MY BROTHER THE MAYOR (FERNANDO VALLEJO) AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN METEORIT AND METEOR.

His career on the way to the Támesis mayoral service was stunning. I can not say it was a meteoric one because meteors fall down and Carlos was always going up , rising, reaching the summit.

It´s very clear what Fernando Vallejo wants to mean by that. But if we were a bit fusspot, which is not the intention of this blog, we could say that what really falls down is a meteorite, not a meteor. The meteor would be a shooting star and this is the sense of the expression ´meteoric career´, from my humble opinion.

But they are really complex concepts to deal with, as it was already said because of Juan Benet.

FAMILY LEXICON (NATALIA GINZBURG) AND SULFHIDRIC ACID AS THE RESPONSIBLE OF HOW A FART SMELLS

“Lidia, you and me, we know a thing or two about chemistry so what’s sulfuric acid stink of? It stinks of fart. Sulfuric acid stinks of fart.”

It´s a chemical common mistake to mixe up the sulfuric and the sulfhidric acid. It´s the sulfhicdric acid, also known as hydrogen sulfide, which stinks of fart. That´s to say, it is the fart which stinks of hydrogen sulfide

THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN (ROMAIN GARY) AND THE CONTRIBUTION OF MADNESS TO THE EVOLUTION OF SPECIES

"That’s it, old man,” he said. “Never say die. You have to be mad, it’s true, to keep going and hope, but the first reptile who dragged his belly out of the water a million years ago to live on land without lungs and tried to breathe all the same— he too was mad. In the end the reptile became a man. We must always try to do the best we can— perhaps one day well become human, who knows"

It´s the first time I hear about the relation between madness and evolution. I wonder whether Darwin took it into account on his work. I´ve never been very daring but I can appreciate what courageous people are able to do. It´s called ´to go out of your comfort zone´ nowadays. Anyway, the last sentence of this post seems to be a good advice for almost everything in life.

TREME (DAVID SIMON) AND THE IMPORTANCE OF BASIC GEOMETRY TO TAXI DRIVERS

Basic Geometry can be helpful in your daily life. Here Antoine Batiste have saved ten dollars thanks to Pitagoras

WILLIAM AND MARY (ROALD DAHL) AND THE COVERINGS OF BRAIN

And now, as I say, I'd take a small oscillating saw and carefully remove your complete calvarium--the whole vault of the skull. This would expose the top half of the brain, or rather the outer covering in which it is wrapped. You may or may not know that there are three separate coverings around the brain itself the outer one called the dura mater or dura, the middle one called the arachnoid, and the inner one called the pia mater or pia. Most laymen seem to have the idea that the brain is a naked thing floating around in fluid in your head. But it isn't. It's wrapped up neatly in these three strong coverings, and the cerebrospinal fluid actually flows within the little gap between the two coverings, known as the subarachnoid space. As I told you before, this fluid is manufactured by the brain and it drains off into the venous system by osmosis

The coverings of the brain are very well explained. The tale is about a dyng man who is offered to keep his brain alive in a basin, with an eye as the only way to interact with the enviroment. The man accepted the offer only because he would be able to read.

At the end of the short story, the wife wants to take her husband´s brain home because she realizes that she likes him better now and it/he gives her no trouble.

Last month, in Yale´s University a group of scientists has brought brains of pigs back to life. This fact is linked with another of Dahl’s tales – ‘Pigs’, a wonderful allegation in favour of veganism, just like the film The Executioner, by Berlanga, is the best allegation against death penalty

THE INVENTED PART (RODRIGO FRESÁN), JOHN UPDIKE AND ART AS REFUTATION OF THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

The day Updike died, he reread something the writer said in an interview and that he’d always found really moving: “My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”

One good thing about this definition is that it is correct regardless of the quality of the art. A bad novel, a bad song, a bad movie...they also bring something to the world, they bring order. From my point of view, this is more of a refutation of the second law of Thermodynamics, than of the conservation of matter. A sculptor, for instance, just redistributes the preexisting matter, like David is said to have been taken out from a piece of marble by Michelangelo

Only Embryo Growth and the birth of a new living being are similar to the artistic creation, that is why we say things like “the artist has given birth to a masterpiece”

DEPT. OF SPECULATION (JENNY OFFILL) AND GOLDEN RECORD

The Golden Record included greetings in fifty-four human and one whale language, ninety minutes of music from around the world, and 117 pictures of life on Earth. These pictures were meant to suggest the widest possible range of human experiences. Only two things were off-limits. NASA decreed that no pictures could depict sex and no pictures could depict violence. No sex because NASA was prudish and no violence because images of ruins or bombs exploding might be interpreted by aliens as threatening.

The Golden Record was launched in 1977 inside the space probe Voyager. It´s like a message in a bottle in the sea, but there are very litle chances of someone receiving it. And it´s even more unlikely that the hypothetical recipient could decode the message.

The film The Arrival answers accurately the question of how to find a shared language with an ET civilization

THE HORSEMAN ON THE ROOF (JEAN GIONO) AND THE LIMITS OF AUTOPSY

Here you have a man (or woman) opened up from head to foot like an ox at a butcher shop and there, leaning over him (or her) with all his implements, the artist. He may know quite well what the man (or woman) died of. But “why,” in its deeper sense, is another matter. Another matter, which, to be brought into the open, would require knowledge of the “how”: how this man (or this woman) had lived. This man (or woman) has loved; hated; lied; suffered; and enjoyed the love, hatred, and lies of others. But no trace of all this at the autopsy

You can´t reach for the moon. Human soul is impenetrable and plausible. It would be very unfair that the autopsy gave away about our privacy. And the other way round, your closest friend doesn´t know about your pancreas.

It´s curious how this middle-20th-century novel is pioneer in the use of inclusive language

ULYSSES (JAMES JOYCE) AND POTATO AS A RHEUMATISM TREATMENT

BLOOM: (Gently) Give me back that potato, will you?

ZOE: Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing.

BLOOM: (With feeling) It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mamma.

ZOE: Give a thing and take it back God’ll ask you where is that You’ll say you don’t know God’ll send you down below.

BLOOM: There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.

STEPHEN: To have or not to have that is the question. ZOE: Here. (She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh, and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking) Those that hides knows where to find.

(...)

On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe. No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time 

(...)

I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. Freeman. Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where? 

(...)

(She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out) 

(...)

ZOE: I feel it. (Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist lips.)

BLOOM: A talisman. Heirloom. 

(...)

Sir? Spud again the rheumatiz? All poppycock, you’ll scuse me saying. For the hoi polloi. I vear thee beest a gert vool. 

Regardless of how little are we able to contribute to bringing some order into this chaotic novel, this tiniest contribution will be a remarkable succes

It´s true: people used to take a potato, halfway between therapy and talisman. I don´t really know if this local treatment is effective or not. I think the potato juice is good for some diseases, but I´m not sure.

In the novel itself some doubts about this therapy appear in the last paragraph: “all poppycock, you’ll scuse me saying. For the hoi polloi.”

GHOSTS (CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHE) AND THE DESPISE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

He was in sociology, and althought many of us in the proper sciences thought that the social sciences people were empty vesses who had too much time on their hands and worte reams of unreadable books, we saw Ikenna differently. We forgave his peremtory style and did not discard his panphlets and rather admired the erudite asperiry which with he blazed through issues; his fearlessness convinced us

It sometimes happens that Science people hate Social Sciences intensely. This intensity is rarely provoked by Humanities disiciplines like Philologies , or it´s at least another sort of hatred. I think Social Sciences are accused of trying to disguise themselves by using instruments of the natural sciences: stats, graphs… ‘The Strangled Reason’, by Carlos Elias explains this phenomenon very wel

SATURDAY (IAN MCEWAN) AND SCHRÖDINGER´S CAT

As he comes away, he remembers the famous thought experiment he learned about long ago on a physics course. A cat, Schrödinger’s Cat, hidden from view in a covered box, is either still alive, or has just been killed by a randomly activated hammer hitting a vial of poison. Until the observer lifts the cover from the box, both possibilities, alive cat and dead cat, exist side by side, in parallel universes, equally real. At the point at which the lid is lifted from the box and the cat is examined, a quantum wave of probability collapses. None of this has ever made any sense to him at all. No human sense. Surely another example of a problem of reference. He’s heard that even the physicists are abandoning it. To Henry it seems beyond the requirements of proof: a result, a consequence, exists separately in the world, independent of himself, known to others, awaiting his discovery. What then collapses will be his own ignorance. Whatever the score, it is already chalked up. And whatever the passengers’ destination, whether they are frightened and safe, or dead, they will have arrived by now.

Something which I am very proud of is the fact that, over 4 years, I have avoided some unpleasant aspects in the 86 posts of this blog. Searching for mistakes has not beeen then main aim of this blog, mainly to get away from my job. I also avoided the scientific clichés; you can´t picture how many times Schrödinger´s Cat appears in novels, it´s almost one more character.

It´s been difficult, but this is only the second time we speak about the damn cat. The first one was just to devote some words to a good movie

AMERICANAH (CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHE) AND THE PROVERBIAL GALLARTY OF CHEMISTRY TEACHERS

He turned to her and said, “About time,” when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service. She smiled at him. The graying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot. He had to be an academic, but not in the humanities or he would be more self-conscious. A firm science like chemistry, maybe.

One more time: the aim of this blog is the good vibes between Science and Humanities, but we don’t want to hide the truth. If this lady thinks that male Science teachers in general, and the Chemistry ones particulary, have a bigger composure with women, it won’t be here that we will disagree with her.

Maybe the reader has noticed that in some posts of this blog the relationship between Literature and Science is a little bit unnatural. We have forced this relationship in a case like this, when the book is so good that it deserves we talk about it 

HEARTBREAK TANGO (MANUEL PUIG) AND PHOTOTROPISM

It happened on an autumn afternoon. The trees that grew along that street in Buenos Aires bowed low. Why? Tall apartment houses on either side of the street blocked off the sun's rays, and the brancKes spread obliquely, as if pleading, toward the middle of the road . . . seeking light. Mabel was on her way to a friend's house for tea, she raised her eyes to the aged treetops, she noticed that the strong trunks bowed, humbly.

Phototropism is the phenomenon that makes vegetables grow and face the Sun, seeking its light. It may seem strange, but all plants do it; the birth and development of any plant is always done looking for the light, usually upwards. When the Sun exposition is irregular, like the situation explained in the text (the tree ‘humiliation’) the deflections from vertical appear

­A remarkable case of phototropism is the sunflower heliotropism. Sometimes, a tree that has fallen down, has got to stand up later thanks to this phenomenon.

In the picture, you can see Manuel Puig with some flowers; we don´t know whether they are heliotropic.

THE GHOST RIDERS OF ORDEBEC (FRED VARGAS), THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT AND CHAOS THEORY

‘No, she’s careful, not a gossip, Danglard. She takes seriously the butterfly wing that moves in New York and causes an explosion in Bangkok.’

‘Did she say that?’

‘No, that was Émeri.’

‘Well, he’s wrong. It’s in Brazil that the butterfly moves its wing, and it causes a hurricane in Texas.’

‘Does that make any difference, Danglard?’

‘Yes. Because once you get away from the original words, the purest of theories just become rumours. Then we don’t know anything. From one approximation to another inaccuracy, the truth unravels and obscurantism takes over.’

Danglard’s mood was improving, as it did every time he had a chance to give a lecture, or better still to contradict someone with his knowledge. The commandant wasn’t a chatterbox, but silence wasn’t good for him either, because it offered too much room for his melancholy to take over. Sometimes it just took a few exchanges to hoist Danglard out of his despondency. Adamsberg was putting off the moment of mentioning Momo the local fire-raiser, and so was Danglard, which was not a good sign.

‘There must be several versions of the butterfly story.’

‘No,’ said Danglard firmly. ‘It’s not a fable, it’s a scientific theory about predictability. It was formulated by Edward Lorenz in 1972 in the version I gave you. The butterfly’s in Brazil and the hurricane’s in Texas, you can’t go altering that.’

I can hardly add something to this text, because the role that I usually play correcting in a fussy way is done by Danglard in the dialogue. Indeed, Lorentz, the man that looks like a kind grandfather in the picture, started creating a mathematic model to study the convection movements of the atmosphere and he came to the conclusions that the text suggests

THE MAGUS (JOHN FOWLES) AND HEISENBERG PRINCIPLE

...but he might well have incorporated the Heisen-berg principle into his ‘experiment’, so that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as observed human particles

I think this is the best allusion to Heisenberg Relation I have ever read. The Uncertainty Principle says that it is impossible to know some pairs of magnitudes at the same time. It´s very common to mix and confuse this principle with the intrinsic mistake of measure, which is provoked by the presence of the observator. This intrinsic mistake of measure, which is seen as a limitation by a lot of people, makes me feel almost like a God, changing the world with my look

THE KOMINSKY METHOD (CHUK LORRE) AND AGING FROM AN ENTROPIC POINT OF VIEW

This mixture of Biology and Physics sounds strange to me, but it´s worth hearing this conversation. If aging is a road to chaos, what would be the embryonic developmnet?

FIRST LIGHT (CHARLES BAXTER) AND THE PHOTON TRAJECTORY

Just outside Buffalo, Dorsey says, “I’m sick. I have Autobahnschmerz. It’s not the distance. It’s the freeways and tolls and the speed and the time, and the fact that there aren’t any decisions a human being can make. It’s like being …” She thinks for a moment. “It’s like being a photon. You can’t decide where you’re going.”

Hugh shrugs and keeps his eyes on the road.

The first time I read this text I also shurg my shoulders, because what can I do against such pendantry? Then I realized it´s a good examle: photon goes by rails which are difficult to get out of. A planet moving in space is also a good example. One goes forward concienless, that´s how we have finished last year.