Monday, 18 May 2020

BARONI: A TRIP (SERGIO CHEJFEC) AND MIRAGE

Still at that hour, or again, the temperature seemed to make things tremble. Those situations of intense heat, which make you rehearse descriptions with vague outlines, refractions of light, objects in slow motion, etc. And yet I was impressed by the opposite, the speed; as if temperature proceeded to disintegrate in terror, and reality itself, in its multiple joints, was struck by fear and wanted to escape this situation immediately.
As soon as you went out to the garden, neither having taken the first step nor having already felt the impact of the heat, you noticed the unease, nature at once watery and squelched.
You knew that underneath that calmness lay a latent combustion encompassing all the elements, revealed by isolated and spontaneous reactions.


This is something that literature can do with physical phenomena: illuminate them with images and so make them better understood. We physics teachers always try to do this. Everybody has seen this optical illusion on the horizon of the road on a very sunny day. You yourself melt by mimesis upon seeing, that´s why we call it a mirage
Once you understand and feel the phenomenon, by virtue of the text above, it almost matters less to know that it´s caused by the different densities of...

Monday, 4 May 2020

CALL FOR THE DEAD (JOHN LE CARRÉ) AND ROUCHÉ-FRÖBENIUS THEOREM

"Loose ends everywhere. No police work. Nothing checked. Like algebra."
"What's algebra got to do with it?"
"You've got to prove what can be proved, first. Find the constants. Did she really go to the theatre? Was she alone? Did the neighbours hear her come back? If so, what time? Was Fennan really late Tuesdays? Did his Missus go to the theatre regular every fortnight like she said?"




It´s great that detectives use mathematics methods in their work. You can’t rush an investigation. The first thing you have to find out is whether a solution even exists. Or, in mathematicians’ terms, whether the system of equations is compatible with the data. Because, what´s the point in trying to solve something that has no solution?

Monday, 20 April 2020

HELENA OR THE SEA IN SUMMER (JULIÁN AYESTA) AND VISIBLE SPECTRUM

All these doubts came from the fact that humans can´t really know anything of truly happens in the World. For instance, we can only see the colours between red and blue, but there are more of them. And then, tehre´s all this fuss about vibration speed and about infrared and ultraviolet



Visible light is the intervale of wavelengths or frequencies visible to the human eye. Outside this intervale are radio waves, micorwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X rays... It seems appropiate, as an image of all the things mankind cannot iluminate with is knowledge. I like even more how the author admits that this is a mess, it reminds me of another text by Cela that reads "you don´t know a word about this"

Monday, 6 April 2020

KUDOS ( RACHEL CUSK) AND A LITTLE MISUNDERSTANDING ABOUT ENTROPY

It was unclear precisely why this had happened, she added, except that everything to do with literature always seemed to be shrinking, as though the world of books was governed by a principle of entropy while everything else proliferated and expanded.


I´m sorry to correct this post for two reasons. Firstly, because I don´t like telling people what it´s wrong and secondly, because I´ve enjoyed so much Rachel Cusk´s books that I think it´s not fair. But I have to admit that I´m not convinced in this idea of the principle of entropy aplied here in something that seems to be shrinking. In my humble opinion, the entropy tends to be joined to disorderly and huge growths

Just the opposite of what happens in her books, in which seems that nothing is happening but everyone who meets the narretor- author becomes an excelent talkative

Monday, 23 March 2020

THE LIAR´S CLUB (MARY KARR) AND THE IMAGE OF EINSTEIN AS SCIENCE´S PAULO COELHO

She liked to repeat a story about seeing Einstein lecture at Bell Labs (where she’d done some mechanical drawing in the war years—a detail it took us years to unearth). She swore that during the question period afterward, Einstein had to have some engineer in the auditorium explain an elementary law of mechanics to him. When the guy was shocked that the great physicist didn’t know such a simple thing, Einstein said, “I never bother to remember anything I can look up.” She loved that idea—a genius who couldn’t open a can of tuna fish but could order the entire universe in the caverns of his own skull. She also said that he bowed his head between questions like he was praying, then raised it up to give answers like those mechanical swamis wearing turbans that guessed your future for a quarter at Coney Island. At the crowded reception after the lecture, she claimed that nobody even tried to talk to him. He sat in a straight chair in the corner by himself looking like somebody’s daffy uncle.



Why are there so may anecdotes about Einstein as absent-minded, always looking like ‘somebody´s daffy uncle’? Will he be known in future as the apocryphal author of cheap help-self aphorisms, Facebook wall style? Was this mystic and oriental wiseman image something he deliberately cultivated? Does the fact that he didn´t like combs influence this image?

Monday, 9 March 2020

JANE EYRE (CHARLOTTE BRONTË) AND ARITHMETIC AS A METHOD TO IMPRESS AN ENGLISH BACHELORETTE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

What age were you when you went to Lowood?’
About ten.’
And you stayed there eight years: you are now, then, eighteen?’
I assented.
Arithmetic, you see, is useful; without its aid, I should hardly have been able to guess your age. It is a point difficult to fix where the features and countenance are so much at variance as in your case

There he goes! Nothing in his pockets, nothing up his sleeves...and he determines her age. Nowadays, Mr Rochester would be accused of doing mansplaining, but I recognize his merit of setting out nimbly the ecuation 10+8=18.
I wonder whether this skill will help him to manage to flirt with her. I´ll find out when I finish the book.

Monday, 24 February 2020

THE ROAD (CORMAC MCCARTHY), HEARING IN THE BRAIN, SUBSONIC AND SUPERSONIC BULLETS

You aint got but two shells. Maybe just one. And they’ll hear the shot.
Yes they will. But you wont.
How do you figure that?
Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.


I think he is right. The speed of sound is about 340 m/s. So if you are about 700 metres away from a shooting gun, you should heard the shot two seconds later. The bullet reaches you before its sound, if it´s supersonic. This is something that sound technicians must keep in mind.This video explains it very well:

Monday, 10 February 2020

NO ENTRY WITHOUT TROUSERS ( JUAN BONILLA) AND POETRY AS PURIFICATION OF REALITY

The poet works with advances which he spends before finishing anything, and he spends everything on tickets and transfers, because poetry is a journey to the unknown, is like the extraction of radium, where you get a gram of product after years of work.


I do agree. Poetry could be compared to any process of separating components, as Bonilla recreates what Maiakovski wanted to mean.Moreover, we may say that any poet distils reality and gets the poetic essence. The world would be the gross sample ( the gangue) and poetry would be the ore which you have to extract

Monday, 27 January 2020

THE ROBOT (DON´T STEP ON ME THAT I´M WEARING FLIP FLOPS) AND ITS OWN CONSCIOUNESS OF THE PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

I´ve got robotic blood in my veins
I´m a robot which isn´t worth it any more
I don´t know neither what I´m doing nor what I´m saying
operating system two dot fig
I´m moving around here
I´m moving around there
but I´m scared, they want to take me to pieces
my memory fails, my hard drive fails
my camera is broken, I see everything dark
Dude, I get mad when I get a screw dropped
and I´m becoming rusted because I´m metallic
and little by little I notice I´m loosing my brightness
Old man, like humans, I´m already loosing my reflexes
and bad news, my garantee is over
because I was made in Almendralejo
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
Prrrrii... prrrriii... pi, Roger... Roger
Prrrrii... prrrriii... pi, Roger... Roger
Prrrrii... prrrriii... pi, Roger... Roger
Prrrrii... prrrriii... pi, Roger... Roger...
I was almost hired in Star wars
What a terrific robot! , what a pretty thing!
but I was programmed with a big task,
to guess why flies rubb their little legs
it´s taken me many years of investigation
watching how they fly over a turd
I´m so fed up...so fed up
I didn´t know how hard the robot life was
Dude, I get mad when I get a screw dropped
and I´m becoming rusted because I´m metallic
and little by little I notice I´m loosing my brightness
Old man, like humans, I´m already loosing my reflexes
and bad news, my garantee is over
because I was made in Almendralejo
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,
what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do,
I´ll turn into scrap,


The Flip flops, possessed by The Red Hot Chili Peppers spirit, re-enact the raising of consciouness of the machines in a way that we hadn´t seen since Blade Runner and his tears in the rain
And it´s also remarkable the excessive nihilism of the expression " what the heck, what the heck, no matter what I do, I´ll turn into scrap", completely human. The robot almost seems to start singing by Camarón that song of" He also condemns us to death when God gives us the life"
And that´s the way we both, robots and obsolescent humans,are living. On the one hand, we complain about the dissatisfaction of the researches and the turds, and on the other one, we are afraid of being taken apart at a junkjard.



Monday, 13 January 2020

THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFE (CARSON MCCULLERS) AND INVISIBLE INK

 It is known that if a message is written with lemon juice on a clean sheet of paper there will be no sign of it. But if the paper is held for a moment to the fire then the letters turn brown and the meaning becomes clear. Imagine that the whisky is the fire and that the message is that which is known only in the soul of a man — then the worth of Miss Amelia’s liquor can be understood




This is already the second formula for invisible ink we post in this blog. The first one was made by Poe in The Gold Bug. In this text, we are also told about the role of alcohol over human souls through a good image. Somenthing, by the way, that we have been able to feel last Christmas

Monday, 16 December 2019

MY BROTHER THE MAYOR (FERNANDO VALLEJO) AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN METEORIT AND METEOR.

His career on the way to the Támesis mayoral service was stunning. I can not say it was a meteoric one because meteors fall down and Carlos was always going up , rising, reaching the summit.



It´s very clear what Fernando Vallejo wants to mean by that. But if we were a bit fusspot, which is not the intention of this blog, we could say that what really falls down is a meteorite, not a meteor. The meteor would be a shooting star and this is the sense of the expression ´meteoric career´, from my humble opinion.
But they are really complex concepts to deal with, as it was already said because of Juan Benet.




Monday, 4 November 2019

FAMILY LEXICON (NATALIA GINZBURG) AND SULFHIDRIC ACID AS THE RESPONSIBLE OF HOW A FART SMELLS

Lidia, you and me, we know a thing or two about chemistry so what’s sulfuric acid stink of? It stinks of fart. Sulfuric acid stinks of fart.”


It´s a chemical common mistake to mixe up the sulfuric and the sulfhidric acid. It´s the sulfhicdric acid, also known as hydrogen sulfide, which stinks of fart. That´s to say, it is the fart which stinks of hydrogen sulfide

Monday, 7 October 2019

THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN (ROMAIN GARY) AND THE CONTRIBUTION OF MADNESS TO THE EVOLUTION OF SPECIES

"That’s it, old man,” he said. “Never say die. You have to be mad, it’s true, to keep going and hope, but the first reptile who dragged his belly out of the water a million years ago to live on land without lungs and tried to breathe all the same— he too was mad. In the end the reptile became a man. We must always try to do the best we can— perhaps one day well become human, who knows"




It´s the first time I hear about the relation between madness and evolution. I wonder whether Darwin took it into account on his work. I´ve never been very daring but I can appreciate what courageous people are able to do. It´s called ´to go out of your comfort zone´ nowadays. Anyway, the last sentence of this post seems to be a good advice for almost everything in life.

Monday, 15 July 2019

TREME (DAVID SIMON) AND THE IMPORTANCE OF BASIC GEOMETRY TO TAXI DRIVERS




Basic Geometry can be helpful in your daily life. Here Antoine Batiste have saved ten dollars thanks to Pitagoras

Monday, 24 June 2019

WILLIAM AND MARY (ROALD DAHL) AND THE COVERINGS OF BRAIN

And now, as I say, I'd take a small oscillating saw and carefully remove your complete calvarium--the whole vault of the skull. This would expose the top half of the brain, or rather the outer covering in which it is wrapped. You may or may not know that there are three separate coverings around the brain itself the outer one called the dura mater or dura, the middle one called the arachnoid, and the inner one called the pia mater or pia. Most laymen seem to have the idea that the brain is a naked thing floating around in fluid in your head. But it isn't. It's wrapped up neatly in these three strong coverings, and the cerebrospinal fluid actually flows within the little gap between the two coverings, known as the subarachnoid space. As I told you before, this fluid is manufactured by the brain and it drains off into the venous system by osmosis


The coverings of the brain are very well explained. The tale is about a dyng man who is offered to keep his brain alive in a basin, with an eye as the only way to interact with the enviroment. The man accepted the offer only because he would be able to read.

At the end of the short story, the wife wants to take her husband´s brain home because she realizes that she likes him better now and it/he gives her no trouble.
Last month, in Yale´s University a group of scientists has brought brains of pigs back to life. This fact is linked with another of Dahl’s tales – ‘Pigs’, a wonderful allegation in favour of veganism, just like the film The Executioner, by Berlanga, is the best allegation against death penalty

Monday, 3 June 2019

THE INVENTED PART (RODRIGO FRESÁN), JOHN UPDIKE AND ART AS REFUTATION OF THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

The day Updike died, he reread something the writer said in an interview and that he’d always found really moving: “My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”


One good thing about this definition is that it is correct regardless of the quality of the art. A bad novel, a bad song, a bad movie...they also bring something to the world, they bring order. From my point of view, this is more of a refutation of the second law of Thermodynamics, than of the conservation of matter. A sculptor, for instance, just redistributes the preexisting matter, like David is said to have been taken out from a piece of marble by Michelangelo

Only Embryo Growth and the birth of a new living being are similar to the artistic creation, that is why we say things like “the artist has given birth to a masterpiece”

Monday, 20 May 2019

DEPT. OF SPECULATION (JENNY OFFILL) AND GOLDEN RECORD

The Golden Record included greetings in fifty-four human and one whale language, ninety minutes of music from around the world, and 117 pictures of life on Earth. These pictures were meant to suggest the widest possible range of human experiences. Only two things were off-limits. NASA decreed that no pictures could depict sex and no pictures could depict violence. No sex because NASA was prudish and no violence because images of ruins or bombs exploding might be interpreted by aliens as threatening.




The Golden Record was launched in 1977 inside the space probe Voyager. It´s like a message in a bottle in the sea, but there are very litle chances of someone receiving it. And it´s even more unlikely that the hypothetical recipient could decode the message.
The film The Arrival answers accurately the question of how to find a shared language with an ET civilization

Monday, 6 May 2019

THE HORSEMAN ON THE ROOF (JEAN GIONO) AND THE LIMITS OF AUTOPSY

Here you have a man (or woman) opened up from head to foot like an ox at a butcher shop and there, leaning over him (or her) with all his implements, the artist. He may know quite well what the man (or woman) died of. But “why,” in its deeper sense, is another matter. Another matter, which, to be brought into the open, would require knowledge of the “how”: how this man (or this woman) had lived. This man (or woman) has loved; hated; lied; suffered; and enjoyed the love, hatred, and lies of others. But no trace of all this at the autopsy




You can´t reach for the moon. Human soul is impenetrable and plausible. It would be very unfair that the autopsy gave away about our privacy. And the other way round, your closest friend doesn´t know about your pancreas.
It´s curious how this middle-20th-century novel is pioneer in the use of inclusive language

Wednesday, 10 April 2019

ULYSSES (JAMES JOYCE) AND POTATO AS A RHEUMATISM TREATMENT

BLOOM: (Gently) Give me back that potato, will you?
ZOE: Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing.
BLOOM: (With feeling) It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mamma.
ZOE: Give a thing and take it back God’ll ask you where is that You’ll say you don’t know God’ll send you down below.
BLOOM: There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.
STEPHEN: To have or not to have that is the question. ZOE: Here. (She hauls up a reef of her slip, revealing her bare thigh, and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking) Those that hides knows where to find.

(...)
On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe. No use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time 
(...)
I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. Freeman. Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where? 
(...)
(She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out) 
(...)
ZOE: I feel it. (Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist lips.)
BLOOM: A talisman. Heirloom. 
(...)
Sir? Spud again the rheumatiz? All poppycock, you’ll scuse me saying. For the hoi polloi. I vear thee beest a gert vool. 


Regardless of how little are we able to contribute to bringing some order into this chaotic novel, this tiniest contribution will be a remarkable succes
It´s true: people used to take a potato, halfway between therapy and talisman. I don´t really know if this local treatment is effective or not. I think the potato juice is good for some diseases, but I´m not sure.
In the novel itself some doubts about this therapy appear in the last paragraph: “all poppycock, you’ll scuse me saying. For the hoi polloi.”



Friday, 29 March 2019

GHOSTS (CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHE) AND THE DESPISE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

He was in sociology, and althought many of us in the proper sciences thought that the social sciences people were empty vesses who had too much time on their hands and worte reams of unreadable books, we saw Ikenna differently. We forgave his peremtory style and did not discard his panphlets and rather admired the erudite asperiry which with he blazed through issues; his fearlessness convinced us

It sometimes happens that Science people hate Social Sciences intensely. This intensity is rarely provoked by Humanities disiciplines like Philologies , or it´s at least another sort of hatred. I think Social Sciences are accused of trying to disguise themselves by using instruments of the natural sciences: stats, graphs… ‘The Strangled Reason’, by Carlos Elias explains this phenomenon very wel

Monday, 25 March 2019

SATURDAY (IAN MCEWAN) AND SCHRÖDINGER´S CAT

As he comes away, he remembers the famous thought experiment he learned about long ago on a physics course. A cat, Schrödinger’s Cat, hidden from view in a covered box, is either still alive, or has just been killed by a randomly activated hammer hitting a vial of poison. Until the observer lifts the cover from the box, both possibilities, alive cat and dead cat, exist side by side, in parallel universes, equally real. At the point at which the lid is lifted from the box and the cat is examined, a quantum wave of probability collapses. None of this has ever made any sense to him at all. No human sense. Surely another example of a problem of reference. He’s heard that even the physicists are abandoning it. To Henry it seems beyond the requirements of proof: a result, a consequence, exists separately in the world, independent of himself, known to others, awaiting his discovery. What then collapses will be his own ignorance. Whatever the score, it is already chalked up. And whatever the passengers’ destination, whether they are frightened and safe, or dead, they will have arrived by now.

Something which I am very proud of is the fact that, over 4 years, I have avoided some unpleasant aspects in the 86 posts of this blog. Searching for mistakes has not beeen then main aim of this blog, mainly to get away from my job. I also avoided the scientific clichés; you can´t picture how many times Schrödinger´s Cat appears in novels, it´s almost one more character.
It´s been difficult, but this is only the second time we speak about the damn cat. The first one was just to devote some words to a good movie



Wednesday, 20 March 2019

AMERICANAH (CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHE) AND THE PROVERBIAL GALLARTY OF CHEMISTRY TEACHERS

He turned to her and said, “About time,” when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service. She smiled at him. The graying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot. He had to be an academic, but not in the humanities or he would be more self-conscious. A firm science like chemistry, maybe.



One more time: the aim of this blog is the good vibes between Science and Humanities, but we don’t want to hide the truth. If this lady thinks that male Science teachers in general, and the Chemistry ones particulary, have a bigger composure with women, it won’t be here that we will disagree with her.

Maybe the reader has noticed that in some posts of this blog the relationship between Literature and Science is a little bit unnatural. We have forced this relationship in a case like this, when the book is so good that it deserves we talk about it 

Wednesday, 20 February 2019

HEARTBREAK TANGO (MANUEL PUIG) AND PHOTOTROPISM

It happened on an autumn afternoon. The trees that grew along that street in Buenos Aires bowed low. Why? Tall apartment houses on either side of the street blocked off the sun's rays, and the brancKes spread obliquely, as if pleading, toward the middle of the road . . . seeking light. Mabel was on her way to a friend's house for tea, she raised her eyes to the aged treetops, she noticed that the strong trunks bowed, humbly.

Phototropism is the phenomenon that makes vegetables grow and face the Sun, seeking its light. It may seem strange, but all plants do it; the birth and development of any plant is always done looking for the light, usually upwards. When the Sun exposition is irregular, like the situation explained in the text (the tree ‘humiliation’) the deflections from vertical appear

­A remarkable case of phototropism is the sunflower heliotropism. Sometimes, a tree that has fallen down, has got to stand up later thanks to this phenomenon.
In the picture, you can see Manuel Puig with some flowers; we don´t know whether they are heliotropic.

Tuesday, 5 February 2019

THE GHOST RIDERS OF ORDEBEC (FRED VARGAS), THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT AND CHAOS THEORY

No, she’s careful, not a gossip, Danglard. She takes seriously the butterfly wing that moves in New York and causes an explosion in Bangkok.’
Did she say that?’
No, that was Émeri.’
Well, he’s wrong. It’s in Brazil that the butterfly moves its wing, and it causes a hurricane in Texas.’
Does that make any difference, Danglard?’
Yes. Because once you get away from the original words, the purest of theories just become rumours. Then we don’t know anything. From one approximation to another inaccuracy, the truth unravels and obscurantism takes over.’
Danglard’s mood was improving, as it did every time he had a chance to give a lecture, or better still to contradict someone with his knowledge. The commandant wasn’t a chatterbox, but silence wasn’t good for him either, because it offered too much room for his melancholy to take over. Sometimes it just took a few exchanges to hoist Danglard out of his despondency. Adamsberg was putting off the moment of mentioning Momo the local fire-raiser, and so was Danglard, which was not a good sign.
There must be several versions of the butterfly story.’
No,’ said Danglard firmly. ‘It’s not a fable, it’s a scientific theory about predictability. It was formulated by Edward Lorenz in 1972 in the version I gave you. The butterfly’s in Brazil and the hurricane’s in Texas, you can’t go altering that.’

I can hardly add something to this text, because the role that I usually play correcting in a fussy way is done by Danglard in the dialogue. Indeed, Lorentz, the man that looks like a kind grandfather in the picture, started creating a mathematic model to study the convection movements of the atmosphere and he came to the conclusions that the text suggests

Monday, 28 January 2019

THE MAGUS (JOHN FOWLES) AND HEISENBERG PRINCIPLE

...but he might well have incorporated the Heisen-berg principle into his ‘experiment’, so that much of it was indeterminate, both to him as observer-voyeur and to us as observed human particles




I think this is the best allusion to Heisenberg Relation I have ever read. The Uncertainty Principle says that it is impossible to know some pairs of magnitudes at the same time. It´s very common to mix and confuse this principle with the intrinsic mistake of measure, which is provoked by the presence of the observator. This intrinsic mistake of measure, which is seen as a limitation by a lot of people, makes me feel almost like a God, changing the world with my look

Monday, 14 January 2019

THE KOMINSKY METHOD (CHUK LORRE) AND AGING FROM AN ENTROPIC POINT OF VIEW





This mixture of Biology and Physics sounds strange to me, but it´s worth hearing this conversation. If aging is a road to chaos, what would be the embryonic developmnet?

Friday, 11 January 2019

FIRST LIGHT (CHARLES BAXTER) AND THE PHOTON TRAJECTORY

Just outside Buffalo, Dorsey says, “I’m sick. I have Autobahnschmerz. It’s not the distance. It’s the freeways and tolls and the speed and the time, and the fact that there aren’t any decisions a human being can make. It’s like being …” She thinks for a moment. “It’s like being a photon. You can’t decide where you’re going.”
Hugh shrugs and keeps his eyes on the road.




The first time I read this text I also shurg my shoulders, because what can I do against such pendantry? Then I realized it´s a good examle: photon goes by rails which are difficult to get out of. A planet moving in space is also a good example. One goes forward concienless, that´s how we have finished last year.

Friday, 21 December 2018

EARTHLY POWERS (ANTHONY BURGESS) AND INERTIA

We were all still standing up, but now Carlo sat down. The whisky in his glass tried to stay where it was and splashed his black jacket. He ignored this, looking, frowning, up at his brother.

I wrote inertia, but, which is the real cause of the whisky falling? Is it maybe because it´s a more complex particles system than the glass itself?If it´s actually the inertia, Burgess describes the phenomenon perfectly: the whisky tries to remain where it was or the way it was, we could also say
I took out this book from the library. It was at the middle of the novel that I realized that I was reading the second volume. I thought a novel starting about page four hundred was a excentric and modern thing that I tolerated

Monday, 10 December 2018

1984 (GEORGE ORWEL) AND A PESSIMISTIC PROPHECY ABOUT THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE

In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance— meaning, in effect, war and police espionage—the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated.



Even darker texts than this one appear in the novel. There are always people who think that we are close to the commented situation, like Thomas Pynchon in tHe epilogue. From my point of view, there is something in which the book is right. It´s in an annex , a Newspeak treatise, which seems to inspire the literary style of thousands of pedagogues.
In the videoclip you can discover (time 1:20) that the elegance and glam that are attributed to David Bowie were indeed developed early in some discos from Spanish villages

Monday, 3 December 2018

THINKS… (DAVID LODGE) AND LAUGHTER AND CRY FROM AN EVOLUTIVE POINT OF VIEW

- It´s a passage from the 1838 notebook. Darwin is thirty. The voyage on the Beagle is two years behind him. He has the idea of evolution firmly by the tail. Hah, no pun intended...He´s convinced taht man is decended from apes, but he hasn´t gone public yet- he knows all too well what an uproar it will cause. He´s been thinking about laughter- that when humans laught they expose their canine teeth, just like baboons. He speculates that our laughter and smiling might be traced back to the way apes communicate the discovery of food to the rest of their tribe- Ralph underlines the quotation with his finger as he reads aloud: “This way of viewing the subject important, laughing modified barking, smilin modified laughing. Barking to tell other animals in associated kinds of good news, discovery of prey- no doubt arising from want of assistance”. The comes the afterthought. He can´t think what crying might be a modification of. “Crying is a puzzler”
- “Sunt lacrimae rerum”, says Helen
- My Latin´s a tad rusty- Ralph says
- “There are tears of things”. Virgil. It´s almost untranslatable, but one knows what he means. Somethin like, “Crying is a puzzler”
- Actually laughter is a puzzler too- says Ralph- Darwin´s explanation doesn´t really cut it

It´s a pity that animals lack A sense of humour, because it would be very useful for them to kill time. All the animals, from the wildest to the most domesticated , waste boring hours and hours which could be spent among laughter and jokes. I don´t know in which sense could crying be useful for animals, because Crying is a puzzler, as Darwin and Virgil said.
I remember in my neighborhood a dog died, the owners of this dog used to say that their dog, Ron, could smile. They buried it next to a wall in which they wrote: “Ron, the dog with an unforgettable smile” . Some creative scoundrel retouched the epitaph, which became :”Ron, the dog with an unforgettable smell”