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?

ABBOTT AWAITS (CHRIS BACHELDER) AND GEOCENTRIC SYSTEM

 Afterward, his parents had joint custody, so Abbott moved between their residences every two weeks. These transfers occurred on Sundays, in late afternoon or early evening. And there was, as in some convoluted geocentric model of the heavens, motion within motion: His mother, with whom Abbott lived half the time, moved six times in the eight years of the custodial arrangement. One consequence of this Ptolemaic childhood was that Abbott at a young age became preoccupied with luggage

 

This is one of the sharpest comparison we´ve posted here. The geocentric model, according the Ptolomeo´s one, was adding, as the text says, motion within motion to justify its validity. Epycicles and deferents got complicated the schedule but they managed to put the Earth at the centre. Likewise, these parents, with their changes and moves, kept on orbiting around their child. This is a lovely and funny book about fatherhood, and we can read things like these: Husbands are useless ( I admit that I couldn´t disagree more) or something about the institution of marriage: That´s one of the things that marriaged people do, devastate a sanctuary to agitate their loved one

THE VANISHING HALF (BRIT BENNET) AND THE DIVISION OF THE EGG

 But they never returned again. Instead, after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg

If this blog were a catalogue of sensible and suitable uses of Science in Literature, this post would be a good example. The metaphor in it, is not the subtlest in the world, but it works pretty well and it fits perfectly to what it wants to show, because the división of the ovule is really mysterious and, on the other hand, is what leads to embryonic growth

The usual reader of this blog may notice that Biology is not my specialty so, I make the most of the situation to speak about this strange novel where we are told, for example, about the phenomenon of the black people which have pale skin and they can impersonate for white people. This such a good material for a novel was also used by Philip Roth in The Human Stain

TOURISTS OF THE IDEAL (IGNACIO VIDAL-FOLCH) AND THE TAMARIND

 The tree on which you are set is called here rain tree . They give it this name because it collects the dew on its flowers and when it dawns and closes them to protect itself from the sun, it pours the water on the one below…if you fall asleep, it wakes you up with a great shower!

Tamarind, sampaloc… this tree has plenty of names. Trees, like birds, can be named in a great variety of ways, according to the place. Linneo´s intervention was very timely to bring order.

Althought the main use of tamarind is to offer shadow for the cattle and it can be comestible, it is best knowm for this hidraulic show described in the text. It is also famous its Majestic top, like the Dragon tree.

May this post serve to recommend the novel  which is good, but even better are the diaries by the same author, Illusion is what matters. In this book, every new post appears wiht a number, 19564 for instance, which means the number of days the writer has lived. It was difficult for me to understand it, but I liked it

ANY SON (EDUARDO HALFON) AND THE BOILED TOAD FABLE

 He told us tha if you put a toad in a boling water pan, the toad Will jump quickly out of the pan for salving itself. But if you put the toad in lukewarm water and you increase Little by Little the temperatura, the toad Will not noticed the gradual rise and it Will died eventually boiled.I am sure that nobody understood the fable and the teacher was writting on the blackboard the First Law of Themodynamics (∆u = q − w) next to the drawinf of a smiling toad

From my point of view, this fable would work pretty well to illustrate the risks of climate change. The average increase in temperature on the planet is so gradual, using a human life as scale, that we do barely notice it. But we might be like the toad which is being heated up little by little. When the old teacher keeps on writing down a formula, his students no longer pay attention to him. It´s something very well-known by teachers and science communicators. In fact, in popular science books, there is a premise of avoiding formulas and working with metaphores and fables. It´s  even said that some editors have quantified ( with a formula!) the number of readers that  would be lost if there were a specific number of formulas on a page.

ANDREW´S BRAIN (E. L. DOCTOROW) AND THE GALVANI EXPERIMENTS

 Andrew was given the lesson plan in biology. It was simple enough and he used the occasion of the frog dissection, and a reprise of Galvani, the leg of a dead frog touched with a metal probetwitching as if still alive, to gradually direct the class to some Elementary facts of brain science. And the more he wandered off the lesson plan, the more they loved it, girls and boys, the inseparable lovers among them. One of the students jumped up on the stage of the study hall and held his fist to his mouth, microphonelike: “Here it´s dorsal, there it´s ventral, this here´s rostral, you nothin´but mental…”

On late 18th century, Galvani applied an electric charge to a frog which he was stuffing and the frog´s leg convulsed. This was the beginning og galvanism, which with te time was alpplied to bigger animals in public demonstrations and even with deaths by hanging. The influence on the later Frankenstein is very obvious

Although lately Volta proved Galvani was wrong by inventing batteries, Galvani´s work was crucial to te development of the study of nervous system, brain and nerve impulse

A REAL BORE ( SANTIAGO LORENZO) AND THE FACTORIAL FUNCTION

 I became intrigued about how he had managed to get in. He told me. He had seen that the door could be opened with the keyboard system that  I´d mentioned earlier when I reminded my arrival to Pacomio´s house, the one that worked dialing a four number code. The possible combinations were hundreds of them. However, they could be significantly shorten. All the buttons were filthy. Except the 3, the 5, the 8 and the 9 one, which were the ones that the real dwellers used to press to get in. Those ones, by the use, were shiny. The four tell-tale keys narrowed down the options to twenty-four attempts. The door opened at the fifteenth one.

Factorial function is a pretty math tool known from long time ago. It is symbolised by the exlclamation point and it indicates the number of combinationsin which you can order n objects (n!). You can calculate it by multiplying all the whole numbers from 1 to the number. For instance, for 4 would be 4!=4x3x2x1=24. Well done, Santiago Lorenzo, the choices were of 25 attempts. And I want also ti congratulate you for this novel that has made have a good time

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