THE SIGN OF THE FOUR (SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE) AND LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS

“Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,” said Holmes. “He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician. But do I see a handkerchief? Surely there is a white flutter over yonder.”

We can say the topic of this text is the application of Law of Large Numbers to human behaviour. And this is precisely the aim that many Social Sciences are dreaming of, in order to achieve prestige.

You cannot foretell what you will get when you flip a coin once, but thanks to this law, you can indeed delimit the number of heads or tails if you throw it 5000 times.

INCENDIES (DENIS VILLENEUVE) AND PURE MATHEMATICS

We haven´t posted a film on this blog for long time. So, here it is Incendies, a Canadian film that everyone who has watched it, is looking forward to discussing about with someone.

I recommended it to my sister and she hasn´t forgiven me yet, because she didn´t like it at all. This scene shows why mathematicians are so weird and besides, we´re told about Siracusa conjecture, although very few mathematicians know it by this name.

GENERATION A (DOUGLAS COUPLAND) AND SCIENTISTS´ WORK

The first thing I want to say is that I don´t share the main idea of the following text. And I´m not even willing to admit that it may be an exageration. In spite of that, and for being refutated, I post it here.

So, because of his near-crippling jealousy, our young scientist found it hard to concentrate on his specific laboratory task, which was this: he aimed laser pulses through a micromisted protein broth. This allowed him to isolate and separate specific proteins within. It was a job that needed much skill and decades of education but was about as fun as stocking cardboard boxes at a Body Shop. The scientist wondered if his entire youth had been wasted in attaining what was essentially an ultra-high-tech McJob

THE LITTLE PRINCE ( ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY) AND THE MOVEMENT OF PLANETS

“I am very fond of sunsets. Come, let us go look at a sunset now.”

“But we must wait,” I said.

“Wait? For what?” “For the sunset. We must wait until it is time.”

At first you seemed to be very much surprised. And then you laughed to yourself. You said to me: “I am always thinking that I am at home!”

Just so. Everybody knows that when it is noon in the United States the sun is setting over France. If you could fly to France in one minute, you could go straight into the sunset, right from noon. Unfortunately, France is too far away for that. But on your tiny planet, my little prince, all you need do is move your chair a few steps. You can see the day end and the twilight falling whenever you like...

“One day,” you said to me, “I saw the sunset forty-four times!”

I first heard of The Little Prince in the Spanish TV series Blue Summer. There, a child asked his father what he was able to see in the famous drawing: a hat or a snake. Of course, the father saw a hat and that made the child huff.

Both this book and that series transmit the idea that adult people are a bit stupid, just for being adults. I myself admit and recognize the superiority of childhood, but I think you can show it in a more elegant way.

With regards to the scientific comment, apart from whether the median density of the planet could generate a gravity field for the little prince, I can see another problem. The relative distances and perspectives in such a small planet make us wonder whether it is possible that this planet (named asteroid B612) could create sunsets. But these words come from an unpleasant adult, with no fantasy and no imagination.

MILO MURPHY´S LAW, THE THREE STATES OF MATTER AND THE DIFFICULTIES INHERENT TO SCIENCES TEACHING

The teacher does her best trying to explain a classic example, the chemical reaction between vinegar (dilute acetic acid) and soda (sodium bicarbonate) to generate carbon dioxide gas. It´s an endotermic reaction indeed, but with Milo is always a disaster.

NaHCO₃(s) + CH₃COOH(l) → CO₂(g) + H₂O(l) + Na+(aq) + CH₃COO-(aq)

with s = solid, l = liquid, g = gas, aq = aqueous or in water solution

She overcomes several mishaps but ends up having the leading role in a pretty cool video with the David Bowie style

ARROW IN THE BLUE (ARTHUR KOESTLER) AND SPEED IN INERTIAL FRAMES OF REFERENCE

The content of the chapter I was reading is as follows: As the cannon-ball carrying the explorers towards the moon travel through the space, one of the animals aboard, a little fox-terrier, dies. After some hesitasion the explorers decide to throw the corpse out through the air-tighy hatch. This is don; and then the passengers, looking through the thick glass window, realise to their horror that the body of the dog is flying on a course parallel to their own through the space. They thought it would drop away, but the carcass share the momentum of the cannon-ball, just as an object thrown from the window of a moving railway carriage, shares the momentum of the train; and outside teh aerth´s atmosphere there is no friction to act as a brake. Gradually the carcass increases its distance from the window, impelled by the persistence of the gentle thrust which had sent it through the hatch; but though slowy receding, it maintains its parallel speed and keeps abreast of the window. The dead fox-terrier has become a planet or a meteor which will continue to travel in its dark elliptic orbit round the earth through eternity

In this text, Koestler himself makes my job on this post, since he comments a play by Verne from a scientific point of view. Koestler´s autobiography is highly recommendable as a very good way to approach XXth century thanks to his presence in every important fact of the century.
I read these memoirs when I was younger and I used to tell my brother about his adventures in our shared bedroom, even a mystical experience happened in Seville´s prison. My brother used to call him a show-off, as he thought it was impossible that kind of things to be true. But don´t worry, I´m not going to spoil the end of the book and neither the end of Koestler´s life

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (JOHN IRVING) AND PETER TREATMENTS BEFORE PENICILLIN

Most peter treatment Jenny saw was done to soldiers. The U. S. Army would not begin to benefit from the discovery of penicillin until 1943, and there were many soldiers who didn't get penicillin until 1945. At Boston Mercy, in the early days of 1942, peters were usually treated with sulfa and arsenic. Sulfathiazole was for the clap--with lots of water recommended. For syphilis, in the days before penicillin, they used neoarsphenamine; Jenny Fields thought that this was the epitome of all that sex could lead to--to introduce arsenic into the human chemistry, to try to clean the chemistry up.

Such a great discovery, the penicillin, indeed. According to Fleming, it was discovered the 28^th of September, although it is not that clear that its discovery was by chance, as we are usually told. The World According to Garp is an extraordinary novel, but it won´t appeal to parents who tend to worry too much. In the prologue, John Irving tries to answer the two most hated questions by writers: What is the novel about? Is this novel autobiographical?

LIFE (KEITH RICHARDS) AND THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE TEACHERS ON 20th CENTURY MUSIC

With that weight off my mind, my work improved at Dartford Tech. I was even getting praise. Doris kept some of my reports: Geography 59%, a good exam result. History 63%, quite good work. But against the science subjects on the report sheet the form master put a single bracket that enclosed them all- there was no daylight between them for abjectness- and he wrote them all off with no improvement in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Engineering drawing was still rather beyond him. That report on science subjects contained the story of the big betrayal and of how I was turned from a reasonably compliant student into a school terrorist and a criminal, with a lively and lasting rage against authority. 

Imagine that this teacher would have been too good and he would have motivated him, making Keith believe that he had a future in Science or that the teacher would have been compassionate and passed Keith the exam. Thanks to the famous scholar failure, the big enemy of education, acording to politicians, Keith could become a great musician.

Keith was expelled from this school to an Art school, where he started playing guitar. Some day justice will be done with all the bad teachers that helped to decide vocations

EMPIRE FALLS (RICHARD RUSSO) AND THE PROBABILITY OF INDEPENDENT EVENTS

 “It could be a baby sister.”

His father chuckled, probably at Peanuts. “Mostly boys in our family.”

“Then we’re due for a girl,” Miles said.

“That’s not how it works. It’s not like flipping a coin.”

“What’s it like, then?” It seemed to Miles that it was exactly like flipping a coin, and he didn’t see any reason to let his father skate on such dubious logic just because he was a grown-up.

Max studied him, grinning again, though Miles wished he wouldn’t. “It’s more like rolling dice,” he explained. “Except they don’t have numbers. There’s six sides to a cube, right? In our family ‘boy’ is written on about five sides of the cube. ‘Girl’ is only written on one. So, if you had to bet with your own money, which would you bet on?”

Miles did some calculations. After a minute he said, “How many kids does Uncle Pete have?” His father’s older brother had moved out west—to Phoenix, Arizona—two decades earlier.

“Four,” said his father. “All boys.”

Miles nodded. “And you’ve got me.”

“You’re a boy too, last time I looked.”

“That’s five in a row,” Miles pointed out.

Outside, footsteps sounded on the back porch: Grace, returning from church. Both Miles and his father glanced up at the kitchen window when she passed. This week her bouts of morning sickness had been less severe, and while she wasn’t looking as radiantly beautiful as she had on Martha’s Vineyard, neither did she appear as frightened and despairing as when they’d first returned.

“Girl was on the sixth side, right?”

Yes, that´s not how it works. The likelihood of having a boy or a girl is 50% and it doesn´t depend on neither the number of boys you had before nor the amount of them that your uncle has.

According to the law of large numbers, the number of sons will be very close to the number of daughters only if you had a considerable amount of children. But it has to be a huge figure so that the law works.

We all know examples of families with lots of boys since their parents were looking for having a daughter, and they ended up giving up.

Therefore, the chance for the family in the text to have a boy or a girl is 50%. Just like flipping a coin at random.

GROWING PAINS AND THE GALILEO´S EXPERIMENT IN PISA

Mike Seaver explains very well to Di Caprio. Probably the history of Pisa Tower it is false, but it is such a beautiful experiment that it would deserve to be truth. With a simple and charm experiment you can show that Aristotelian Physics was wrong

THE ASTRONOMER (WALT WHITMAN) AND LEGITIMACY PREDILECTIONS OF POETS

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, 

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, 

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, 

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, 

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, 

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, 

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

To start the new year without being tired let´s do the comment to Aldous Huxley, who in Science and Literature wrote abput this poem:

For some people the contempaltion of scientific theories is an experience hardly less golden than the experience of being in love or looking at a sunset. Whitman wasn´t one of them. As a human being who enjoys and suffers, facts and Astronomic hypothesis kept him cool; he preferred silence and stars. In the case of a poet, this is a compeltely legitimacy predilection

LOGAN LUCKY (STEVEN SODERBERGH) AND THE EXPLOSION´S CHEMISTRY

Daniel Craig explains very well the chemical reaction, it´s clear that he has been James Bond. Because of scenes like this the pupils demand fireworks to the Chemical teachers when they go to the laboratory

NEAR TO THE WILD HEART (CLARICE LISPECTOR) AND TIMBRE OF SONIC WAVES

Joana remembered how once, a few months after she was married, she had tirned to her husband to ask him something. They were out. And before she´d even finished her sentence, to Octávio´s surprise, she had stopped- brow furrowed, gaze amused. Ah- she had realized- she´d just repeated one of the voices she´d heard so often when she was single, always vaguely perplexed. The voice of a young woman besides her man. As her own had rung out just then to Octávio: sharp, empty, soaring upwards, with identical, clear notes. Something unfinished, ecstatic, somewhat satiated. Trying to scream… Bright days, clear and dry, sexless day voice and days, choir boys in an outdoor mass. And something lost, heading for mild despair… That newlywed timbre had a history, a fragile history taht went unnoticed by the owner of the voice, but not by the owner of this one

Pitch, loudness and timbre are three characteristics of sonic waves that can be explained by physics magnitudes. Pitch is related with frecuency, high-pitched sounds with high frecuencies and deep voices (like if you are inside a clay pot) belong to the low frecuencies. Loudness, which is usually measured in decibels, corresponds with the intensity and the amplitude of the wave.

Lastly, the today physic concept is timbre, which is what makes you distinguish one sound from another, a violin from a piano, for instance. The timbre depends on the shape of the wave, each sound has a special shape that makes it unique. This peculiar shape never is the perfect armonic one that physicists draw. I didn´t know that, as the text suggests, the timbre is also influenced by the marital status of the focal point of the wave

MIDDLEMARCH (GEORGE ELIOT) AND AN OPTICAL PARABLE ABOUT SELFISHNESS

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person 

I would like to add somethiung but the last two sentences make the fuction that usually makes my comment. The experiment can be done at home even if you haven´t got a housemaid. I recommend this amazing novel

SHROUD FOR A NIGHTINGALE (P.D. JAMES) AND THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF ASTRONOMY

- Are you interested in astronomy?

- Not particularly

She smiled.

- Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m´affraie?

- Discomforts rather than terrifies. It´s probably my vanity. I can´t interest myself in anything which I not only don´t understand but know that I have no prospect of ever understanding.

- That for me is the atraction. It´s a form of escapism, even of voyeurism, I suppose-this absortion in an impersonal universe which I canñt do anything to influence or control and, better still, which no one expects me to. It´s an abtidaction of responsibility. It restores personal problems to their proper proportion

I think the both arguments are quite reasonable. Pascal is the author of the quote. Pascal´s brother in law will appear here in the future because he had an important tole in the progress of Science in the Pyu de Dôme

MY ÁNTONIA (WILLA CARTHER) AND THE TELLURIC GOOD VIBES

There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

The comunion with Nature is a common poetic subject, likewise the admiration of the Universe. I am not insensitive about Nature but I think it is more a atrezzo to another thing to contemplate: a son concentrated drawing, for instance 

THE OPOSSING SELF (LIONEL TRILLING) AND THE PHYSICS´ARROGANCE

Readers of literary bent, who have as an clement of their pathos

the belief that they arc persecuted by science[1], will set special

store by those parts of the novel that have the effect of exposing

the arrogance as well as the contradictions and absurdities of the

physical science of the day. Everyone who has ever studied litera-

ture knows that physical science was the basis of the vulgar

materialism of the nineteenth century. In this regard it is well

to remember that Flaubert had no principled hostility to science

as such — quite to the contrary, indeed. He takes note of the ridic-

ulous statements that science can make, but much of the confu-

sion that Bouvard and Pccuchct experience is the result of their

own ineptitude or ignorance rather than of the inadequacy of

science itself. It is not the fault of botany— although it may be

the fault of a particular elementary textbook of botany — that

they believe that all flowers have a pericarp, but look in vain for

it when confronted by buttercups and wild strawberry.

---

[1] It is not sufficiently understood that men ..f science have an analogous-

homologous?— pathos to support them in their own troubles: they believe that they

are systematically persecuted by the humanities.

Let´s not consider the reciprocal ‘pathos’ between Science and Humanities, which  is  against to this blog´s spirit. We have already talked about the novel Bouvard and Pecuchet here. When you read it you can´t raech any negative conclusion about Science, rather that negativity goes against those ‘hicks’ who are the novel´s protagonists.

Regarding the Physics´arrogance, there is a famous sentence by Lord Kelvin that says: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement." It was said on 1900,when the classic Physics was about to break down

BLOODY MIAMI (TOM WOLFE) AND THE DETRITIVIS

The maggots! . . . Once, when she was six or seven, Magdalena had come upon a little dead dog, a mutt, on a sidewalk in Hialeah. A regular hive of bugs was burrowing into a big gash in the dog’s haunch—only these weren’t exactly bugs. They looked more like worms, short, soft, deathly pale worms; and they were not in anything so orderly as a hive. They were a wriggling, slithering, writhing, squiggling, raveling, wrestling swarm of maggots rooting over and under one another in a heedless, literally headless, frenzy to get at the dead meat. She learned later that they were decephalized larvae. They had no heads. The frenzy was all they had. They didn’t have five senses, they had one, the urge, and the urge was all they felt. They were utterly blind.

Let´s deal today with a nasty topic. Science sometimes stains and it is disgusting. Even the ugliest creature  with a nasty job is important for the ecosystems. Detritivis ( named in this way because they eat detritus) are fundamental to the food chain.

Every child has some time found a earthworm digging the soil. This moment is very important for the later man, because  he can react in two different ways to this discovery. The boy with Animal Fisiology Aptitudes gazes with attention and even tries to touch the earthworm with a little stick. The boy without Animal Fisiology Aptitudes doesn’t play again with the sand for a long time.

Earthworms are able to concentrate the snake´s revulsion but without their majesty

LIBRA (DON DELILLO) AND AN EXCESIVE CASE OF CONSERVATION OF LINEAR MOMENTUM

The thing he could not forget was the way the hat jumped from the slim man’s head. The heavy thudding surprise, the sudden insult. Even after you think you’ve seen all the ways violence can surprise a man, along comes something you never imagined. How much force do bullets have to exert if they can hit a man in the chest and make his hat fly four feet in the air, straight up? It was a lesson in the laws of motion and a reminder to all men that nothing is assured

We are in favour of a thorough compliance  of all kinds of laws, including the scientific ones, because  otherwise everybody knows that chaos overcomes. But the opposite can also have drawbacks, just like that Spanish student who, in doubt , writes more tildes than necessary. We also know from science that there are errors by defect and excess. The  Principle of Conservation of Linear Momentum explains curious phenomena, but we believe the incident that is narrated in the text is impossible from a scientific point of view 

THE INFINITE JEST (DAVID FOSTER WALLACE) AND THE NORMAL SCIENCIE OF KUHN AS A PLATEAU

'... that because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there's like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.’

The one who speaks is a teacher from the famous Enfield Tennis Academy and he establishes the analogy for the tennis training, how one must insist and keep training even when you think you aren´t progressing. I think the analogy also works for the language learning and for our topic today:  the change of paradigm in the progress of science and the normal science concept.

It´s necessary to cross over all the plateau to get to climb to the next one. In Kuhn´s words: it´s necessary that normal science advances mechanically until a crisis appears. Then, there is a change of paradigm followed by another period of normal science

AMERICAN PASTORAL (PHILIP ROTH) AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MEN AND MONKEYS

Monkeys, gorillas, they have brains and we have a brain, but they don’t have this thing, the thumb. They can’t move it opposite the way we do. The inner digit on the hand of man, that might be the distinguishing physical feature between ourselves and the rest of the animals. And the glove protects that inner digit. The ladies glove, the welder’s glove, the baseball glove, et cetera. This is the root of humanity, this opposable thumb. It enables us to make tools and build cities and everything else. Maybe more than the brain. Maybe some other animals have bigger brains in proportion to their bodies than we have. I don’t know. But the hand itself is an intricate thing. 

The genetic similarities between humans and primates are very clear when you see Mick Jagger. Regarding the differences, we have the thumb, as the text explains, but we also have the fact that primates don´t have a white sclerotic, so you can´t see where they are looking at. This has plenty of evolutionary implications, as José Cervera has explained in this conference very well.

From a literary point of view, American Pastoral is a great book, so is The World Accoding to Garp, by John Irving. However, neither books should be read by parents that are inclined to suffering about their children too much. 

Aspectos de la evolución humana en los que no solemos pensar from CRFP CLM on Vimeo.

A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY (KURT VONNEGUT) AND THE SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT APPLIED TO LITERATURE

As an undergraduate at Cornell I was a chemistry major because my brother was a big-shot chemist. Critics feel that a person cannot be a serious artist and also have had a technical education, which I had. I know that customarily English departments in universities, without knowing what they’re doing, teach dread of the engineering department, the physics department, and the chemistry department. And this fear, I think, is carried over into criticism. Most of our critics are products of English departments and are very suspicious of anyone who takes an interest in technology. So, anyway, I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

Kurt says he studied Chemistry because his brother was already a big-shot chemist. This is a big deal. I don´t know whether eldest brothers are aware of their responsibility when they choose a degree. I am not sure if they know how they can influence on their siblings. How many soft, but genuine vocations have been destroyed by the big brothers influence?

Regarding the fear mentioned in the text, we have said several times that this dread is reciprocal between scientists and men of letters and that we try to make this dread as soft as possible. It is been accepted that the man of letters thinks all scientists are brutes and, on the other hand, scientists think men of letters are damsels. This is unbearable.

With thi­s text we want to express our gratitude to Kurt Vonnegut for the incorporation of the scientific thought to literature, even if we don´t believe in this thought or scientific method so much.

(looking at Vonnegut’s picture, he looks like Fogwill, the way that Cortazar believed that Baudelaire and Poe were actually the same person)

CARPENTER´S GOTHIC (WILLIAM GADDIS) AND THE AGING OF MEN AND PLANTS

—Well it's, yes of course that's what happens isn't it, he said as though again called on to explain, pursuing it as he had the house itself, welcoming facts proof against fine phrases that didn't mean anything with —all those glorious colours the leaves turn when the chlorophyll breaks down in the fall, when the proteins that are tied to the chlorophyll molecules break down into their amino acids that go down into the stems and the roots. That may be what happens to people when they get old too, these proteins breaking down faster than they can be replaced and then, yes well and then of course, since proteins are the essential elements in all living cells the whole system begins to disinteg..

It seems there are similarities between the animal and the vegetal aging, apart from the exchangable adjetives: glum, overripe… whithered! much harder.

“Insane, whithered or dead” were the three possibilities, terrible possibilities, for women, according to a Mexican poet.

The Fisiology assesor of this blog told me that the text says the truth about the chlorophyll, but not so much about the animal proteins, from a scientific view. Maybe you, like I, have the feeling that the text should have more commas, I guess the author has made it in this way on purpose.

THE SUMMER WITHOUT MEN (SIRI HUSTVEDT) AND THE FUNCTION OF CORPUS CALLOSUM

In 1906, the anatomist Robert Bennett Bean claimed that the corpus callosum—the neural fibers that bind the two halves of the brain together—were bigger in men than in women and hypothesized that the “exceptional size of the corpus callosum may mean exceptional intellectual activity.” Big thoughts = Big CC.

The corpus callosum is a controversial topic, not only from a feminist point of view. Back in those days, some scientists also tried to find differences between the corpus callosum of several races. Nowadays nobody thinks this is true. For me, it is not only diffcult to believe those differences exist, but also that this disgusting cauliflower is, as some claim, able to do anything except getting to know itself. This last thing would be, according to David Hubel, “like getting up from the floor by pulling up your own shoelaces”

JENIGAN (DAVID GATES) AND THE SPACE-TIME PERSPECTIVE

One of those disgraces best dealt with by putting off thinking about it. Once you’d moved on in time a little bit—making an analogy here between time and distance, though I’m not sure you can—it would be back in the past and therefore smaller. The law of perspective, as in Jon Nagy’s Television Art Book. Like an A-bomb blast, which seared you less the farther away you stood, in a featureless Jon Nagy landscape. I’m not explaining this right.

At the end he doesn´t explain it properly, like he admits, but I like the analogy. If in Modern Physics you can talk about the continuous spacetime, you can also talk about the spacetime perspective. When you do something embarrasing you don´t need to run away, it is enough to stay motionless and think (like in The King´s Ring tale): “this too shall pass”. The people who are able to discern how they will laugh in the future at the failure occured in the present, can be very happy

THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS (WILLIAM MAXWELL) AND THE PROPAGATION OF ESPHERIC WAVES

Once started, the music swept along of its own momentum, carrying Bunny with it. He was helpless. So was Robert and so was his mother. The only opposition came from the room itself. What the green walls threw back, the fire caught at and sent up the chimney. What the fire could not reach, the ringed candelabrum turned nervously into light, ring upon ring.

Sonic waves are tridimensional waves that propagate from their source. Its area would be the area of a sphere with radius R, where R is the distance to the sonic source. According to Huygens Principle, each obstacle that the waves face should become a secondary source of spheric waves, similar to the ones described by William Maxwell in this room. With the candelabrum, there is a more complicated interaction between light and sonic waves.

TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT (T.S ELIOT) AND THE MIND OF THE POET AS A CATALYST

I, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. 

The text it self explains the analogy very well, there is not much one could add. The catalysts, indeed, remain intact at the end of the reaction; they only make it possible for the reaction to runs in a more favorable, faster way..

There is another quote by Eliot about poets that I like. He said about bad poets: “In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious”. I used this sentence, conversely, to praise the last Kiko Veneno albums

MY LAST SIGH ( LUIS BUÑUEL) AND THE SCIENTIFIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BUÑUEL AND CAJAL

There was much ado about this in the literary world. We decided to give a banquet to tribute Araquistain so as to collect signatures for supporting him. My ultraist friends were aware that I was acquaintance with Cajal from the Natural History Museum, where I would prepare platelets for his microscope in the Entomology section. So, they asked me to get his signature, which would have been the most prestigious of all. So, I did . But Cajal, very old at that time, refused to sign it. He claimed the excuse that the newspaper ABC, where the Audacious Sir collaborated regularly, was going to publish his own memoirs and he was afraid that by signing that, the newspaper terminated the contract.

Although for different reasons, I do always refuse to sign the requests I am given. The sheets of signatures are nothing but a way to calm down your conscience. I know my attitude is arguable. That is why if something happens to me, if I end up in jail, for example, or I disappear, I beg nobody to sign for me.

It´s not the first time that Cajal has appeared in this blog. In the first one, Cajal was told off by Emilia Pardo Bazán, and that must have been serious business.

I had no idea of this collaboration between Buñuel and Cajal before reading this book and it´s not the only amazing thing I´ve discovered. I´ve also found out that Buñuel was about to kill Gala and also that John Wayne led a supporting association for Franco.

But the most practical information of the text is the one dealing with collecting signatures. I think I´m going to use it the next time a girl from an NGO comes up to me and tells me: do you have a second? I´ll say no moving my finger, while speeding up my pace and saying: “I know my attitude is arguable”

THE PALE KING (DAVID FOSTER WALLACE) AND NON INERTIAL FRAMES OF REFERENCES

 Sylvanshine then spent some time trying to feel the fact that his personal body was traveling at the same speed as the craft he was inside. On a large jet it felt like merely sitting in a loud narrow room; here at least the changes in the seat’s and belt’s pressures against him allowed him to be aware of movement, and there seemed to be some security in the physical candor of this, which partly offset the fragility and spatter-potential of the sound of the propellers, which Sylvanshine tried to think of what the props sounded like but could not except as a gnawingly hypnotic rotary hum so total that it might have been silence itself. A lobotomy involved some kind of rod or probe inserted through the eyesocket, the term was always ‘frontal’ lobotomy; but was there any other kind?

The non inertial frames of reference are those that move with aceleration and that is why an observer would be able to see how a motionless body gets aceleration. Newton Laws are not applicable to non inertial frames of reference, except if you add unreal forces called fictitious forces.

In good planes, when you are flying you don´t feel any sort of movement, only the noise, as stated in the text by David Foster Wallace (such a great writer unfairyly critized as too officially postmodern; I am very sad about the fact that there will not be any new books written by him), because they are (the good planes, I mean) inertial frames of reference, in other words, they move with constAnt velocity.