Monday, 28 December 2020

DERIVATIVE SPORT IN TORNADO ALLEY (DAVID FOSTER WALLACE) AND THE OMNIPRESENCE OF MATHS

 When I left my boxed township of Il inois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I al of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this was so. Col ege math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hil y Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light.

Calculus was, quite literal y, child’s play.


Maths are eveywhere, although some landscapes are more explicit than others. For example, the Mid-West, but also the olive groves in the province of Jaén.
The ability of thinking abstractly about mathematical entities of Nature, typical of huge intelligences, is one of the shortest ways to madness.
I,ve read Foster Wallace tennis texts yet again ( I used to love them when I was younger) because I,m playing tennis these days due to Covid ( a sport full of geometry and trigonometry, by the way). So, we can say that the Covid  has  transformed me from a player of friendly games of football to an amateur tennis one.
In fact, when I knew the news about Maradona death, I was playing tennis and  this paradox made me feel a bit guity

Monday, 14 December 2020

TENDER BAR (J.R MOEHRINGER) AND BARS AS FORUMS WHERE DEBATE SCIENCE

 Sometimes the bar felt like the best place in the world, other nights it felt like the world itself. After one especially grueling day at the Times, I found the men in a circle at Uncle Charlie’s end of the bar. They had arranged cocktail garnishes in the shape of the solar system, a lemon as the sun, and they were moving the olive around the lemon, explaining to each other why New York gets dark before California, why seasons change, how many millennia we have before the whole thing falls apart. I stood behind them, letting their conversation orbit around me. What’s a black hole anyway? A thing that sucks up everything in its path. So it’s like my ex? Yeah only smaller. I’ll tell her you said that. A black hole’s like the Grand Canyon with extra gravy. Not gravy, dipshit—gravity. What’d I say? Think of it this way—the universe is held together with gravity, your ex is held together with gravy. Don’t use an olive for the earth, I hate olives. Whaddya got against olives? Pits—I don’t like food that fights me. Who the fuck ate Mars? Sorry, I see a cherry, I eat a cherry. How big is the fucking earth anyways? It’s twenty-five thousand miles around. That sounds almost walkable. You don’t even like to walk to the corner for the Daily News. You mean to say everyone in this joint is going sixty-seven thousand miles an hour right now? No wonder I feel so fucking dizzy.


Apparently, a bar is not the best place to discuss science (it´s very difficult to argue about science, in any case) , but alcohol can do anything. In the text, it´s all very well explained: black holes, the solar system, translation speed of  the earth, which is higher in the winter, the earth´s diameter…

What an extraordinary thing is a bar with a good parish!! As the song goes:

“if the place is warm

With people to laugh and argue with

It doesn’t matter if it’s a bar or home”


Monday, 30 November 2020

THE CONVERSATION OF EIROS AND CHARMION ( EDGAR ALLAN POE), THE COMPOSITION OF THE AIR AND A VINDICATION OF NITROGEN

It had been long known that the air which encircled us was a compound of oxygen and nitrogen gases, in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen, and seventy-nine of nitrogen, in every one hundred of the atmosphere. Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion, and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature. Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An unnatural excess of oxygen would result, it had been ascertained, in just such an elevation of the animal spirits as we had latterly experienced. It was the pursuit, the extension of the idea, which had engendered awe. What would be the result of a total extraction of the nitrogen? A combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate; the entire fulfillment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book

We´d rather talk about the composition of the air with this post by Poe than with the famous song by Mecano ( oxygen, nitrogen and argon) It´s more suitable to the spirit of this blog. The role of Nitrogen, so low considered, is very important to temper the explosive character of the oxygen avoiding the spontaneous combustions. Nitrogen has its own cycle as well, which is essential at different levels for life in our planet.

So, there it is the Nitrogen, so noiseless but basic and majority in the air, quiet and vital.


Monday, 16 November 2020

HERETICS (CHESTERTON) AND SCIENCE ANALITIC LIMITATIONS

Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyse any man’s wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful.

The man’s desire for the pork-chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven

Ok then, Science says how much Phosphorus there is in a chop, which is no mean feat. But, as Chesterton points out, Science doesn´t say too much about human desire about chops or other human desires. We have other stuff for this purpose, such as Arts or Poetry. Something like that we talked about in this blog regarding Emilia Pardo Bazán and Ramón y Cajal

Monday, 2 November 2020

THE LOVED ONE ( ISRAEL FERNÁNDEZ, DIEGO DEL MORAO) AND FIRST DEGREE EQUATIONS

 For having you beside me

I have to deceive time

I want the hours to stand still

to recreate myself in your body

For having you beside me

I don´t know what I´d give

I´d fight against time

to stop our lifes

my heart and my mind

are having a long fight

if my soul doesn´t give up

that it´s the one which sleeps with you

24 hours a day, if it had 27,

three more hours I´d love you

24 hours a day, and you´re the owner of my body

and you´re for me my whole life

the little sheets of my bed

have sorrow for me

have sorrow for me

in noticing how I cry for you

when I remember you

You gave to my heart

a few disappointments

but I´m still loving you

what am I going to deny it for?

my heart and my mind

are having a long fight

if my soul doesn´t give up

that it´s the one which sleeps with you

24 hours a day, if it had 27,

three more hours I´d love you

24 hours a day, and you´re the owner of my body

and you´re for me my whole life





I have forced a bit this post to talk about this record, ´Love´, that is going to be really important in flamenco. The operation included in the lyrics is easy to calculate, but it´s the way to begin in algebraic language, actually. So, the equation would be 24 +x = 27, where x is the extra hours of love

Monday, 19 October 2020

THE THIRD POLICEMAN (FLANN O`BRIEN) AND THE SLOWNESS OF MIRRORS

If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. De Selby's explanation of this phenomenon is quite simple. Light, as he points out truly enough, has an ascertained and finite rate of travel. Hence before the reflection of any object in a mirror can be said to be accomplished, it is necessary that rays of light should first strike the object and subsequently impinge on the glass, to be thrown back again to the object to the eyes of a man, for instance. There is therefore an appreciable and calculable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the of the reflected image in his eye

What a strange argument, I always feel the opposite: I look older than I think I am. Someone says you should never look at yourself in the elevator mirror, not even when you are 20 years old, and I guess he is right

As for O´Brien´s text, it´s an excessive version of the famous twin paradox of Einstein, in which a second brother is not even necessary. As they say, an exaggeration is sometimes the most accurate lie


Monday, 5 October 2020

A TRIP BY BUS ( JOSEP PLA) AND THE ETOLOGY OF SPARROWS

 There are, finally, varieties of birds which live in complete freedom even at the breeding moments. The sparrow- a rascal bird, fornicating and individualistic- may be an example of these ungrateful animals. Sparrows live in a regime of systematic and perpetual social gathering and they don´t mind neither the blood ties nor the birdie feelings, that although rudimentaries, they exist somehow.

Now I understand  the expression ‘Hey, Sparrow!better, the one which is used by males of human specie when they see each other in a delicate situation or when they tell some naughty plan to  one each other . I would never think of a bird  in such  a way  with such a pacific appearance. Most birds (you can also say: Hey, Bird!) interrupt their social-gathering or café rules while their breeding time, but   sparrows keep it even in this critical situation. In this time, their chest swells up so much  that they seem to be more male doves than sparrows.

Monday, 21 September 2020

A TRAM IN SP (UNAI ELORRIAGA) AND THE PHYSICAL -CHEMICAL PROPERTIES OF MERCURY, WHICH MAKE IT SO ATTRACTIVE

 Mercury, for example. Imagine a drop of mercury on the top of a marble table. Then, lift the table and let the mercury slide. It´s like water but more perfect, because it´s metal and because it doesn´t dry up. If you throw water to a crystal, it spreads and melt. And it dries, besides. Mercury not. Mercury is the most perfect drop that exists. And although steel is really spectacular, mercury is more spectacular than steel because it´s liquid and cold. Mercury is a funny thing


The mercury thermometers used to be one of the first experiences of scientific surprise in the childhood and their desaparition makes the children loose it. When you were ill and the thermometer broke down, the drops of mercury looked like a strange flock.

The mist of fever joined to the amazement made the experience really odd. We were told about this in the poem metales pesados by Carlos Marzal.

In other post, we´ll talk about the Mad hatter from the book Alice in Wonderlad. He was mad because of an intoxication of mercury, something very usual in that job


Monday, 7 September 2020

THE BUSINESS OF LIVING (CESARE PAVESE) AND THE INVISIBILITY OF THE VITAL FUNCTIONS

 Everything our body does, other than the functioning of the senses, escapes our notice. We know nothing of our most vital processes-circulation, digestion, and so on. It is the same with our spirit; except for the superficial pattern of ideas, we are ignorant of its activities and changes, its crises. Nothing but an illness makes us aware of the profound workings of our body. In the same way we realize those of our mind and spirit when we become unbalanced.


The whole physiology occurs in the dark, the human body is like a fridge, dark until you open it. Everything takes place in the dark, hidden to the daylight but microscopically. Only when things go wrong, we are aware of them and begin to pay attention to. " We know about love for what it illuminates, for what it twists and increases and rules". We have to make do with this indirect knowledge of our body, in the way as with the knowledge of love in these lines by Manuel Alcántara

Monday, 24 August 2020

DESPERATE CHARACTERS (PAULA FOX) AND THE EXPIRATION DATE OF PERFUMS

He sniffed at her hair. There was a faint trace of the perfume she always wore, but it floated on a rather stronger chemical smell. That monstrous bottle he had given her had probably turned to alcohol. Next birthday, he would buy her three small bottles instead

Once opened, perfums begin to loose their volatile compounds ( especially esters, aldehydes and ketones). These compounds are in charge of their smell and due to the passage of time, they may smell to alcohol sometimes. Not everybody knows that cosmetic industry is an important career opportunity for many chemists, where the composition of the perfum is as important as the addition of masked agents that avoid copying the scent to the competition.

Monday, 10 August 2020

OTHER´S MEN DAUGHTERS (RICHARD STERN) AND SCIENTIFIC DEFENSE OF SUPERFICIALITY

 It used to be thought the body was more “sensitive” as it got deeper. But no, it’s like the earth itself, the vividness is at the surface. You can crush an organ and get no pain, but look at the skin. One cm. of human skin contains two sensory machines for cold, twelve for heat, three million cells, ten hairs, fifteen sebaceous glands, a yard of blood vessels, a hundred sweat glands, three thousand sensory cells at the end of nerve fibers, four yards of nerves, twenty-five pressure apparatuses for tactile stimuli, two hundred nerve cells to record pain. This fantastic factory is our surface. No wonder our feeling is so exposed. Our hearts are on our sleeve.

How many things on the surface which we disregard for not being deep! All the stuff the skin has! Who needs more? It´s better not to go in depth hardly ever, you have to surf throughout life . Everything gets better, the friendship, the work,...if you keep on kindly superficial

Monday, 27 July 2020

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO ( GEORGE SAUNDERS) AND THE CONSERVATION OF CADAVERS BY THE METHOD OF ZINC CHLORIDE

Sagnet had pioneered the innovative use of zinc chloride.
Five quarts of a 20 percent solution of zinc chloride injected through the popliteal artery not only preserved a body for a minimum of two years, but also wrought a wondrous transformation, giving the body the
Extravagant claims were made of the Sagnet process, stating that the remains became a “shell in effigy; a sculpture.”



In effect, the antiseptic characteristics have been used to embalm and recompose cadavers throughout time, especially in the XIXth century. With this method, the facial features were restored in case of violent death. So, it was bound to be very used in funerals with militar honours.

I´m not quite sure that this Sagnet really exists, because this book is as interesting as weird.

Monday, 13 July 2020

LIVING DOWN ( GUSTAVO FAVERÓN), THE BULB FROM LIVERMORE AND PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE


I was like the electric bulb of the fire department from Livermore, California, which a hand switched it on in 1901 and no hand has switched it off until today




This bulb is indeed famous for being on for very long. You can see it streaming via this webcam, where people from anywhere in the world can admire this phenomenon, which goes to show that things aren´t made nowadays as well as they used to.
Its only secret is that it´s made of more and better materials than current bulbs, which are surrendered to planned obsolescence.

Monday, 29 June 2020

HOW FAR CAN YOU? (DAVID LODGE) AND THE SILENCE OF INFINITE SPACE ( OR THE BIG BANG WASN´T REALLY A BANG)

The silence of infinite space terrifies me,” he murmured, squinting one night through Martin’s telescope at a faint smear of light that the boy assured him was a galaxy several times bigger than the Milky Way.
Why?”
Austin straightened up and rubbed the small of his back. “I was quoting Pascal, a famous French philosopher of the seventeenth century.”
Interesting he knew that space was silent,” Martin remarked, “that long ago.”
You mean, there’s no noise at all up there? All those stars exploding and collapsing without making a sound?”
You can’t have sound without resistance, without an atmosphere.”
So the Big Bang wasn’t really a bang at all?”
“’Sright.”
Doesn’t it frighten you, though, Martin, the sheer size of the Universe?”
Nope.”


This is the most common way to find science mistakes in films. Sound is a mechanical wave, so it needs a medium to propagate. In contrast, electromagnetic waves, like light, can travel through vacuum.
I think that 2001: A Space Odyssey was the first film to show outer space as silent. “No one can hear you scream in space”, according to the advertising of the film Alien. I am not fussy about this, a film with noises in outer space doesn´t bother me, I understand it´s a poetic license. Indeed, if we want to be very strict, the concept of vacuum is also very controversial

Monday, 15 June 2020

HERE COMES THE MAPLE (JOHN UPDIKE) AND THE FOUR KINDS OF FORCE OF NATURE

... he read every scrap he was sent, and even stooped in the alleys to pick up a muddy fragment of newspaper and scan it for a message. Thus, he read, it was already known in 1935 that the natural world was governed by four kinds of force: in order of increasing strength, they are the gravitational, the weak, the electromagnetic, and the strong. Reading, he found himself rooting for the weak forces; he identified with them. Gravitation, though negligible at the microcosmic level, begins to predominate with objects on the order of magnitude of a hundred kilometers, like large asteroids; it holds together the moon, the earth, the solar system, the stars, clusters of stars within galaxies, and the galaxies themselves. To Richard it was as if a faint-hearted team overpowered at the start of the game was surging to triumph in the last, macrocosmic quarter; he inwardly cheered.


I don´t have much to add, since John Updike himself comments on the original text, which we are told is from ´The Forces of Nature,´ a conference by Steven Weinberg. Physicist dream of being able to reduce all these forces to one, precisely the goal of the big unification theory, as has already been accomplished with electricity and magnetism being unified as electromagnetism
I think that, when I was a student, the interaction electroweak, unifying the weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force, has almost been completed. I don´t know how things stand now.
How can one not like and identify with gravitation, which among the four forces, is the only one we are familiar with?

Monday, 1 June 2020

THE ESSEX SERPENT (SARAH PERRY) AND THE PALEONTOLOGIST MARY ANNING

What’s more, he blamed himself for Cora’s adoration for the geologist Mary Anning: she’d never shown the least interest in grubbing about among rocks and mud until finding herself at an Ambrose dinner party seated beside an elderly man who’d spoken with Anning once and been in love with her memory ever since. By the time Cora had heard his tales of the carpenter’s daughter who grew strong after a lightning strike, and of her first fossil find at twelve, and her poverty, and her martyrdom to cancer, she too was in love and for months afterwards talked of nothing but blue lias and bezoar stones.




This blog wants to join the trend of recognizing female scientists. We want to add the paleontologist Mary Anning (although the text calls her a geologist) to the list headed by Marie Curie.
Paleontology and Geology don’t have a good reputation among scientists. So, the unfortunate Mary Anning suffered a double discrimination: one related to her gender at the time, and the other by ‘authentic,’ hard scientists.
I have a soft spot for the clever English women of the nineteenth century, how they had to deal with overbearing men, boring clergymen...
https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-essex-serpent/sarah-perry/9781781255452

Monday, 18 May 2020

BARONI: A TRIP (SERGIO CHEJFEC) AND MIRAGE

Still at that hour, or again, the temperature seemed to make things tremble. Those situations of intense heat, which make you rehearse descriptions with vague outlines, refractions of light, objects in slow motion, etc. And yet I was impressed by the opposite, the speed; as if temperature proceeded to disintegrate in terror, and reality itself, in its multiple joints, was struck by fear and wanted to escape this situation immediately.
As soon as you went out to the garden, neither having taken the first step nor having already felt the impact of the heat, you noticed the unease, nature at once watery and squelched.
You knew that underneath that calmness lay a latent combustion encompassing all the elements, revealed by isolated and spontaneous reactions.


This is something that literature can do with physical phenomena: illuminate them with images and so make them better understood. We physics teachers always try to do this. Everybody has seen this optical illusion on the horizon of the road on a very sunny day. You yourself melt by mimesis upon seeing, that´s why we call it a mirage
Once you understand and feel the phenomenon, by virtue of the text above, it almost matters less to know that it´s caused by the different densities of...

Monday, 4 May 2020

CALL FOR THE DEAD (JOHN LE CARRÉ) AND ROUCHÉ-FRÖBENIUS THEOREM

"Loose ends everywhere. No police work. Nothing checked. Like algebra."
"What's algebra got to do with it?"
"You've got to prove what can be proved, first. Find the constants. Did she really go to the theatre? Was she alone? Did the neighbours hear her come back? If so, what time? Was Fennan really late Tuesdays? Did his Missus go to the theatre regular every fortnight like she said?"




It´s great that detectives use mathematics methods in their work. You can’t rush an investigation. The first thing you have to find out is whether a solution even exists. Or, in mathematicians’ terms, whether the system of equations is compatible with the data. Because, what´s the point in trying to solve something that has no solution?

Monday, 20 April 2020

HELENA OR THE SEA IN SUMMER (JULIÁN AYESTA) AND VISIBLE SPECTRUM

All these doubts came from the fact that humans can´t really know anything of truly happens in the World. For instance, we can only see the colours between red and blue, but there are more of them. And then, tehre´s all this fuss about vibration speed and about infrared and ultraviolet



Visible light is the intervale of wavelengths or frequencies visible to the human eye. Outside this intervale are radio waves, micorwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X rays... It seems appropiate, as an image of all the things mankind cannot iluminate with is knowledge. I like even more how the author admits that this is a mess, it reminds me of another text by Cela that reads "you don´t know a word about this"

Monday, 6 April 2020

KUDOS ( RACHEL CUSK) AND A LITTLE MISUNDERSTANDING ABOUT ENTROPY

It was unclear precisely why this had happened, she added, except that everything to do with literature always seemed to be shrinking, as though the world of books was governed by a principle of entropy while everything else proliferated and expanded.


I´m sorry to correct this post for two reasons. Firstly, because I don´t like telling people what it´s wrong and secondly, because I´ve enjoyed so much Rachel Cusk´s books that I think it´s not fair. But I have to admit that I´m not convinced in this idea of the principle of entropy aplied here in something that seems to be shrinking. In my humble opinion, the entropy tends to be joined to disorderly and huge growths

Just the opposite of what happens in her books, in which seems that nothing is happening but everyone who meets the narretor- author becomes an excelent talkative

Monday, 23 March 2020

THE LIAR´S CLUB (MARY KARR) AND THE IMAGE OF EINSTEIN AS SCIENCE´S PAULO COELHO

She liked to repeat a story about seeing Einstein lecture at Bell Labs (where she’d done some mechanical drawing in the war years—a detail it took us years to unearth). She swore that during the question period afterward, Einstein had to have some engineer in the auditorium explain an elementary law of mechanics to him. When the guy was shocked that the great physicist didn’t know such a simple thing, Einstein said, “I never bother to remember anything I can look up.” She loved that idea—a genius who couldn’t open a can of tuna fish but could order the entire universe in the caverns of his own skull. She also said that he bowed his head between questions like he was praying, then raised it up to give answers like those mechanical swamis wearing turbans that guessed your future for a quarter at Coney Island. At the crowded reception after the lecture, she claimed that nobody even tried to talk to him. He sat in a straight chair in the corner by himself looking like somebody’s daffy uncle.



Why are there so may anecdotes about Einstein as absent-minded, always looking like ‘somebody´s daffy uncle’? Will he be known in future as the apocryphal author of cheap help-self aphorisms, Facebook wall style? Was this mystic and oriental wiseman image something he deliberately cultivated? Does the fact that he didn´t like combs influence this image?

Monday, 9 March 2020

JANE EYRE (CHARLOTTE BRONTË) AND ARITHMETIC AS A METHOD TO IMPRESS AN ENGLISH BACHELORETTE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

What age were you when you went to Lowood?’
About ten.’
And you stayed there eight years: you are now, then, eighteen?’
I assented.
Arithmetic, you see, is useful; without its aid, I should hardly have been able to guess your age. It is a point difficult to fix where the features and countenance are so much at variance as in your case

There he goes! Nothing in his pockets, nothing up his sleeves...and he determines her age. Nowadays, Mr Rochester would be accused of doing mansplaining, but I recognize his merit of setting out nimbly the ecuation 10+8=18.
I wonder whether this skill will help him to manage to flirt with her. I´ll find out when I finish the book.

Monday, 24 February 2020

THE ROAD (CORMAC MCCARTHY), HEARING IN THE BRAIN, SUBSONIC AND SUPERSONIC BULLETS

You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot.
Yes they will. But you wont.
How do you figure that?
Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.


I think he is right. The speed of sound is about 340 m/s. So if you are about 700 metres away from a shooting gun, you should heard the shot two seconds later. The bullet reaches you before its sound, if it´s supersonic. This is something that sound technicians must keep in mind.This video explains it very well:

Monday, 10 February 2020

NO ENTRY WITHOUT TROUSERS ( JUAN BONILLA) AND POETRY AS PURIFICATION OF REALITY

The poet works with advances which he spends before finishing anything, and he spends everything on tickets and transfers, because poetry is a journey to the unknown, is like the extraction of radium, where you get a gram of product after years of work.


I do agree. Poetry could be compared to any process of separating components, as Bonilla recreates what Maiakovski wanted to mean.Moreover, we may say that any poet distils reality and gets the poetic essence. The world would be the gross sample ( the gangue) and poetry would be the ore which you have to extract

Monday, 27 January 2020

THE ROBOT (DON´T STEP ON ME THAT I´M WEARING FLIP FLOPS) AND ITS OWN CONSCIOUNESS OF THE PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

I´ve got robotic blood in my veins
I´m a robot which isn´t worth it any more
I don´t know neither what I´m doing nor what I´m saying
operating system two dot fig
I´m moving around here
I´m moving around there
but I´m scared, they want to take me to pieces
my memory fails, my hard drive fails
my camera is broken, I see everything dark
Dude, I get mad when I get a screw dropped
and I´m becoming rusted because I´m metallic
and little by little I notice I´m loosing my brightness
Old man, like humans, I´m already loosing my reflexes
and bad news, my garantee is over
because I was made in Almendralejo
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
Prrrrii... prrrriii... pi, Roger... Roger
Prrrrii... prrrriii... pi, Roger... Roger
Prrrrii... prrrriii... pi, Roger... Roger
Prrrrii... prrrriii... pi, Roger... Roger...
I was almost hired in Star wars
What a terrific robot! , what a pretty thing!
but I was programmed with a big task,
to guess why flies rubb their little legs
it´s taken me many years of investigation
watching how they fly over a turd
I´m so fed up...so fed up
I didn´t know how hard the robot life was
Dude, I get mad when I get a screw dropped
and I´m becoming rusted because I´m metallic
and little by little I notice I´m loosing my brightness
Old man, like humans, I´m already loosing my reflexes
and bad news, my garantee is over
because I was made in Almendralejo
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,


The Flip flops, possessed by The Red Hot Chili Peppers spirit, re-enact the raising of consciouness of the machines in a way that we hadn´t seen since Blade Runner and his tears in the rain
And it´s also remarkable the excessive nihilism of the expression " what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do, I´ll turn into scrap", completely human. The robot almost seems to start singing by Camarón that song of" He also condemns us to death when God gives us the life"
And that´s the way we both, robots and obsolescent humans,are living. On the one hand, we complain about the dissatisfaction of the researches and the turds, and on the other one, we are afraid of being taken apart at a junkjard.



Monday, 13 January 2020

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE (CARSON MCCULLERS) AND INVISIBLE INK

 It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man — then the worth of Miss Amelia’s liquor can be understood




This is already the second formula for invisible ink we post in this blog. The first one was made by Poe in The Gold Bug. In this text, we are also told about the role of alcohol over human souls through a good image. Somenthing, by the way, that we have been able to feel last Christmas