RUNAWAY (MARTÍN LUCÍA) AND FLUIDS DYNAMICS

 The belly and the top of the legs got soaked everytime the wind changed its direction and  contradicted the Universal Law of Gravitation. The wind maded drops moving almost horizontally, flooding what should be protected by human invention and Physics

Fluid Dynamic is one of the ugliest branch  of Physics and it´s very unpleasant to study with its Reynolds numbers and others. In general, the more Science simplifies the object to study, the more beautiful it is. This is why Engineering degrees are ugly to study if you compare them with pure Sciences and their famous simplifications.

With wind, water doesn´t behave itself in an ideal way, but willy-nilly. So, it´s difficult to model it using  Physics. Then, things like  the rain upwards may happen. It´s very common in Cádiz in days of levante wind, by the way.

This post is also useful to recommend this novel, the first one in putting the VAR tecnology in Literature

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION (OTESSA MOSHFEGH) AND THE CONCEPT OF VACUUM

 “Mind over matter, people say. But what is matter, anyway? When you look at it under a microscope, it’s just tiny bits of stuff. Atomic particles. Subatomic particles. Look deeper and deeper and eventually you’ll find nothing. We’re mostly empty space. We’re mostly nothing. Tra-la-la. And we’re all the same nothingness. You and me, just filling the space with nothingness. We could walk through walls if we put our minds to it, people say. What they don’t mention is that walking through a wall would most likely kill you. Don’t forget that.”

First of all, these words come from the mouth of an extravagant ‘psychologist’ who in fact looks more like a witch or a fortune teller­. Vacuum has always been a controversial concept, not only from a scientific perspective. Torricelli experiment, so simple, so smart, proves the existence of  vacuum. But the text doesn´t speak about vacuum as a no-matter space, which is what Torricelli showed, but about the emptiness inherent to the matter, a gap, a hole inside the matter. And that´s what Rutherford exposed with his famous gold-foil experiment. Furthermore, the woman in the text is fully right when she warns us that we´ll probably die if we go through a wall

NEVER MIND (EDWARD ST AUBYN) AND THE RAINBOW OF THE ROAD

 He had read about rainbows in a soppy picture book, but then he had started to see them in the streets in London after it rained, when the petrol from the cars stained the tarmac and the water fanned out in broken purple, blue, and yellow rings.

It´s not exactly a rainbow, but we all have seen it on a rainy day on the road. The description in the text is very good, rings are formed, not  archs, the complete circumference. This effect is produced because petrol, like oil, is immiscible with water and stays upon a puddle on the road. Then, a triple layer air-petrol-water appears, which produces a game of refractions that separates the light into its colours

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE (SHIRLEY JACKSON) AND THE TOXICITY OF THE AMANITA PHALLOIDES

 “The Amanita phalloides,” I said to him, “holds three different poisons. There is amanitin, which works slowly and is most potent. There is phalloidin, which acts at once, and there is phallin, which dissolves red corpuscles, although it is the least potent. The first symptoms do not appear until seven to twelve hours after eating, in some cases not before twenty-four or even forty hours. The symptoms begin with violent stomach pains, cold sweat, vomiting—”

Careful with this mushroom, whose nicknames are green hemlock, fungus of death or death cap. These nicknames themselves make you mistrust them.

With regards to the three different poisons, I don´t know if you can choose one or the three of them act simultaneously. If I had to choose, I´d have doubts between phallin or phalloidin. But you must know that if you eat it, you´ll be on the list of victims of this mushroom, and there are two emperors on this list, Claudio and Carlos VI.

And Wikipedia says that ´according to some reports, its taste is nice´…

THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE (MAGGIE O´FARRELL) AND THE SPEED OF GLACIERS

 Elina sits in traffic on Pentonville Road.  The cars ahead of her stretch out like a glacier of chrome and glass.

I think both of them, the metaphor and the hyperbole, work pretty well so, I  have nothing to correct here. And this is perfect because I´m on my holidays and we, the teachers, need to disconnect from work avoiding  telling off  or correcting anything.

I knew glaciers move very slowly but I have found out in a Google search that their average speed is 50  meters per year. Really frustrating for a jam, indeed.

´A  glacier of chrome and glass´ sounds good, even like a line in a song by Javier Krahe.

FIVE AND ME (ANTONIO OREJUDO) AND THE ARISTOCRACY OF SCIECE

 Quintin always believed he was a genius who was going to renovate Maths. His fathers´ dream was that he studied aeronautic engineering.  That’s why,  his resolution to study Pure Maths disappointed his father. He asked him why did he do it and Quentin answered that applied sciences was for weak people; Pure Maths were the aristocracy of Science

In the last post we talked about the reciprocal misgivings between Science and Arts. In this post Arts are not even involved. As a chemist, I have to admit that the difficulty of  an university degree is directly proportional to the contents of Math in it.  Although we are not only told about difficulty here, but the plebeian aspect in the fact of looking for an application in everything you learn.  The romantic vision of Knowledge for its own sake is not actually exclusive of teoric or pure Mathematics because degrees as classical philology for example,  share this vision.

THE KINGDOM (JO NESBO), WE WERE THE MULVANEYS (JOYCE CAROL OATES) AND BEAUTY

 'Symmetry,’ she said at last. ‘The golden ratio. Shapes that imitate nature. Complementary colours. Harmonising notes.’

I nodded, relieved that the conversation was back on the rails again but knowing I’d have a hard time forgiving myself for that slip.

‘Or in architecture, where you have functional shapes,’ she went on. ‘Which are actually the same as shapes that imitate nature. The hexagonal cells in a beehive. The beaver’s regulatory dam. The fox’s network of tunnels. The woodpecker’s hole of a nest which becomes a home for other birds. None of these are built to be beautiful, and yet they are. A house that’s good to live in is beautiful. It’s actually as simple as that.’

Symmetry, which is a geometric concept, is essential to define Beauty. Therefore, Beauty would be something objective, outward and superior to human beings. Pure Maths are  this way somehow .  This is something you can withhold from  Nesbo´s text. All the attempts of breaking this harmony in Music, Painting,  can’t help being   a naughty childish behaviour.  Not only is there the famous Golden Ratio named in the text but  also there is another proportion in the Alhanmbra ,called Arabian  by some people , which appears in most of the rectangles of this monument. Or, maybe, it´s just the opposite, who knows,  and so  Beauty is the quality most affected by  subjectivity and full of prejudices , as it is said in this passage  We were the Mulvaneys, by  Joyce Carol Oates:

Of course, he knew beauty doesn't exist. He hadn't known then but he knew now. Beauty is a matter of perspective, subjectivity. Cultural prejudice. You require a human eye, a human brain, a human vocabulary. In nature, there's nothing. 

Still, beauty gives comfort. Who knows why?

OLIVE KITTERIDGE ( ELIZABETH STROUT) AND THE BIOCHEMISTRY OF ASPIRIN

 His smile would linger as he arranged his bottles, typed up labels. Denise’s nature attached itself to his as easily as aspirin attached itself to the enzyme COX-2; Henry moved through his day pain free

This is a bold metaphor, because not many people know how the active ingredient of aspirin works. By contrast, if you use good similes, you can give us the feeling of reminding  more than discovering something unknown.

The enzyme COX-2  allows the appearance of pain and inflammation and aspirin inhibits them.

Henry manages to pass the day without pain at the expense of his own personality, which ends inhibited, and I´m not sure that this is what the author wants to mean

Anyway, it´s great to see that someone takes the risk of using this daring metaphor

I´m also going to use this post to recommend this novel about the wanderings of a dull teacher of Maths ( redundancy?) of which there is a TV series that I haven´t seen yet

LITTLE FAITH (NICKOLAS BUTLER) AND THE INACCURAY OF METEOROLOGISTS

 These meteorologists don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground anyway,” Otis said. “I worked in academia over half a century. Meteorologists had to be some of the least respected scientists on campus. At the end of the day, they look at their fancy radars, they punch in their projections on a computer, shake some chicken bones on a table, light a black candle, and say a hundred Hail Marys. Somebody could sneeze in Seattle and disrupt their forecast. This could be a whole lot of nothing. Go home and wish for warm weather

Poor meteorologists! They are not well considered.  This text tries to take off any scientific bass to this part of knowledge. Sometimes, as the referees, meteorologists have been insulted, and their mothers too. It´s difficult to stand that pressure, not everybody is prepared to be a meteorologist. Because not only farmers are attentive to the weather forecast, also the amateur sport men, or the Brotherhoods of Holy Week. Now, with our mobiles, we want the information in real time ( and I wonder if there be a virtual time).  But also people tend to say ´three minutes per clock ´and I guess it´s to distinguish them  from the minutes of a thermometer

I have checked that it always rains less than my mobile says, I think it may be a strategy to keep us happy. Like when my mobile lies to me, with the help of Google maps, about the time that takes me to get to a place by bike, it always takes me more.

My favourite weather man has always been José Antonio Maldonado, who is Sevilla FC supporter and he used to sit next to me in Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán stadium.

ORFEO ( RICHARD POWERS) AND BRAVO FOR CHEMISTRY!

 At fifteen, he fell in love with chemistry. The pattern language of atoms and orbitals made sense in a way that little else but music did. Balancing chemical equations felt like solving a Chinese puzzle box. The symmetries hidden in the columns of the periodic table had something of the Jupiter’s grandeur. And a person might even make a living with the stuff.

I´m about to start my Chemistry term showing this text to my students, because it´s full of Chemistryphilia, word that I´m inventing in opposition to Chemistryphobia, which gives to the chemist  work all  evils, and it´s a decent job, even could be an art, like Juncal used to say to Búfalo.

I think that ´balancing chemical equations´ should have been translated by ´adjusting chemical equations´.

To round off this cute image of Chemistry, or this ´whitewash´as it´s said nowadays, we can add another passage of this interesting novel that equates  Chemistry and Music in several times. Both of them have developed an own language, for example.

Freshman year exhilarated him. He sat in the auditorium alongside four hundred other chemistry students while the lecturer scribbled down blackboards full of spirit writing from the world inside this one. The labs—titrating, precipitating, isolating—were like learning to play a wayward but splendid new instrument. Matter was thick with infolded mysteries waiting to be discovered. Coming from the lab, stinking of camphor, fish, malt, mint, musk, sperm, sweat, and urine, Els smelled the heady scent of his own future.

TAKE ME HOME ( JESÚS CARRASCO) AND MOURNING AS A BLACK HOLE

 The mother beside him, stooped over, decreased by her own mourning. Her closeness is a black hole which consumes his energy.

I find appropriate this image, in a real mourning there is nothing else. The one in mourning, suffers inwards and decreases himself, as we are told in the text, and all in the surround end up being absorbed by the mourning. It doesn´t let escape anything, as if it were a black hole.

One of the most fascinating conversations I´ve ever heard in my life was in a bus in Seville. It was between two gipsy girls, quite young both of them. One of them was explaining to the other how to cook when you are in mourning and she was telling her how inappropriate was to add peppers, red or green, to the lentils. I would have felt like listening much more, but I arrived to my bus stop and I had to get off