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