[GK Chesterton]
Quote: Fences
[GK Chesterton]
[GK Chesterton]
Five Questions, Series 5 #4
We’ve got to question 4 of the Five Questions in Series 5 that I posed at the beginning of the year. (OMG, a month of the year has gone already!)
Question 4: Give me the story of your life in six words.
How about this as a fair summary:
I didn’t get where I am today by achieving anything other than mediocrity.
OK, yes I did well academically by most people’s standards: reasonable first degree, a masters, then a doctorate (by the skin of my teeth!). But I failed dismally as the academic I wanted to be and left after a year.I was destined to be a top consultant technician in a large IT company, but allowed myself to drift from job to job. I realised towards the end of my career that I could have achieved much more so-called success if I had put my mind to it. But I hadn’t and I realised I really didn’t want it, although I would have liked the status, the money and the pension. And that, from the outside looks like under-achievement because the early academic promise should have taken me much further than it did.
Unfortunately this just reinforced my internal mental self-portrait as a loser, an image which seems to have been instilled in me in childhood. It became an ingrained self-fulfilling prophesy. But of course it’s bollox. Intellectually I know it is.
But changing one’s internal self-image is damn hard. I’ve managed to get a long way from being a miserable, negative, “they’re all out to get me” git of a loser, as my father was, and as I was set to become. But so far I haven’t managed to shift the internal “loser” self-portrait.
No wonder I’m depressive.
Bah! Humbug!
Weekly Photograph
This week’s photo was taken last October when Noreen and I travelled on the paddle-steamer Waverley from London (Tower Pier) to Southend. This guy was one of the passengers. He was totally oblivious to me sitting on deck less than 10 feet away taking his photo. I don’t know how he was warm enough in just a t-short at 9AM on a cold foggy morning. I ask you, what does he look like?!
Plonker
River Thames, October 2013
Quotes
Another in our series of interesting, thought-provoking or humourous quotes recently encountered.
It has proven surprisingly difficult to work out how many sheets of A4 the average goatskin can produce.
[@ianvisits on Twitter]
Challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges.
[Carlos Castaneda]
Less and less is done until non-action is achieved. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
[Lao Tzu]
There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.
[Mark Twain]
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
[GK Chesterton]
A man’s bookcase will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him
[Walter Mosley, born 1952]
In expanding the field of knowledge we but increase the horizon of ignorance.
[Henry Miller, The Wisdom of the Heart (1941)]
It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.
[Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)]
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
[George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)]
For lust of knowing what should not be known,
We take the golden road to Samarkand.
[James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915), The Golden Journey To Samarkand]
It’s because someone knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics, it’s the things that nobody knows about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance … so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!
[Richard Feynman (1918-88)]
… and at the very bottom, a world of caverns whose walls are black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts, of eyeless beings who drag animal carcasses behind them, of demoniacal monsters with bodies of birds, swine and fish, of dried-out corpses and yellow-skinned skeletons arrayed in attitudes of the living, of forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.
[Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual]
If you’ve ever tried counting yourself to sleep, it’s unlikely you did it using the square roots of sheep. The square root of a sheep is not something that seems to make much sense. You could, in theory, perform all sorts of arithmetical operations with them: add them, subtract them, multiply them. But it is hard to see why you would want to.
[Matthew Chalmers, “Reality Bits”, New Scientist, 25/01/2014]
Something for the Weekend
I rather like this XKCD from earlier in the week:
Click the image for a larger view
Book Review: The Secret World of Sleep
Penelope A Lewis
The Secret World of Sleep: The Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
This is another of those books which I wanted to read and which appeared for either Christmas or my birthday (I forget now which as they are quite close together). This is what the cover blurb says:
A highly regarded neuroscientist explains the little-known role of sleep in processing our waking life and making sense of difficult emotions and experiences.
In recent years neuroscientists have uncovered the countless ways our brain trips us up in day-to-day life, from its propensity toward irrational thought to how our intuitions deceive us. The latest research on sleep, however, points in the opposite direction. Where old wives’ tales have long advised to “sleep on a problem,” today scientists are discovering the truth behind these folk sayings and how the busy brain radically improves our minds through sleep and dreams. In The Secret World of Sleep, neuroscientist Penny Lewis explores the latest research into the nighttime brain to understand the real benefits of sleep. She shows how, while our body rests, our brain practices tasks it learned during the day, replays traumatic events to mollify them, and forges connections between distant concepts. By understanding the roles that the nocturnal brain plays in our waking life, we can improve the relationship between the two and even boost creativity and memory. This is a fascinating exploration of one of the most surprising corners of neuroscience that shows how science may be able to harness the power of sleep to improve learning, health, and more.
Yes, OK, I guess it does do all of that and at a level which is likely OK for the intelligent layman. But as a scientist I found it somewhat lacking, or maybe more correctly it felt loose, in the details. I don’t profess to be very knowledgeable about the neurology of sleep, but I had the feeling that there was more there which is known and which would tie everything together. I may be wrong, and in fairness to Lewis she does say at a number of points “we don’t know how this works”.
Did it tell me anything I didn’t know? Well nothing which I found helpful and which has stuck sufficiently that I could recite it now. As always, yes, OK, I’m probably way above the audience this was written for. I found it an easy but not compelling, or gripping, read — sufficiently so that I whizzed through it far faster than I had expected.
All of this is a shame because I wanted to get that “Wow!” inspirational insight and it didn’t happen. I still feel it should.
As with many modern books it is a slim volume (about 190 pages) and it could have been much slimmer: as always there is too much white space on the page. Even if you don’t want to reduce the font size the leading could certainly be reduced, as could the margins slightly. That would make it a more compact volume, both in looks and physically.
I was also not struck on the cartoon-style illustrations. I didn’t find them illuminating (indeed at times downright confusing) and felt that maybe a few more, better, diagrams were needed for the target audience.
One thing which Lewis does however do well is to write a summary paragraph or two at the end of each chapter. Other authors please copy.
Is this a bad book? No, certainly not. It would likely work very well for an intelligent layman. It is merely that it didn’t work for me; but then it probably wasn’t intended to.
Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆
Word: Orchidectomy
Orchidectomy
The excision of one or both of the testicles; castration.
This is derived from the Greek ὄρχις (orkhis, a testicle) + ἐκτοµή (ektomi, cutting-out).
According to the OED the first recorded usage was in 1870.
And just to remove any confusion, the group of plants called orchids are so named because of the testicular appearance of the roots of some species.
Oddity of the Week: Banana Radiation
We are exposed to ionising radiation every minute of every day, much of it in the form of background radiation including cosmic rays, rocks in the ground, radon gas, water and food.
Bananas, for example, contain naturally occurring potassium-40, a radioactive isotope of potassium. Incredibly, there is even something known as the ‘banana-equivalent dose’, an attempt to contextualise artificial radiation exposures for the general public.
An X-ray screening at a US airport is roughly two and a half times a banana-equivalent dose.
From Simon Flynn, The Science Magpie (2012)
Coming up in February
Interesting events and anniversaries in the coming month.
1 February
Start of the last London Frost Fair, 1814 which lasted four days, during which time an elephant was led across the river below Blackfriars Bridge. This was the last frost fair because the climate was growing milder; old London Bridge was demolished in 1831 and replaced with a new bridge with wider arches, allowing the tide to flow more freely; and the river was embanked in stages during the 19th century, all of which made it less likely to freeze.
2 February
Candlemas. This is the Christian festival 40 days after Christmas of the presentation of Jesus at the temple. This day is also celebrated as Imbolc in the Wiccan/Pagan calendar (although some traditions celebrate on 1 February) in honour of Brigid, the goddess of fertility, fire and healing. It is also a time of increasing strength for the sun god and is Groundhog Day in the USA.
2 February
British Yorkshire Pudding Day. What better way to cheer up a miserable winter’s day than with Yorkshire Pudding? Read more here >>>>
10-16 February 2014
Go Green Week. The idea for Go Green Week is to encourage people, especially young people, to think about the environment and climate change. Read more here >>>>
12 February.
Bagpuss. On this day in 1974 BBC TV showed the first ever episode of the children’s animated series Bagpuss, an old, saggy cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams. Sadly it was a bit too late for my childhood (I was a research student by then) but it was (and is) still fun and became one of Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate’s iconic series. Read more here >>>>
14-21 February 2014
National Nest Box Week. Run by the British Trust for Ornithology, National Nestbox week is to encourage us to put up nestboxes for the birds. Why? Because so often these birds are declining due to a scarcity of nest sites as mature trees are cut down. This is also a good time to check existing nestboxes and (if they’re not inhabited by anything hibernating — insects, dormice, etc.) to clean them our before the new nesting season begins. Read more here >>>>
15 February.
Galileo Galilei was born this day in 1564. Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements included improvements to the telescope (and thus astronomical observations) and support for Copernicus’ theory of heliocentrism. For this latter Galileo was arraigned by the Inquisition, made to recant and sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Galileo was one of the all time giants of science. Read more here >>>>
17-23 February 2014
Chip Week. It seems that we Brits can’t get enough chips, so let’s admit defeat and celebrate! What? You mean they’re bad for us? I don’t believe it! Read more here >>>>
25 February.
Sir John Tenniel, British illustrator, graphic humourist and political cartoonist, died this day in 1914 just a few days short of his 94th birthday. He is perhaps best known today for his illustrations to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Read more here >>>>
Weekly Photograph
This week’s photograph was taken last summer while sitting outside a pub in London’s Covent Garden. The guy spend quite some minutes ferreting around his pockets while making mobile phone calls, it appeared all in aid of paying for parking his motorbike. It was street performance at it’s best — completely impromptu!
Contortionist
Covent Garden; August 2013