The end of the world as I knew it

When I was in my O level year I thought I had worked out how the end of the world would arrive

My attitude towards religion had, until then, been a thoroughly emotional one, based on a strong attachment to the language & rituals of Christianity, the music of the organ & the singing of hymns

This was beginning to change into something more questioning. Helped by a BBC schools programme which tackled the thornier issues, such as the problem of pain

It was also the time which Harold Wilson later characterised as the white hot heat of the technological revolution. The men in white coats were really on the verge of solving all the problems of the world

But that, I thought, would mean omniscience, & only God could be omniscient

I also knew that science proceeded step by tiny step, each experiment adding one more fragment to the sum total of human knowledge

So omniscience would arrive when a scientist somewhere in his lonely lab completed the experiment which added the final piece, & 'we' would finally know it all

And in that instant, before the scientist could even say eureka, we would just be subsumed into God. 'We' would no longer exist

The beauty of this idea is that we would be completely unaware of the end. I found that an oddly comforting conclusion

Now, I read in the tv listings, the Large Hadron Collider may be about to achieve just that end

Fortunately its a 50 million to 1 chance. I wonder if these scientists can also calculate the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow?

Same but different

Many white people find it startling, & difficult to accept, that in countries where people do not see many whites in their day to day lives, 'we' all look the same

But we do, we do

Though I admit to being surprised the first time it happened to me

Because she was short, dumpy & wore her fair hair up in a bun. I was a long haired brunette beanpole

I also felt seriously offended

Because she was 30 if she was a day, & I was only 21

Word search

When I was writing about mid-C20th women recently (Dont be a bluestocking) I wanted a word for love of marriage - the equivalent of philoprogenitive

There doesnt seem to be one

So I thought Id invent one. Toyed with the idea of philohymenal but it sounds a bit disgusting, certainly not euphonious. Philothalamic (homage to Donne) would be impossible

I like philogamous. It sounds quite cosy

Somebody beat me to it, though its not in the OED:


A PHILOGAMOUS FELLOW [Pseudonym] The pros and cons of the celibate system in the universities. Cambridge, Henry W. Wallis, 1871.

Sounds like a good read

Links

Amitmishra comment on another blog

Perfect Wives, Other Women By Georgina Dopico Black

The Arabian Epic By M. C. Lyons

Making eyes

You know how young(ish) mens eyes will always swivel towards a pretty girl walking along the street? How, if hes with a mate who might not have noticed, theres a surreptitious nudge with the elbow & a silent Cor! Look at that!

Provided its not accompanied by catcalls, wolf whistles or crude comments, I see no earthly point in objecting to such behaviour, still less berating them for it. Its rather sweet, really. And anyway, they grow out of it. Eventually

I have even more sympathy now. Since I reached a certain age I find that my eyes swivel too. Only in this case its towards babies & small children

With all the paranoia about paedophiles, I felt nervous in case people might notice. Tried to pass by with my eyes fixed firmly ahead

But its actually much nicer if you catch the parents eye, exchange a silent What a lovely child!

And its even nicer still if you smile

I expect the evolutionary psychologists have a plausible explanation of the survival advantages conveyed by these behaviours on our ancestral hunter gatherers as they roamed the plains

Title credit 1 2

Its a point of view

There are of course many joys & advantages to be had from looking at the world through a computer screen

But you cant spread your work out, as you can with books, papers, statistical tables across the top of a desk. Nor can you mark the relevant bits by laying the book down flat, festooned with torn off bits of paper or marked with red felt tip, or scribbles of 'Rubbish!'

Finding your way back on the computer, to what you belatedly realise was an interesting or vital page is not easy. Even if you had noted the brain boggling string of symbols which is the url, all too often it comes up Not Found, or has been edited to remove the precise point for which you are searching

At least with a laptop you can look down, you dont get a crick with your necks unaccustomed position while you stare at a vertical screen

But it is still like trying to work with one hand covering one eye, with an empty cardboard tube from a toilet roll clasped to the other, just to restrict the visual field

It really ought to be perdaughter

I wonder if Acts of Parliament still include this in their introduction:

For the avoidance of doubt, the male embraces the female

Which is such a delightful way of putting it

Or perhaps they have finally got round to doing what JS Mill moved in 1867, that man should become person

Its my money

Its my money, so why should I have to pay to take it out of a cash machine?

Because it may be your money, but its not your cash

If your money is in the bank then its just a pattern of electrons on a hard disc. A microscopic speck in a complex world wide web of debts, credits, obligations, promises

If it were your cash it would be upstairs under the mattress, or weighing down your handbag, or spoiling the line of your jacket

Cash is physical, tangible, real

Cash has to be manufactured out of real paper & metal. That costs money

It takes up space, has to be stored somewhere. Space costs

It needs security, wherever it is - vault, Group4 van, supermarket till, even in a cash machine. That costs

It needs to be physically counted, by hand, every time it changes hands. That costs too

Somebody, somewhere, is paying for it somehow

Labour is the worst pain anyone can experience

This is one which, as a good Popperian, I can refute purely from personal experience

And no, this is not an obscure joke about current politics

Mary Anne, Mary Ellen & Mary Jane

I recently tracked down, courtesy of Google, a poem that I had learned as a child. Though not without the help, as a crucial first step, of a book in the reference library, an index to verse for children

The reason I coudnt find it directly on Google was that I was misremembering a name. I was mixing it up with the Mary Jane who did not like rice pudding

This poem, by Anna Maria Pratt, is about Mary Anne, a doll whose name is given as the, mortifyingly mistaken, answer to the question What is six times nine?

A Mortifying Mistake

I studied my tables over and over
And backward and forward too
But I couldn't remember six times nine
And I didn't know what to do
'Til my sister told me to play with my doll
And not to bother my head
"If you call her 'Fifty-four' for awhile
You'll learn it by heart', she said.


So I took my favorite, Mary Anne,
Though I thought 'twas a dreadful shame
To give such a perfectly lovely child
Such a perfectly horrible name,
And I called her my little Fifty-four
A hundred times 'til I knew
The answer of six times nineAs well as the answer of two times two.


Next day, Elizabeth Wigglesworth,
Who always acted so proud
Said, "Six times nine is fifty-two,
And I nearly laughed out loud
But I wished I hadn't when teacher said,
"Now Dorothy, tell if you can."
For I thought of my doll and sakes alive!
I answered, "Mary Anne!"

One thing leads to another & I found myself remembering my grandfather

If I did or said anything foolish in his presence he would shake his head, cluck his tongue & say "Eeh! Youre a right Mary Ellen, you are"

When I was told that the headmistress of the school I was going to teach at was called Sister Mary Ellen, I thought, She can't be

But she was. I dont know if that made me more or less nervous of meeting her

Commonplace books

Ben Macintyre wrote an interesting piece about commonplace books the other day. I too have been keeping commonplace books for more years than I care to remember

I had always thought that the word commonplace must be a cuddly version of miscellaneous file - a place to keep, to hold in common, all those personally meaningful bits & pieces which otherwise resist classification

Mine used to be in a variety of notebooks & included cartoons, pictures & clippings of interesting bits of graphics from newspapers & magazines, as well as quotations, comments & musings

After my right arm went funny I moved to keeping it as a Word document - functional but not so pretty or idiosyncratic

I am working on turning this into a commonplace blog

Sometimes making a collage of pieces from the old one

Little minds are interested in the extra-ordinary; great minds in the commonplace - Elbert Hubbard

Quetelet invented the Body Mass Index

Oh no, he didnt

He merely observed that, among his samples of early C19th Belgians, weight tends to increase in proportion to the square of the height, once they were fully grown

He also failed to recognise that newer generations might be growing taller. He attributed to natural shrinkage the entire difference in height between 40 & 80 year olds

Links

A treatise on man and the development of his faculties - Google Books Result


Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874)—the average man and indices of obesity - Garabed Eknoyan

Pomp & cavalcades

"Its even better in London," one aide confides. "Marble Arch with no waiting - just imagine it"

Tony Blair aide, as reported by Ian Rankin in The Times, 27 April 2007

Doesnt that sum up all you need to know about them?

The NHS is a burden on us

On Womans Hour this week a woman told of how she had been told, in terms, by an NHS doctor, that she would be a burden on the NHS because she was classified as clinically obese

Smokers like me are a burden too

And people who injure themselves or others through the sheer stupidity of their driving

And all those sportsmen who injure themselves in pursuit of their allegedly healthy activities

And mothers of IVF twins

And people who live on lettuce & lemon juice

And people who demand fabulously expensive drugs to eke out their miserable existence for another few months

In fact the opposite is true

The NHS, by gobbling up going on 10% of our gross income, is a burden on us

And brings out the nosy, carping, interfering, censorious, misanthropic busybody in us all

Related post: Not so funny anymore

First impressions

I used to think Gary Slapper was well named - bit of a media tart, as the unkind label has it

But I have changed my opinion, especially since I started reading him in The Times

He had a very nice piece on the Attorney General this week. Containing a phrase which is headed for my commonplace book

"when political power has tried to jostle justice"

Cloning is an environmental procedure

Cloning is an environmental procedure, concerned with nurture, not nature

True, its aim is genetic: to control as completely as possible the genetic makeup of the resulting life form

But putting the genetic material together is (relatively) the easy bit

The trick is to put it into an environment which enables development to start & then proceed to viability

Related post: Genes & process

Tall cranes

Miracles of modern engineering. Things of beauty. And power. And awe. Rock solid, perfectly balanced. Seemingly pared down to use the minimum of material. As delicate as the tracery on any medieval rose window.

Im very glad Im not the one who has to get the sums right to make sure they stay upright

There are plenty gracing the Manchester skyline right now

During the second great hurricane to hit England in recent years - '90 or '91 - I was working in an office on the 17th floor. The winds began really to pick up around mid-day & I observed the operator of a crane on the adjacent building site begin to make his cautious descent

I dont know why he was up there in the first place - the winds had been forecast. No Michael Fish moment there

I soon had to leave my office. I had been trying not to look, but my eyes kept being pulled towards the window. Like watching a car crash in slow motion

But he did make it down safely

It depends on how you look at it

The answer to Wittgensteins supplementary question about the sun is, as always, another question

What would it have looked like if it had felt as if the earth were spinning on its axis?

He wasnt always sitting glowering in his box

Am I imagining this?

Or was Gordon Brown a coruscating performer in the House of Commons in the 1980s?

A formidable debater

Feared by Conservative (junior) ministers

And very funny

Post mortem scandals

I am supposed to react with shocked horror to the idea that organs or tissues may have, for research purposes, sometimes been removed from dead bodies without the relatives (or indeed the corpses) permission

I am also supposed to understand why, in some cases, such parts have been retrieved from the laboratory & given a 'decent burial'

Why then would it be thought peculiar of me to ask that significant parts of my body, which were surgically removed over 20 years ago, be reunited & disposed of together with the rest of me when I die?

Does anyone want to join with me in a campaign to fight for my human right to decide whether the NHS should callously have decided to chuck my bits into the incinerator or pickled them in glass jars to be gawped at by generations of medical students?

An apple a day

Do Marks & Spencer put apple juice in all their drinks?

I first noticed this when I tried their vanilla & maple smoothie. I had acquired a particular taste for vanilla flavoured milky drinks when it was my favourite among the supercharged nutritional drinks I was given in hospital last year. The first taste of the M&S version made me splutter - rather than a slightly sweet creaminess I got distinctly sour. Examination of the label revealed that apple juice was an unexpected ingredient. I have since acquired the taste however

This week I suddenly noticed that the diet version of their lemon & lime fizzy water costs 15p less than the full strength version, which seems rather a lot for the difference between the price of sugar & saccharine. I normally avoid, on principle, anything which carries the rubric diet, or lite, or (ugh) lo-fat but I was intrigued enough to compare labels

Apart from the fact that the diet version tells you the country of origin of the lemons & limes, there are only 2 real differences between the 2 versions. The artificial sweetener is the same. So the price differential is down to the use of bog-standard carbonated water rather than mineral water, & the addition of apple juice to the full strength version