LINCOLN HIGHWAY (AMOR TOWLES) AND THE ATTENUATION OF WAVES

 

And this was my favorite rocking chair, said Woolly to no one.

He was standing on the porch, a little while after Duchess had gone to the general store. Giving the chair a push, he listened to the thwapping of its rockers as it rocked back and forth, noting how each individual thwap came closer and closer together as the back and forths became smaller and smaller, until they stopped altogether.

The loss of energy due to friction processes makes the amplitud of the oscillation of the rocking chair lesser and lesser. It´s like a tennis ball released from high. The ball is loosing height until stopping on the floor. With friction forces acting, the mechanical energy is being lost. When the armonic motion moves into the space, this is why the wave intensuty become lower when get away from focus

How many readers have read the whole paragraph? As it were a wave, the number of readers have been decreasing while I was inserting technical terms.

 

THE GIRAFFE'S NECK (JUDITH SCHALANSKY) AND THE HETEROTROPHIC NATURE OF HUMAN BEINGS

 Plants turned energy-poor materials into energy-rich. Animals did the reverse. We just weren’t autotrophic. Day after day, in every little leaf, in every tiny chloroplast, the miracle that kept us all alive occurred. Epidermis, cuticle, spongy mesophyll. If you were green you wouldn’t have to eat anything, you wouldn’t have to go shopping, you wouldn’t have to work. You wouldn’t have to do anything at all. You would just have to lie in the sun for a bit, drink some water, absorb carbon dioxide, and everything, really everything, would be fine. Chloroplasts beneath the skin. It would be ­wonderful!

 

I couldn´t disagree more about the author´s thesis. I don´t want chloroplasts under my skin and that wouldn´t be wonderful. When you say ´plant life´, there´s rightly a negative connotation. I say hurrah for heterotrophic organisms with their pleasurable activities!

Nevertheless, it has been written and fantasized about this for years. There´s another novel, Solar by Ian McEwan, with no exactly the same plot, but with a kind of MacGuffin about something similar.

JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI (GEOFF DYER) AND TON AS AN APROXIMATE MEASURE

 The wood was stacked, chopped, weighed and carried down to the water again, probably weighed again. Each cremation required a ton of wood. Ton in the sense of a lot, not a specific unit of measurement

 

I think it´s an subtle clarification of the term ton, unnecessary, but subtle. Nowadays, a ton is equal to a thousand kilos, but its name and its origin are quite confusing because of its relation with the whimsical English imperial units.

The text could have told us about the diferences between a literal ton and a metaphoric one. Curiously, when teenagers, in their current language, say literally a ton, they mean both meanings, because literally is used as figuratively now.

A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW (AMOR TOWLES) AND PRIME NUMBERS THEOREM

 “The list of prime numbers begins with two, three, and five, as you say. But prime numbers grow increasingly rare the larger they become. So it is one thing to land upon a seven or eleven. But to land upon a one thousand and nine is another thing altogether. Can you imagine identifying a prime number in the hundreds of thousands . . . ? In the millions . . . ?”

 

It´s clear that the larger a number is, the more difficult is to find out whether this number meets the requirements of being a prime number. I´d dare to say, using a quirky analogy, that it´s also harder and harder to find a mate as you become older.

And yet, as a very well-known theorem by Euclides says, there´s an infinite number of prime numbers. So, according to my analogy, there´s hope for singles.

THE TEMPTATION OF FAILURE (JULIO RAMÓN RIBEYRO) AND LIGHT POLLUTION

 On the terrace of my bedroom, with lights off, in midnight, watching the firmament. Startling spectacle. In the clear sky, millions of stars. Impossible to orient yourself. Sense of vertigo, of dread. Why? An artificial satellite passes.

I´m using this post, in spite of its forced relation with Science, to talk about a diary that I really enjoyed and I like its title too. Someone wrote once that Ribeyro used to tittle his books badly, but I think ´the temptation of failure´is a good tittle and it also works the reverse, I mean, ´the failure of temptation´.

It has to be difficult to see satellites nowadays because of this kind of light pollution which has so many negative effects in some ecosystems, besides the waste of energy. But, of course, artificial lighting has their good points too.

These days I´m watching good films in the summer cinema of the council of Seville, like ´The sun of the future´or ´Saben aquell?´, but if the film wasn´t a good one, I´d be able to look up the screen and see the stars in the sky.

 

NOBODY IS EVER MISSING (CATHERINE LACEY) AND PERCENTAGES

 They looked and made quick calculations: a 7 percent chance of con artistry, 4 percent chance of prostitution, 50 percent chance of mental instability, 20 percent chance of obnoxiousness, a 4 percent chance of violent behavior.

 

One of the aims of this blog is to show how science language can be integrated in literature in a nice and charm way, as in this good example that looks like a Kiko Veneno´s song. So, it´s out of my mind to look for mistakes or bloomers. But, if I wanted to take the unpleasent role of fussy proofreader, (something that, as a teacher, I try to avoid on my holidays), I´d check whether the addition of all the percentages is like it must be, ie, 100.

THE ENCHANTED WANDERER (NIKOLÁIS S. LESKOV) AND CAPTIVITY STRESS

 They were terribly headstrong. Half of them would even drop dead rather than submit to training: they stand there in the yard—they’re bewildered and even shy away from the walls, and only keep their eyes turned to the sky, like birds. You’d even feel pity looking at them, because you see how the dear heart would like to fly away, save that he has no wings … And from the very start he won’t eat or drink for anything, neither oats nor water from the trough, and so he pines away, until he wears himself out completely and drops dead. Sometimes we lost half of what we spent, especially on Kirghiz horses. They love steppe freedom terribly.

 I think captivity stress is like an extreme and phatologycal version of freedom. Like withdrawal would be to hangover. Theoretically, huma being is inmune to this illness, but there is the famois sentence by Pascal: all the human problems come from the fact of not being able to stay motionless in a room.

We know from COVID about the negative effects of a lockdown. But we hace some ecpections; Newton made some of his best contributions to Science during a lockdown in a farm

THE WHITES (RICHARD PRICE) AND HEMATOLOGY

 “All kinds of vitamin deficiency, B12, folic acid, iron, et cetera, thrombocytosis, that’s excess platelets, thrombocytopenia, that’s low platelets, polycythemia, excess red blood cells, anemia, pernicious or otherwise, which is low red blood cells, leukocytosis, excess white blood cells, neutropenia, low white blood cells, all kinds of coagulation disorders, blood vessel abnormalities, hemophilia, scurvy, leukemia, acute and chronic, an encyclopedia of various syndromes, genetic or otherwise . . .”

Billy stared at him, then looked to Stacey.

“He’s just a really good hypochondriac,” she said.

The well informed hypochondriac answers with this enumeration of problems related to bloog when he is asked about reasons to visit a hematologist. Blood belongs to the myterious group of no newtonian fluids

 

INFINITE JEST ( DAVID FOSTER WALLACE) AND THE OWN STIMULATION OF THE REWARD CIRCUIT

 

His head immobilized with some straps, the test Subject had viewed the Entertainment

twice at gratis, without the application of any motivational inquiry. For inquiry

into the degree of motivation the cartridge will induce, M. Broullîme had

rolled himself blindfolded into the room of storage holding an orthopedic saw

and informed the Subject of the test that, as of beginning now, each subsequent

reviewing of the Entertainment now would have the price of one digit from the

Subject’s extremities. And handed the Subject the orthopedic saw in question,

also. Broullîme’s explanation to Fortier was that thus a matrix could be created

to compute the statistical relation between (n) the number of times the Subject

replayed the Entertainment and (t) the amount of time he took to decide and

remove a digit for each subsequent (n+I) viewing. The goal was to conrm with

statistical assurance the Subject’s desire for viewing and reviewing as incapable

of satiation There could be no index of diminishing satisfaction as in the

econometrics of normal U.S.A. commodities. For the samizdat Entertainment’s

allure to be macro-politically lethal, the ninth digit of extremities had to come

o as quickly and willingly as the second. Broullîme, personally he had some

skepticism about this. But this was Broullîme’s function in his role in the cell:

expertise in combination with skepticism de coeur

There were some interesting talks in the last ´Pint of Science´in Seville. I attended at one by the doctor Esperanza Rodríguez called ´Everything I like is illegal, inmoral or makes you get fat´ like the tittle of a terrific song by Pata Negra. In this talk, Esperanza told us about the Olds and Milner experiment, which was very important for studying the brain circuit of pleasure. In this famous experiment, some rats had access to a button directly connected to an electrode that activated the pleasure in their own brains. The rats pressed the button up to 700 times per hour and even some of them ended up dying because they gave up eating.

In this post, we are told about an extreme and gory versión of that experiment: to mutilate oneself a finger whenever you want to see again this samizdat or Entertaiment, which is the McGuffin of this amazing novel.

 

THE GHOSTS RIDERS OF ORDEBEC (FRED VARGAS) AND ORINE AS FERTILISER

 Lucio nodded, seeming to appreciate the macabre balance sheet, and uncapped the beer bottles, levering them against a branch.

‘When you piss against it, you’re damaging its roots,’ Adamsberg protested, ‘and now you’re tearing off its bark.’

‘Not at all,’ Lucio retorted indignantly. ‘Urine’s full of nitrates, best thing there is for compost. Why d’you think I piss against the tree? Nitrates, that’s why, did you know that?’

‘I don’t know much, Lucio.’

 

In this case, folk wisdom is near the truth, because human orine contains urea, a substance that is produced industrially as a fertilizer. In 1828 Whöler was able to synthesize it artificially in a laboratory for the first time, messing up the vitalist theory. This theory defended that certain compounds were only able to be produced by living organisms

This Lucio is also right about nitrates, because the urea is a nitrogen compound whose symbol is CH₄N₂O

THE FUTURE FUTURE (ADAM THIRLWELL) AND MYCORRHIZAL SYMBIOSIS

 What then happened was that new interpreters emerged, to communicate between the soil and the trees. Little mushrooms appeared at the base of each tree trunk. First there were chanterelles everywhere, yellow among the black earth. Underground, the threads from these fungi grew into the hairs of the roots, so that they couldn’t be separated. Everything was a blur and tangle. The threads gathered little messages from the soil and the rock. These mushrooms were new in the forest. No one had seen them before. The trees fed the fungi their sugary drinks and in exchange the fungi diverted away from the trees anything they thought might be harmful to them, the toxins or metals, and when they had gathered enough of these elements they transformed into ever crazier varieties of mushroom: porcini, cepes, boletes. Everything was a form of thinking and comparison. If water fell in one area, too far for the trees to reach, it could be transported back to the trees through the filaments of the fungi. It was an education, a little process of apparent self-assembly – the way a group of people might take over a disused gas station and somehow transform it into a cinema for the benefit of the whole community.

What could be the utility of thid humble collection of texts? I would love that they appear as an introduction to the chapters of a Science book, as the same way as some novels begin with a quote.

Such a good description of the micorrizic symbiosis! It seems like the text belongs to The Living Forest, by Wenceslea Fernández Flores. An hyperbolic critic said that the author was the new Martin Amis, but I disagree with he, because thatś much to say

 

THE MONSTERS OF TEMPLETON (LAUREN GROFF) AND THE RABBIT TEST

 What did she know about precautions? Vi awoke over the next month with vomit already in her mouth, and felt lethargic and heavy and sick. Even before they injected the bunny with her urine and watched it die, Vivienne knew.

 

In the recent past, this test was very popular, even it was used the expression ´the bunny died´ to name euphemistically a pregnancy. As the text says, the test consists in injecting urine from the possible pregnant woman in a rabbit, in a doe rabbit specifically. If the woman is pregnant, the presence of the hCG hormone will cause changes in the rabbit organism. But the rabbit doesn´t die because of this injection, like the text may show, but it has to be sacrified and dissected by a doctor in order to check wether there is a pregnancy or not. It may seem a very rudimentary method and something like an archaic ritual, but its reliability was quite high, around 98%.

MEN IN MY SITUATION (PER PETTERSON) AND ECO-ANXIETY

 Of the roads. Of the cars, of Mazda and Ford, of Opel, of any brand at all, of manuals and automatics, of petrol-powered cars and cars that were diesel powered, of quiet-running cars and cars that spewed coal-black smoke out over the tarmac in a miserable tail from their exhaust pipes. I hadn’t worked out how much carbon dioxide I emitted on these trips. It was probably a criminal amount, and honestly, it bothered me, I thought about it often, I lay awake at night counting litres of fuel, counting cubic metres in my sleep, but what could I do, should I take pills, how damaging was the pharmaceutical industry, certainly very damaging, though I didn’t know with what substance or how; toxic runoff into the ground, crap in the air, or just narcotically destructive in general.

In this blog we like to keep us up-to-date about scientific neologisms. Letś consider eco-anxiety, which symptoms are well described in this text. Pavese said that a suicide was a shy killer, so in the same way we could say that people who suffer ecoanxiety are like expandable hypochondriacs. As you can see, itñs a very first world problem. Everything contaminates, everything wastes energy, even a simple Google search does it. Indeed, I have just searched it on Google and “one only one Google search is equivalent to about 0.2 grams of CO2”

 

GREAT EXPECTATIONS (CHARLES DICKENS) AND THE INFLUENCE OF WIND IN SONIC PROPAGATION

 As I shut it, Saint Paul’s, and all the many church-clocks in the City - some leading, some accompanying, some following - struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.

 

How useful for the daily life is to have a slight knowledge of the basics of Science! Without reaching the levels of McGyver, here are a few tips about wind so that you can take the most of them: you shouldn´t urinate against wind ( all the boys learn it by scientific method). And the wind has also influence in the sound. Everyone who lives around a futbol stadium knows that with wind-assisted, the sound gets better. You listen to it stronger and better, or less flawed, in Dickens´words. This is because of a type of diffraction that alters less the sonic waves

WHEN WE CEASED TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD (BENJAMÍN LABATUT) AND THE EFFECTS OF CYANIDE

 The effects of cyanide are so swift that there is but one historical account of its flavour, left behind in the early twenty-first century by M.P: Prasad, an Indian goldsmith, thirty-two years old, who managed to write three lines after swallowing it: “Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid,” said the note found next to his body in the hotel room he had rented for the purpose of taking his own life.

Itś very short the bibliograhy about the effects of cyanide. Likewise, there are very few records about the effects og guillotine during French Revolution. It really atracts my atention the fact that this Indian goldsmith, hopeless as he was to commit suicide, found time to think about Science and posteriry. He had his reason, the poor guy. Pavese, anothesuicide, used to say tha a suicide was a shy killer. May the bitterness of cyanide be recorded, in case someone was cuirious about it

 

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD (JENNIFER EGAN) AND ENTANGLED PARTICLES

 And with a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of so-called entangled particles, that same pulse of recognition reaches every part of the restaurant at once, even tables so distant from ours that there is simply no way they can see us.1

11. I’ve engaged in a bit of sophistry, here, suggesting that entangled particles can explain anything when, to date, they themselves have not been satisfactorily explained

 

I like this nice confession by the author because it shows how the writers sometimes use Science to brag adorning their metaphors. In fact, with a complicated and abstract topic like quantum mechanics, it should be just the opposite, I mean, instead of being a source of metaphors, it would be neccessary to use clever similes to understand their own concepts, because many of them are neither intituive nor familiar. I see Quantum Physics more like a recipient of similes than a donor.

And what a beatiful word is sophistry, isn´t it?