DECLINE AND FALL (EVELYN WAUGH) AND THE MONKEY AND THE HUNTER PROBLEM

 “ ‘Aim high’ has been my motto,” said Sir Humphrey, “all through my life. You probably won’t get what you want, but you may get something; aim low, and you get nothing at all. It’s like throwing a stone at a cat. When I was a kid that used to be great sport in our yard; I dare say you were throwing cricket-balls when you were that age, but it’s the same thing. If you throw straight at it, you fall short; aim above, and with luck you score. Every kid knows that. I’ll tell you the story of my life.”

´Aim high ´is a good  piece of advice in general, but in this case  I think it´s not quite correct. Or at least it doesn´t agree about the solution of the famous mental experiment of the hunter and the monkey. With some simple equations of elemental Physics ( which I don´t write here in order not to chase any hipotetycal reader away) can be proved that if the monkey ( or the cat) falls at the moment of listening the shot, the hunter always scores  if he´s aiming to the monkey. But if you throw a stone at a cat, he can react and fall a bit later, that´s why Evelyn  Waugh suggests this adjustment in this novel whose tittle, by the way, is so suitable for this post

LIT: A MEMOIR (MARY KARR) AND DARWINISM AS BASIS OF LOVELY BUT FALSE THEORIES

 An old sociological or Darwinian theory holds that when we’re looking to gin out babies, we’re biologically propelled toward the partner who’ll color in dull spots in our own genetic code. So when opposites attract, they’re biologically combining to form the perfect offspring

It´s a pity that these compact and satisfactory explanations are not scientifically rigorous, because they work as well as fables. Their problem is that they explain everything in hindsight, they don´t have the capacity of prediction. In this way, they seem like Psychoanalysis. It would be nice if there were an evolutionist justification for each old saying or proverb, like ´Think  the worst and you won´t be far wrong´, ´Spare the rod and spoil the child´,… I think it wouldn´t be very complicated, using Darwin´s theory as an excuse, to explain each topic or maxim

THE MAN WHO INVENTED MANHATTAN ( RAY LORIGA) AND CONTINENTAL DRIFT

 …with that invisible movement similar to continental drift that separates people who love each other.

Bravo for Ray Loriga! This is a brilliant example of how Science can help Literature on giving a great presence to your metaphors. You can tell, for things like this, that a good basic scientific education at school is worth it! They are also very interesting the metaphors in the opposite way, I mean, those you have to create to explain a physical phenomenon without using Maths or another Science. For instance, in Physics manuals, the waves are described as a transmission of energy without transmission of matter and someone thought it was like a rumour spreading troughout the country without nobody  moving.

So, metaphors are a kind of communicating vessels between scientists and litteratours and you can use them to give an elegant touch to a literary text and to get people without  great scientific knowledges to glimpse some complex physical phenomena

THE CUNNING MAN (ROBERTSON DAVIES) AND THE TWELVE CRANEAL NERVES

 I tried to pass the time by recalling mnemonics which had helped to get me through my medical examinations, but for so many the "clean" form gave way to the form preferred by young men in excellent health whose instruction in science and medicine had done nothing to quench their natural lusts -- did, indeed, encourage them.

Consider, for instance, the Twelve Cranial Nerves of the brainstem:

I Olfactory On Oh!

II Optic Old Oh!

III Oculomotor Olympus' Oh!

IV Trochlear Towering To

V Trigeminal Tops Touch

VI Abducens A And

VII Facial Finn Feel

VIII Acoustic And A

IX Glossopharyngeal German Girl's

X Vagus Viewed Vagina

XI Accessory Some And

XII Hypoglossal Hops Hymen!

Science students have always had the ability of taking unbelievable detours to study. I have seen for myself how some people used to do strange things to study the periodic table.Mnemonic techniques  tend to be naughty because then you reach a win-win situation, I mean, on the one hand you end up learning the twelve Cranial Nerves of the brainstem but on the other hand, you make laugh your mates. And although many of these rules have a collective authorship, there is usually someone talented for these jokes.As Gerardo Diego said about his future and hypothetical students on toasting for his position of a teacher,

And another , surely the most clever one,

will give me a definitive alias

The naughty mnemonic techniques and the definitive alias of a teacher are stuff not well appreciated in your official CV but they give you a lot of prestige with your mates. However, students of tough sciences as Physics or Chemistry are not very keen of this method, even they disregard it, as we can see in what The physic Enrico Fermi said when the subatomic particles began to increase: ´if I could remember the name of all of these particles, I´d have been a botanic´

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (CORMAC MCCARTHY) AND THE SPEED OF BULLETS COMPARED TO THE SPEED OF SOUND AND LIGHT

Even with the heavy barrel and the muzzlebrake the rifle bucked up off the rest. When he pulled the animals back into the scope he could see them all standing as before. It took the 150 grain bullet the better part of a second to get there but it took the sound twice that. They were standing looking at the plume of dust where the bullet had hit. Then they bolted. Running almost immediately at top speed out upon the barrial with the long whaang of the rifleshot rolling after them and caroming off the rocks and yawing back across the open country in the early morning solitude.

Moss felt something tug at the bag on his shoulder. The pistolshot was just a muffled pop, flat and small in the dark quiet of the town. He turned in time to see the muzzleflash of the second shot faint but visible under the pink glow of the fifteen foot high neon hotel sign. He didnt feel anything. The bullet snapped at his shirt and blood started running down his upper arm and he was already at a dead run. With the next shot he felt a stinging pain in his side. He fell down and got up again leaving Chigurh’s shotgun lying in the street. Damn, he said. What a shot. 

We can see in these two texts some topics that films usually don´t represent quite well. In the first one, some antelopes can see the dust where the bullet had hit and in less than a second after , they listen to the gunshot. So, it´s a rifle with supersonic bullets that they move faster than the sound (340 m/s). This is something usual in rifles and machine guns . I think it would be easy to representate it in films but they don´t do it because the result wouldn´t be very intuitive.

A bit more complicated is the second text because of the inclusion of the speed of light, higher than the speed of sound. If you were shot by a sniper with one of these rifles, you´d notice the following order of things: firstly, the burst of light, especially if you were shot at night. After that, you´d notice the impact of the bullet (or you´d listen to the whistling of the bullet nex to to you) and in the end, you´d listen to the ´bang!´.It´s a bit confusing and the opposite of the natural order you can imagine. I think that´s the reason why film directors don´t take the opinion of fussy people like me into account.

Cormac McCarthy is really into the topic of the speed of bullets as he also talked about it in The Road

THE LIVING FOREST (WENCESLAO FERNÁNDEZ FLORES), IRIS AND THE FRIENDS (JOHN BAYLEY) AND THE UNJUSTIFIED GREAT REPUTATION OF PLANT KINGDOM

 Trees have their fights. The big ones give shade to the small ones, which  grow quickly then in order to be the owners of their ration of sun, and on spreading the roots under the ground, there are some of them, maybe too much greedy, that hinder the rest in their legitimate determination of nourish themselves

The living forest, Wenceslao Fernández Flores

It´s depressing to see all this biologically. The Woodlandres again: Hardy´s vision of the beautiful trees battening on one another, helpless not to profit from their neighbours´ wounds and death. If the tree close beside me dies, I have that much more light and air

Iris and the friends, Jhon Bayley

The rocker Silvio used to say:´Everyone does their own thing but me, that  do my own thing´. The same is true for plants, as we can see in the two texts of this post: they try to survive in a wild way, even over the heads of their congeners. And yet, they enjoy a great and unjustified reputation compared to the animals´one. In fact, nobody tends to say things like this: ´ man is a fern for men´. And a geranium, for instance, would act like a hyena or a fox if it could. Even plants like bougainvillea or rose bush, well-regarded in Literature, would attack other plants, primarily the same kind´s ones,  if their limitations of movement didn´t prevent it

But we have an exception in this benevolent treatment of the language to plants with the verb ´to thrive´, that is what plants do since they are small. So, the next time you find a social climber workmate, don´t use animal analogies to describe him or her, you can just say, for example, ´this workmate is a vine´or ´my boss is a pothos´. In this way you enrich your vocabulary at the same time that you render justice in balancing the fame of animals and plants

WE THREE: MY ECHO, MY SHADOW AND ME ( THE INK SPOTS) AND HOW PHYSICAL PHENOMENA PROVIDE YOU WITH COMPANY

 We three, we’re all alone

Living in a memory
My echo, my shadow, and me

We three, we’re not a crowd
We’re not even company
My echo, my shadow, and me

What good is the moonlight
The silvery moonlight that shines above?
I walk with my shadow
I talk with my echo
But where is the one I love?

We three, we’ll wait for you
Even till eternity
My echo, my shadow, and me

“We three we’re all alone. Seems like we’re livin’ in a memory.
That’s my echo my shadow and me.
We three we ain’t no crowd.
Fact is we ain’t even company.
That’s my echo my shadow and me.
You know I been wonderin’ what good is the
moonlight that silvery moonlight that shines way, way up above?
Yeah, I walk with my shadow, I talk with my echo, but where is that gal that I love?”

We three, we’ll wait for you
Even till eternity
My echo, my shadow, and me

We have a song this time. I discovered it listening the fantastic podcast by BobDylan and I also found out that this song, ´My echo, my shadow and me´ was popularized by Frank Sinatra earlier.

This is the way Physics accompanies you; if you want to talk, you have your echo, which is exactly a reflection of your sound waves. With regards to the shadow, can there be anything more faithful that your own shadow? To illustrate this wonderful optical phenomenon, you are bound to remember a little kid discovering his shadow for the first time.  There are two kinds of reaction to this discovery which even are two kinds of attitude to life: some of them run away desperately and others play with it, testing their capacity of imitation.

Someone could think that Philosophy, Art or Religion are also capable to accompany: with the soul. But the soul has the problem of its controversial existence and above all, that which Douglas Coupland wrote in The Gum Thief : ´I don´t deserve a soul, yet I still have one. I know  because it hurts

ENDURING LOVE (IAN MCEWAN) AND THE LATE EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION OF EINSTEIN THEORIES

 In physics, say, a small elite of European and American initiates accepted and acclaimed Einstein’s General Theory long before the confirming observational data was in. The Theory, which Einstein presented to the world in nineteen fifteen and sixteen, made the proposition, offensive to common sense, that gravitation was simply an effect caused by the curvature of space-time wrought by matter and energy. It was predicted that light would be deflected by the gravitational field of the sun. An expedition had already been mounted to the Crimea to observe an eclipse in nineteen fourteen to test this out, but the war intervened. Another expedition set out in nineteen nineteen to two remote islands in the Atlantic. Confirmation was flashed around the world, but inaccurate or inconvenient data was overlooked in the desire to embrace the theory. More expeditions set out to observe eclipses and check Einstein’s predictions, in nineteen twenty-two in Australia, in twenty-nine in Sumatra, in thirty-six in the USSR and in forty-seven in Brazil. Not until the development of radio astronomy in the fifties was there incontrovertible experimental verification, but essentially these years of practical striving were irrelevant. The Theory was already in the textbooks from the twenties onwards. Its integral power was so great, it was too beautiful to resist.

This is one of the reasons why I don´t like teaching the scientific method as a recipe or as an inflexible guide that scientifics strictly follow. Things work in another way because we know that intuitions exist and even tricks to get where you want.  Something typical of human beings, indeed.

Ian McEwan always talks about  Science in his novels. We´ve already posted here about Saturday and Solar. In my head, I have an outline of the analogy between the structure of McEwan´s novels and Sabina´s songs, which both of them repeat again and again. But I admit that I´m not ready to develop it yet

IRIS AND HER FRIENDS (JOHN BAYLEY) AND ACCUMULATORS OF LEAD

 I never saw him start the engine, nor did I wish. I felt it would be farightening experience- but I loced watching him intenly measuring the level of the acid in each massive accumulator . At least he said it was acid and I believed him, although I was surprised the first time I watched him fill up the level from a big bottle marked 'Distilled Water'. I was too polite to point out the apparent discrepancy; and I was in any case highly respectful of acid because Mr Mills had said that if you touched it accidentaly it wpuld burn right through you

I´d dare to say he´s talking about an accumulator of lead, similar to a car battery. So, Mr Mills is not lying to little John because these accumulators  use both  distilled water and sulfuric acid. Mr  Mills was a visionary with regards to protective measures at laboratory because you can really see on every sulfuric acid jar a label with a liitle drawing of a hand pierced by a drop. I´ve always interpreted this drawing as Mr. Mills does, the drop would pierce your hand if it fell on you

SAINT MAYBE (ANNE TYLER) AND PHAGOCYTOSIS

 In his ninth-grade biology class, Ian had watched through a microscope while an amoeba shaped like a splash approached a dot of food and gradually surrounded it. Then it had moved on, wider now and blunter, distorted to accommodate the dot of food within.

As Ian accommodated, over and over, absorbing the fact of Danny’s death

This is a good example of using scientific terms in a classic comparision.

A  bitter pill to swallow is digested, by phagocytosis in this case, and you get over it when you excrete it, for keeping on with the digestive analogy

THE PAGAN RABBI ( CyNTHIA OZICK), MYRIADS ( CARLOS MARZAL) AND THE (DRUNK) DANCE OF ATOMS

 You must let me go on,' Sheindel said, and grimly went on. '"It is false history, false philosophy, and false religion which declare to us human ones that we live among Things. The arts of physics and chemistry begin to teach us differently, but their way of compassion is new, and finds few to carry fidelity to its logical and beautiful end. The molecules dance inside all forms, and within the molecules dance the atoms, and within the atoms dance still profounder sources of divine vitality. There is nothing that is Dead. There is no Non-life. Holy life subsists even in the stone, even in the bones of dead dogs and dead men. Hence in God's fecundating Creation there is no possibility of Idolatry, and therefore no possibility of committing this so-called abomination."'

Nobody is always still. The orbitals must be gone through and took up and the construction of chaos never stops. The space is displaying alive, like in Myriads, the poem by Carlos Marzal which sang Antonio Arias

On the diagonal of golden light

that frays the calmness of the air

in that ray of untouchable amber

where the space manifests alive,

the dust is dancing in disorder,

And atoms dance drunk.

Myriads from a world we cannot see

BUNKER ( TOTEKING) AND THE INNATE INCOMPETENCE OF SOME PEOPLE FOR SCIENCES

 We were unable to understand Sciences. We had tried everything. We were so incompetents for the subject that we were even useless for cheating: the teacher managed to catch us because we used to make mistakes even copying the exam from the student in front of us. Completely desperate, but with a firm attitude for not repeating a course, we decided to draw up a plan to steal the final exam of Physics. We knew a person who had been succeed: a classmate had chased a teacher to the teacher´s room and had memorized the little cubbyhole where she kept her papers. One day, due to the fact that the teacher´s room was empty and all the teachers were in their classes, he managed to be expelled of his own class because of his bad behaviour . Then, he successfully dodged the teacher who was guarding the hallway, came into the teacher´s room and ended up finding the exam in the cabinet. Of course, he shared it and all his classmates passed with good grades. And naturally as well, the teacher discovered us, deduced our modus operandi and since then, the security system of that room improved significantly

As author of this blog and as a teacher  I should fight against the notion of people being bad at Sciences by nature as well as  accepting the fact that there are people  who are bad at Music or Sports per se . But my experience confirms what Tote´s text points out. What can we do?

We are not going to insist on

TRISTAM SHANDY (LAURENCE STERNE) AND THE IDEAL ANGLE FOR ORATORY

 He stood before them with his body swayed, and bent forwards just so far, as to make an angle of 85 degrees and a half upon the plain of the horizon;——which sound orators, to whom I address this, know very well, to be the true persuasive angle of incidence;—in any other angle you may talk and preach;—’tis certain,—and it is done every day;—but with what effect,—I leave the world to judge!

The necessity of this precise angle of 85 degrees and a half to a mathematical exactness,—does it not shew us, by the way,—how the arts and sciences mutually befriend each other?

This angle is really important and you´d better not abuse of it. Between the Moonwalker by Michael Jackson and backing away from someone or dodging a bullet in Matrix, there are lots of intermediate situations. In my opinion, the people who use the angle of 85 degrees are usually a bit annoying and their breath is likely to smell badly. Anyway, as the text itself says, what a good example of how well Art and Science support each other

TO DIE EQUALLY ( RAFAEL REIG) AND GALILEO´S PRINCIPLE OF RELATIVITY

 He told me that one time, the rear admiral William Parry, explorer of the Artic, went to the north in his dog-driven sled. He advanced easily for several hours, but at nightfall when checking the latitude, he found himself further south from the point he had left

-        How is that possible?- I asked, amazed

-       Elementary,  dear Ochoa.. He didn´t know he was moving forward above a huge ice floe which was swept southward by the current, with greater velocity than his dogs could reach, they must have been Siberian huskies . The same happens to you. The ground you consider firm, diverts back to the past. No matter how much you advance, it takes you back to the start point

This principle, which inspired Einstein in his Relativity Theory, establishes the importance of the observer position. Everyone who has watched how a cow moves backwards through a train window has verified it. To fully understand a movement, you have to have sort of kinematic empathy and put yourself in the standpoint of the observer. This way of putting yourself in the shoes of your counterpart should be follow in others aspects of life.

CHERRY ( MARY KARR) AND ANOTHER ARGUMENT TO CONVINCE GIRLS TO STUDY SCIENTIFIC DEGREES

 His final sentence, pronounced just at the door in front of the administrative staff, says like this: I can assure you, without Maths, you´ll end up being a vulgar prostitute. (Later on, you´ll find out that most of the girls had to hear the title of ´vulgar prostitute´, while the boys had to face with the ´vulgar criminal´)

These are the alternatives  which used to establish the school principal where Mary Karr studied. Without Maths, vulgar prostitute, there are not intermediate situations, le t’s say a classical philology for example. We do not know whether this pioneer's eccentric and radical method of motivation in the fight against the gender gap would succeed.

GLOBAL WARMING ( DANIEL RUIZ) AND THE THICKNESS OF THE OZONE LAYER

 The plane keeps going up, overtaking blocks of clouds, until the sea and the land are barely noticed down below, there is just a bed of greenish and cyano colours, a kind and quiet seat. In a short while, they´ll reach the maximum height, around twelve thousand metres, with an outside temperature about fifty degrees below zero.  Very close to there, just five kilometres higher, the ozone layer is located. Between the km fifteen and fifty, that zone of the stratosphere is displayed, that which concentrates the 90 per cent of the ozone from the atmosphere, absorbing the most part of the high-frequency ultraviolet radiations. It is imperceptible, with  a thickness just under five milimetres, but its  effect is decisive for skin and ocular protection of people. Like from here, as well, is imperceptible the effect of global warming.

So finite  the ozone layer is !, and even thinner  if it were under normal pressure on the Earth's surface. Very weak, very dim, just 5mm; don't even think of throwing deodorant or hairsprya on a plane.  The certainty that our skin health or the climatic stability of our planet depends on a 5-millimeter shield gives very little security, in fact.

THE NAME I´M SAYING NOW (ANTONIO SOLER), THE TRANSLUCENT BELL JAR (ANDRÉS TRAPIELLO) AND A GOOD METAPHOR ABOUT SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS

 With the first ones I saw worse; distant things also got bent, and with the second ones, it was the same. With others I just saw  blurred,  hazy things, and so I kept trying while Montoya would open drawers and look at paintings without being quiet; and I would see him sometimes very far away, other times with his head in a place and his body elsewhere, or submerged in water. And suddenly, when I put on one of those glasses and opened my eyes, I saw everything different, Montoyas´face, the painting he was looking at and the glasses Hidalgo had in his hands, and it was really like everything had been removed from the bottom of the sea, and I was afraid because it seemed as if I emerged from some place where I had always been  hidden and now I was out of my hideout, exposed. I was told that on putting on the glasses, my eyes were wide open, they became bigger and my pupils seemed to almost touch the lenses. That was what they told me, and that was what I thought on looking at myself in a mirror, that my eyes were some fish stuck to the glass of their fish bowl staring at the world

The Name I´m Saying Now, Antonio Soler

Albano was a skinny, small-framed, and short-sighted man, thus endowed with very big glasses which exaggeratedly enlarged his eyes. Those enormous eyes observed the word with veiled astonishment. He looked through the spectacles just like a red sea bream would from inside its aquarium; and he moved in this world like one of those taciturn fish that swims around in circles all day without knowing what  they are after, woolgathering

The Translucent Bell Jar, Andrés Trapiello

As a person with deep myopia, I think it´s a right analogy;   you  see as if you were underwater. To be honest, I can´t check wether this is true, because I haven´t opened my eyes under the water for ages just because  my contacts would fall off.

The refraction index of vitreous humour is very similar to that of the water , but different from the one of the air, where our outlook is necessarily more frequent  

T

NUNS AND SOLDIERS (IRIS MURDOCH) AND A PARAGRAPH WITH A MISHMASH FULL OF SCIENTIFIC JARGON

He felt extremely quiet, but absolutely stretched as if space were bending and he were bending with it. Everything seemed to vanish including his own personality. He was a tiny scrap of being, a particle, and yet also he was the surrounding area which seemed infinite. He was an atom, an electron, a proton, a point in empty space. He was transparent. It was this transparency which made him feel invisible. He was empty, he was clean, he was nothing. Yet at the same time he was refined energy, pure activity, pure being. The experience was not in itself painful, though frightful pain somehow existed too, nearby, half hidden, sometimes like a black hole, sometimes like a dense mass of indestructible matter.

Iris Murdoch isn´t very prone to introduce scientific matters in her novels, she is more into Philosophy. But she has loosen up here: protons, electrons, black holes, atoms…they are all welcome so we can bring this author to our blog. 

THE INNOCENT ANTHROPOLOGIST (NIGEL BARLEY) AND CURATIVE PROPERTIES OF THE GUAVA

 Some kind soul at the mission at N’gaoundere had passed on to me the secret of curing hepatitis – a decoction of guava leaves in hot water. It certainly seemed to help more than anything else. Later I learned that a German pharmaceutical company was testing a drug based upon just this compound.

Poor Nigel! He had a really rough time in his hamlet of Cameroon. In the end, he had to have faith in traditional or alternatives methods, like everyone desperate does. The guava must have many virtues because if you write down in Google ´guava for…´ the predictive keyboard ends the sentence with ´diahorrea, anaemia, diabetes, flu, hair loss,…´ and many other illnesses that poor Nigel was bound to suffer from. So, if I had to go to some city in Cameroon by any chance, I´d look for a hut next to a guava.

HOMO ZAPIENS (VIKTOR PELEVIN) AND THE MYTH OF THE RESONANCE IN BRIDGES

-         - Do you know what resonance is?

-         - More  or less

-         - Well then: if a battalion of soldiers marches across a bridge in step, then the bridge can easily collapse- there have been cases- and so when a colum crosses a bridge, the soldiers are ordered to march out of step

It´s a very ugly thing to point out mistakes, something that we don´t want to do in this blog. Ever worse it´s to show exagerations like this, beautiful but fake. Bridges like Tacoma´s felt down because os several causes, not only resonance.

Lont time ago before Tacoma, they said a bridge in Brougthon collapsed because soldieres were marching on it, and Napoleon was known for asking his soliers to march out when they cross a bridge.