tasted. They’re succulent, densely meaty and very tasty — partly as they contain some pimento and partly because Hiltons use good meat. Hiltons are good because they specialise in organic, free-range and humanely reared meat, so you get something that looks, feels and tastes like proper meat rather than a piece of soggy pink plastic.
  2. Sinex Nasal Spray. I dislike using nasal spray as I know they can wreck nasal membranes. But very occasionally it is necessary, as it was last night in order to be able to breathe and get a decent night’s sleep.
  3. Wednesday’s Sunset. We were coming back from Pinner at sunset on Wednesday, and the sunset was absolutely stunning. Lots of dark peachy-orangey cloud above a bright azure blue sky. I did photograph it, but they really don’t do it justice; the blue just didn’t come through.

    Sunset

  4. Osteopathy. Wednesday’s trip to Pinner was partly for hypnotherapy and osteopathy. On Tuesday I managed to hurt my right wrist (no, not like that!). I’ve done it before and it was hugely painful for a long time, so I knew I needed to get Chris to treat it ASAP. It seems that, as before, I had misaligned one of the small wrist bones — quite commonly done, apparently, pushing open doors. Chris gave it a waggley-twist and wrench. As he was doing the waggley-twist there was this grindy-grindy noise and feeling, followed by a snap putting it back. Now I know some people don’t like this and can’t stand cracking knuckles. But I don’t mind; indeed I quite like that connection with what my body’s doing.
  5. Nice People. Noreen and I have spent two mornings this week at our doctor’s (guess where the head-cold came from?) talking to patients in the hope of getting some interested in joining the Patient Participation Group. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how nice people are. Very very few have said a flat “no, don’t want to know” and the vast majority have at least taken a flyer away and said I’ll read it and consider. What pleased me even more is that many of those most interested are the under-30s, both male and female, and of all ethnic backgrounds; also a good few young mums. We’ve met some interesting people and a few pretty girls; not many pretty boys though.
ramblings, science

The Strangeness of Days

The more I think about it, the more puzzling time becomes. Not just from a scientific point of view — and who knows that’s bad enough! — but from an experiential view.

There are two things which especially puzzle me; confuse me, even; despite that I think we all experience them.

The first is the way in which time is not linear.

OK, we know that time works only in one direction: it marches inexorably forward. As far as we know there is no way in which time can run in reverse; physicists tell us this doesn’t accord with the laws of nature they know about, hence our continuing quest for time machines.

But we all know from experience that time is not linear. There are days when one gets up and follows one’s normal routine — some combination of coffee, shower, shave, hair-do, feed the cat etc. — only to fine one is 15 minutes late leaving for work/school. The next day you’ll do exactly the same and be ready 15 minutes early. Some days the afternoon disappears without you realising; other days it drags and you seem to be checking the clock every few minutes wondering how many hours have passed.

Scientists tell us this is impossible; that time is perfectly linear. Yet we all experience it. And no-one so far can explain it satisfactorily.


The second puzzle, which may be related to the first, is the nature of days. Again no-one to my knowledge has ever satisfactorily explained this.

How is it that on Thursday, I was convinced it was Friday? Yesterday (Friday) morning I thought it was Saturday. And by yesterday evening I thought it was Thursday again. Worse, yesterday evening (what time I was existing in Thursday) Noreen was convinced it was Saturday. And today? Well I have no clue; my head is just too full of cold germs to be sure of anything beyond it’s dark, it’s raining and I’d rather be huddling under the duvet.

Now I can understand how it may be possible to explain the way in which time passes faster as one grows older. The theory is that as one ages there is less new to take in; the brain measures time in notable experiences; hence as there are fewer, time seems to pass faster.

But that doesn’t explain the non-linearity of time at either the level of minutes and hours or at the level of days. I’ve been pondering this for years, and still have no idea what’s going on here. Is it just that all our brains are faulty, or is there some underlying system of local time-warps? Has anyone got any clues?

words

Word: Haruspication

Haruspication

A form of divination from lightning and other natural phenomena, but especially from inspection of the entrails of animal sacrifices

An Etruscan model of a sheep’s liver used for divination

ramblings, thoughts

Wrong!

Crumbs it’s a busy week again, which is why there’s been no blogging. Hopefully I might catch up a bit over the weekend, because next week looks like being busy too.

Meanwhile earlier in the week I came across the best advice I’ve seen in a long time about recovering from mistakes written by Matt Shipman over at SciLogs. It is very simple, though not always easy. It goes like this …

Assuming you are a human, you are going to make mistakes. But [for many of us] those mistakes can be public. And embarrassing. So how do you recover gracefully, or at least with as little damage as possible to your reputation?

Here’s the short answer: admit your mistake as early as possible; never make excuses; and do not make the same mistake again.

The rest of the article is worth a read too.

We’re human. We make mistakes. That’s what we do here; it’s called “life”!

So yes, three golden rules:

  1. Admit you made a mistake — and that includes saying “Sorry!”
  2. Never make an excuse — they cut no ice; it was a genuine error and these things happen.
  3. Log the mistake in your brain so you can guard against it next time.

We all make the best decisions we can, at the time, with the information we have available. That information includes the state of your aberrant brain. Unless we’re mental, we none of us deliberately make mistakes. So yes, we are going to get things wrong sometimes.

When I was at work I expected to make errors, but I knew I could hold my hands up to them and often correct them. I also expected to get a bollocking for it occasionally. And I was fine with my guys as long as they admitted they got things wrong. There’s only a problem when someone keeps making errors — usually the same silly errors — and not learning from them.

Keep calm, admit you got it wrong, and learn from it.

words

Word: Wallah

Wallah or Walla

From the Hindi/Urdu suffix -wālā, which has the sense of ‘pertaining to or connected with’ that preceding, which may be compared with the English suffix -er (as in, for example, baker, walker). Thanks to the Raj, in English it has progressed beyond its Indian roots and has come to mean:

  1. One employed in a particular occupation or activity (eg. kitchen wallah; rickshaw wallah).
  2. An important person in a particular field or organization.
  3. One carrying out a routine administrative job; a civil servant, a bureaucrat.

Thus it is also a component of Indian names, eg. Unwalla (originally a wool worker or merchant).

Other examples of Anglo-Indian usage include:

  • banghy-wallah, a porter who carries loads with a banghy or shoulder-yoke
  • dhobi-wallah, a laundry worker (photo right)
  • punkah-wallah, a servant who works a fan
  • Dillī-wālā, inhabitant of Delhi.
quotes

Quotes

Another toffee-bag of recently encountered quotes. This selection seems to be mostly from the cynical and philosophical jars.

Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
[Oliver Wendell Holmes]

My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what’s really going on to be scared.
[PJ Plauger]

Reality is something you rise above.
[Liza Minnelli]

War is organised murder, and nothing else.
[Harry Patch; last surviving soldier of WWI]

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
[Voltaire]

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
[George Santayana]

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
[Herbert Spencer]

Finally a gob-stopper from the jar of amusements …

Judge: There’s a certain light connotation attached to the word panties. Can we find another name for them?
Prosecution: I never heard my wife call them anything else.
Judge: Mr. Biegler?
Biegler: I’m a bachelor, your Honor.
Judge: That’s a great help. Mr. Dancer?
Dancer: I was overseas during the war, your Honor. I learned a French word. I’m afraid it might be slightly suggestive.
Judge: Most French words are.
[Wendell Holmes, Anatomy of a Murder; with thanks to Barnaby Page]

personal, pleasures

Reasons to be Grateful: 53

Week 53 and we get to the hardest part of the experiment: not just keeping focus and motivation for the last few weeks but also surviving winter. The greyness has really caught up with me in the last 2-3 weeks. Anyway here is this week’s pick of five things which have made me happy of for which I’m grateful this week.

  1. Golden Leaves. Yes we still have lots of rich golden leaves on the trees — although fewer today after a very cold night — and they’ve looked just glorious in the winter …
    Golden Leaves
  2. Sunshine. Yes, sorry I have to repeat myself, especially at this time of year, as I really do appreciate every drop of sunshine we get. Not only do I suffer from SAD but I hate dull, grey, damp days. I’d much rather have bright, cold alpine weather.
  3. Nice Scrabble Words. Scrabble, even played against oneself during sleepless nights, is pretty good at keeping the mind active. And being competitive I always want to beat my own best score. I enjoy being able to play unusual, fun or interesting words too. Like GNEISS or DJINN. Neither scored outrageously high but when I played DJINN a few days ago it resulted in a series of four very high scoring moves.
  4. Wine Deliveries. The wine rack is overflowing. Because we thsi week we had three wine deliveris. What do you mean “Why?”? Because (a) the wine rack was almost empty, (b) it’s approaching Christmas and (c) because it’s time for …
  5. Beaujolais Nouveau. No I’m not someone who is sniffy about Beaujoias Nouveau. Partly because we’ve found Nick Dobson Wines who ship wine from a couple of very small producers who create good wines, even in challenging years like this one.

    Vincent Lacondemine, Beaujolais Villages Nouveau. Light, bright, cool, refreshing berry fruits; ruby red, obviously young but oh so drinkable. If anything it’s even smoother than last year’s despite the awful summer. How did I manage to stop at just one bottle? If that’s what the nouveau is like the vintage should be excellent!

    Phillipe Deschamps, Beaujolais Nouveau. Initially much smoother on the palate than the Lacondemine, but not as characterful, thinner with more low molecular weight esters (amyl acetate comes through). Very drinkable, but so far I prefer the Vincent Lacondemine.

    I drink this stuff because I actually like it. We don’t all like to drink heavy, robust red wine all the time. And isn’t all part of enjoying the year’s rich cycle — along with the SAD.