BOURNVILLE (JONATAHN COE) AND MATHEMATICS AS AN EMPHASIS

 “But I can swear to you that if you take the worst thing you can imagine about those people and multiply it by ten, then square it, and multiply it by another thousand, you still won’t even come close to getting an idea of what a bunch of pieces of shit they are.”

 

Let us remember that the purpose of this blog is not to hunt for errors or engage in criticism, but rather to appreciate the use of science and scientific terminology as literary devices. And I think this is a good example of that, or at least an appropriate one: the use of mathematical operations to reinforce a hyperbole. Such operations can be used both to magnify something and to reduce it to the bare minimum, as in Bart Simpson’s famous “Multiply yourself by zero.”

Let this post also serve as an opportunity to talk about this very British novel — British to the nth degree, to borrow the device we have just been discussing — a sort of literary The Crow

THE LOVERS OF FONTANA FREDDA (PAOLO COGNETTI) AND IRON OXIDE

Fausto smelled the plank: its smell was strong, but not unpleasant. It was covered with little holes left by the nails he had pulled out. Around each hole there was a reddish halo, caused by the rust from the nail.

 

I don’t know what is happening, but I seem to be receiving a lot of books by Italian authors. There is Cognetti, whose best-known novel is The Eight Mountains, but also Dario Ferrari and his The Recess Is Over (which we will try to feature here).

In the days before steel, nails were made of iron and therefore rusted very easily, producing the unwelcome substance that, like all oxides, is known as iron oxide. On the other hand, to put a more positive spin on iron oxide, we can point out that the reddish colour referred to in the text makes it valued as a pigment and glaze.

In the syllabus I studied for the competitive examinations to become a secondary-school teacher, specialising in Physics and Chemistry, there was a section entitled Corrosion and Ways of Preventing It. It was really more of a catalogue of ways of delaying rather than preventing corrosion, since this is a thermodynamically inevitable phenomenon—an oxidation process that costs industry enormous amounts of money.

Some of the most effective ways of slowing it down were discussed in connection with Jacobo Bergareche’s book The Perfect Days.

 

THE SAINT (CÉSAR AIRA) AND ARCHIMEDES’ PRINCIPLE

 He wondered why the ship did not sink. He was so unaccustomed to thinking that he found the mental activity novel and entertaining. “I need to get out more,” he told himself. There must be, he supposed, clear and compelling physical reasons why a vessel, even though heavier than water, did not simply go under. But what those reasons were was another matter entirely.

 

We continue with the aftereffects of having read César Aira. Admittedly, I am forcing his appearance into these lines, just as he forces his plots and seems to challenge himself with the subjects he chooses for his novels. The reason ships do not sink is the Archimedes’ principle, a fairly well-known principle, buoyancy and all that. Anyone who has raised an eyebrow at the saintly protagonist’s ignorance should ask themselves why airplanes fly, and they will see that the answer, although it also involves lift, is not quite so simple.

Fortunately, this is one of the things that makes us more human and sets us apart from animals: we do not need to know, down to the very last detail, how every technological advance we use in our everyday lives actually wor

THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE (JONATHAN COE) AND OPTICAL DEFECTS

     Phyl is having a good wander around and occasionally lifting up my glasses so that she can get a better look at everything. Adam notices this and says:

Are you long-sighted, or short-sighted, Phyl?

She laughs nervously.

Long, short and everything in between! she says, and then zooms in on a glass cabinet at the centre of one of the walls.

 

That Phyl, in order to pass herself off as a bibliophile, has put on someone else’s glasses, which is why she has to lift them up to be able to see properly. Adam’s suspicions are well founded: it is not possible for the same eye to suffer from both myopia and hyperopia simultaneously, as they are opposite optical defects. In myopia, the eyeball is usually too long and the image forms in front of the retina; that is why it is corrected with diverging lenses. In hyperopia, the opposite is true: the eyeball is usually too short and the rays would come together behind the retina, so it is corrected with converging lenses. I am severely short-sighted and my wife is an incorrigible farsighted person, and so far our offspring have managed to escape both conditions: they must have taken the average of our eyeballs, so to speak.

APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA (JOHN O'HARA) AND INORGANIC NOMENCLATURE

 “Hey, Harry, Julian English killed himself last night.”

“What?”

“He killed himself. He took some kind of poison in the garage. Carbon oxide.”

“You mean carbon monoxide.”

“That’s it. It’s a poison.”

“It certainly is, but he didn’t take it. It comes from the engine.”

“Oh, really? I didn’t know that. All I know is that it was a poison and that he took it in the garage.”

 

The IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry)—something like the FIFA of chemists—is very particular, very fussy, about the way chemical compounds are written and named. It passes that rigor on to teachers, and rightly so, because small changes in the formula of a compound—and therefore in its name—can be crucial to its properties and behavior.

The young woman reporting the suicide adopts a charmingly modest and detached attitude toward the names of poisons: “some kind of poison.” She does not distinguish between carbon oxide (CO₂) and carbon monoxide (CO). It does not matter much in the context of the conversation, but in the real world they should never be confused.

MRS PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT (ENLIZABETH TAYLOR) AND REACTION TIME

     Presently, in the silence in which they were sitting, he had an idea. He took from a pocket Mrs Palfrey’s five-pound note. He smoothed it carefully and, holding it by one corner, dangled it in front of Rosie. ‘Do you know this trick?’ he asked. As she did not answer, he went on quickly, ‘You’d think it quite simple. You’ll probably think me simple for suggesting it. But you’d be surprised. All you have to do is to catch it when I let go, and if you can, you keep it.’

She looked at him with astonishment – her first change of expression from disdain.

‘Come on!’ he said coaxingly, as if to a child. ‘Just snatch at it with your little paw.’

He let go of the note and she caught it between thumb and finger and stared at him uncomprehendingly. Then she resumed her disdain and he in his turn looked astonished.

‘I’ve never seen that happen before,’ he said

 

The calculations I demonstrated on the board were based on a €5 banknote, though it is worth noting that a £5 note is very similar in size. As shown in the video, the banknote takes approximately 0.16 seconds to fall. This duration is significantly shorter than the average human reaction time, which typically ranges between 0.25 and 0.35 seconds.

This disparity is exactly why it is nearly impossible to catch the note before it slips through your fingers. In fact, this was once a staple of fairground scams, much like the deceptive tactics used by shell game swindlers.

Theoretically, anyone who succeeds in catching the note is not "reacting" in the traditional sense, but rather anticipating the drop. This is comparable to track and field regulations: an athlete is charged with a false start if they move within 0.1 seconds of the starting pistol. Even if they move after the sound, the rules dictate that a human cannot physically process and respond to a stimulus that quickly—meaning they must have guessed the timing.

THREE DAYS IN JUNE (ANNE TYLER) AND NUTRITION

     I said, “Is it okay that we’re eating all these scrambled eggs and omelets and such?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” he asked.

“Aren’t they bad for our cholesterol or something?”

“That was last week,” he told me. “Everything’s changed.”

 

It´s true, the opinion of nutritionists changes throughout the time. We have noticed these changes in eggs, oily fish and other food. Since it´s not a fixed law and it may experience whimsical variations, in my humble opinión you should embrace the most convenient for you according to your tastes.

In this case, I find it difficult to believe that eggs, in any of its presentations, can be bad for your health.

I would like to recommend this novel because it has everything what I like in novels: about 200 and 300 pages and a nice story

QUESTION 7 (RICHARD FLANAGAN) AND LEO SZILARD

On 2 December 1942, in a squash court beneath the stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field football field, the world’s first man-made nuclear reaction took place in a nuclear reactor built by Szilard and Fermi, now a Nobel laureate, using, thanks to Szilard’s insight, a newly developed, highly purified graphite.

 The goal of this post is to try that Leo Szilard would have the public reconnition that he deserves. Oppenheimer has a film, Fermi has a Nobel prize, Einstein is almost a rock star... but Szilard was the ideologist of the Manhattan Proyect, as it is explained in this novel.

Talking about the relationship between science and literarure, Szilard had the idea, the vision of all the posibilities inside nuclear energy by reading the H.G Wells novel The World Set Free. Leo Szilard, a clever central european jewish was the first of being aware of the dangers in case Nazi German dicovered nuclear bomb. He conviced Einstein to write to Roosevelt in this sense. Lately, Einstein, regretting for Hiroshima said    he ‘really only acted as a mailbox’ for his former student.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS (LORRIE MOORE) AND THEORY OF ERRORS

I knew several kids who for money had been lab rats in pharmaceutical experiments, and they had secretly mucked up the data by doing things like eating doughnuts on the sly or getting high on glue. But after their blood was tested or their sleep observed, the results were sent out as science.

 

Science is a human activity and thus, our simple, seedy and tricky behaviour can have influence on it. The Theory of Errors tries to dignify and reduce this negative influence differentiating between two types of mistakes, the systematic and the random ones, and human mistakes belong to this last type.

Scientifics are usually organized and methodical but by being human, they can be also dirty and cheating. We have another example of this in the space debris, which we have already posted about