Strange death

It will come as a huge blow to some readers of the Times & its devoted Revise & Feedback teams of guardians of good English, but Language Log has proof that Whom has all but ceased to be.

Link
The coming death of whom: photo evidence

Related post
Rumsfeldian grammar rules

Safety in childbirth

A recent edition of More or Less on Radio 4 attempted to answer a young listener’s question: What would be the population of the world today if WWI - with its carnage of young men – had never happened.

Imponderable, to say the least. But Professor Jay Winter attempted some elucidation.

For me, the most startling revelation was that infant mortality declined sharply – largely because, with so many doctors on war service many more births were attended by a midwife only.

The use of forceps fell dramatically - & perhaps midwifes were more scrupulous about washing their hands.

Link
Jay Winter Department of History Yale University

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Beating the odds

Overworked

Chris Huhne told delegates to the Lib Dem conference that the biggest surprise of being in government was the amount of work it entailed. "I prioritise what I take home by what I can get into my bike pannier," he explained. “If it doesn’t fit in my bike pannier I don’t take it home.”

Well, well, well.

Has the coalition relaxed the rules on ministerial boxes? As others before have found out – from Sir George Young (the bicycling baronet) to David Cameron, red boxes are verboten on a bike. And on a bus (Chris Mullin).

Come to think of it, Sarah Vine, wife of Michael Gove, wrote a piece in The Times about the arrival at her home of the chauffeur driven red box while her husband travelled by other means.

Perhaps Chris Huhne just has a mock up or model pannier which his Private Office staff can use as a guide to the amount of paper which he can tolerate at home.

Link
Conference diary

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Thomas Bayes’ logarithm

According to a report by Nic Fildes in Monday's Times, the walls of Mike Riley’s Autonomy headquarters are adorned with a ‘lurid neon sign that displays the Bayesian logarithm.’

In the words of the ever helpful but case insensitive Google - Did you mean: bayesian algorithm ?

Links

Autonomy - The Leader in Meaning-Based Computing & Enterprise Search

Bayes' Theorem for the curious and bewildered

Restoration of Thomas Bayes' Tomb
Who was the Reverend Thomas Bayes?

Family formation

One interesting observation which came out almost as an aside in Radio 4’s latest report on the Born in Bradford study provided confirmation of my casual observation of a new pattern in family life: parents who are not married & do not live together but who share the upbringing of their children.

They spoke to one such mother who stressed how good was the children’s father – visiting every day, even having the children to stay with him for 2 days a week. Such arrangements seem to be informal, no court or other agency involved.

The most likely explanation remains, for me, the uncertainty & insecurity around male employment these days, especially in the old industrial areas of the north. It must be hard for a man to know what role to play in a family if he is not the reliable provider, just another ‘child’ in his relationship with his partner. And all this reinforced by the emphasis in the benefit system of making sure that children are cared for, which has, perhaps unwittingly, led to it being much easier for a lone mother to negotiate the bureaucracy than it is for a man.

Links
Born in Bradford
Radio 4 Born in Bradford

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Technology & the rise of fertility
Caring fathers
Marriage

Price, supply, demand: Aqueous cream

If you buy a big ticket item it will obviously be worth your while to pay some attention to where you can get it at the lowest price – although other factors, such as convenience, the reputation of the seller, or the quality of the brand may be at least as, if not even more, important than simple cash.

But how do you make purchasing decisions for smaller, more everyday items?

When Resale Price Maintenance was abolished in Britain in 1964 there was plenty of advice for housewives; we were advised, in all seriousness, to walk the length of the high street stopping at each relevant outlet to check the price of the items on our shopping list. You then turned round & walked back home, this time stopping to buy bacon, bread & baked beans at whichever shop offered the lowest price for each.

In fact this was the way that perfect competition was described as operating in the only venue in which it could conceivably do so, as it was described in our Introduction to the Theory of Economics lectures; consumers entered the street market & carefully checked the price & quality of the potatoes on offer at all the different stalls before making a decision.

Aqueous cream has once again made me think about all this.

If you are a nurse or a carer or an elderly person you will be familiar with aqueous cream – a skin cleansing agent & emulsifier for softening & soothing skin. It is a great boon. With the addition of magic ingredients & perfumes it is essentially what beauty editors call moisturiser or cleansing or anti-ageing lotion, but bog standard is available in non-branded form. It consists mostly of petroleum & water.

The last time I left hospital with a goody bag full of pharmacy products, one was a big tub of emollient cream, apparently made up in the hospital itself since their label only appeared on the tub. When it eventually ran out I thought I would buy the nearest available commercial product & trotted off to a well known High Street Chain with the list of ingredients – which included some chemical names which meant nothing to me.

The lists of ingredients on the creams available on the shelves brought only confusion – how did I know which might be vital to my needs? A discussion with the pharmacist whizzed me through a very interesting lesson on the science of moisturising different areas of skin. When feet were mentioned – well I don’t think the word lard was used, but the implication was that any old fat would do for that & I left with a tube of the cheapest available cream.

It was some time later that I noticed a display in the same pharmacy of large hospital sized tubs of aqueous cream at a very advantageous price. I soon noticed that supermarkets were doing the same – I put it down to their strategy for maximising their share of the prescription market, since the majority of customers for aqueous cream will be elderly & the elderly account for 6 out of every 10 prescriptions issued by the NHS. The price seemed to hover around the £4 mark.


It is not something I need to buy very often, so I would just buy it in whichever store I happened to be in on the day. Until one day that store was Sainsbury's & I discovered that their price was only £2.02. So next time I needed some I made sure it was a Sainsbury’s day.

But Oh dear – last week there was an empty space on the shelf where the aqueous cream should have stood. Well, the shelf is in the pharmacy section & as there was no queue at the counter I went across to ask if they had any.

The pharmacist went & brought a tub from round the back. I had to pay him for it, rather than take it to the checkout with the rest of my shopping – and it cost £2.99! Almost 50% more than the shelf price of the other stuff (I did go to check just to make sure).

Well it’s not the kind of thing to make a fuss about, or walk away & buy it somewhere else.

But why the difference? The size is the same, as are the listed ingredients (white soft paraffin, liquid paraffin, cetostearyl alcohol, sodium laurisulfate, phenoxyethanol, purified water) though they do not appear in the same order & they do not give the percentages in a way that is directly comparable.

The one from behind the pharmacy counter specifies that it meets the BP (British Pharmacopoeia) standards.

Both are manufactured in Ireland (by different companies) but the one on the public shelves also carries the name of an English distributor.

Oddly, the one from round the back has the more attractive label, with a pretty yellow & green logo.

Of course, in many cases, those getting the pharmacy version on an NHS prescription will not have anything to pay at the point of delivery; indeed those who are liable to pay the charge of £7.20 per item would be well advised to make a private purchase.

I do not know what I conclude from this nano-economic analysis. It certainly shows the complexity of the globalised consumer world in which we live, & how complicated is the business of being a purveyor to the masses. It even shows how confusing it can be for a mere consumer, attempting to obey the simple law of price & demand.

I once read a very splendid article about how to make sure you got your new car at the lowest possible price, using game theory to set dealer against dealer. Written of course by a man. I do not think such stratagems would work for the weekly shop – the math is probably far too complicated anyway.

So I think I will just fall back on the law of large numbers & say that all these would-be rational, sometimes illogical choices work out in the end to fit the macro-economic forecasting models which guide the Chancellor’s decisions.

Links
The Conservative Party and Defeat: the Significance of Resale Price Maintenance for the General Election of 1964

Prescriptions - The NHS

NHS Prescription Charges

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Swings & roundabouts on drugs

Worthwhile intervention

Entering the age of the consumer

I think that my father only ever gave my sister & me one ‘proper’ present – by which I mean for birthday or, in this case, Christmas, all wrapped up in festive paper with a card saying Love from Daddy.

I do not wish to imply that he was a mean, distant or uncaring father – far from it. For instance I remember some wonderful toys he made when we were small, particularly a rocking horse & a double fronted dolls house with electric light in every room.

But formal occasion presents were left to mummy & other female relatives, except for horrible uncle, who used to give us extravagantly ‘grown up’ presents of Max Factor talcum powder.

What made the present even more extraordinary was that it was bought new from a shop, rather than made by him from scratch or acquired second hand & lovingly restored & refurbished.

We each got one of these mysterious & unexpected presents after everything else had been opened on Christmas morning.

Small portable transistor radios.

We both burst into tears I think. How could daddy have known how badly we wanted to be with it but would never have dreamed of pestering for something so extravagant.

Our children's future

Peter White’s series which tracks the fortunes of some of the children who went to Singapore to support Britain’s bid for the 2012 Olympics is back again on Radio 4.

One of the striking things about these young people who lived in one of the more deprived areas of the capital is how many of them have found that their road to the future leads, at least for a time, to North America, usually as part of their higher education.

One girl emigrated with her parents, one won a sports scholarship, one is spending a year of his university course over there, & one has just first landed his first job, after graduating from Exeter university.

Food for thought there.

Link

BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Children of the Olympic Bid.

Related post

Only in America?

Atlas & my mother’s new fridge

For some reason I thought that the Atlas supercomputer of the 1960s had been analogue rather than digital; I think I must have been muddling up & misremembering various discussions I had at that time with my father. He was very keen on the idea of analogue computers, & on Atlas too.

Some time after 1966 he decided to build his own home computer. I never had the privilege of seeing this machine, as I lived abroad at the time, & they left it behind when they moved to a new house. And since my father never wrote me a letter I have only my mother’s description to go on; it had a lot of valves & its main purpose seemed to be to switch lights on & off.

Mother was pleased about it for several reasons however – not least because she got a brand new modern fridge out of it.

My parents never lost the habits of thrift – little was ever bought new & we had a man in only rarely – both were good at DIY so things were bought second hand & refurbished or even made from scratch – a great advantage of having an engineer in the house.

The post-war prefab that was our first family home had a fitted kitchen with, wonder of wonders, a built-in refrigerator, but the Edwardian house we moved to when I was 8 had a proper pantry/larder, rendering a refrigerator unnecessary. Even better it doubled as a photographic dark room.

But the 1930’s house which came next had only the simplest ventilated cupboard. The refrigeration problem was solved by the purchase of an old fashioned model at auction. It was huge, though the internal space for storage was no greater than you would get in the smallest under-the counter fridge in a modern galley kitchen. Its deceptive size was made up mainly of insulation – which is what made it perfect housing for my father’s computer.

So, with children off their hands, they could afford to splash out.

Links

The ATLAS Computer:- The Technology
Overview Atlas Computer
Atlas Computer Laboratory
London Atlas
Archive - Desmond Paul Henry
Online Stuff - Science Museum

Spanish Tudors

Sometimes it does you good to come across familiar history written or put together by somebody with a different point of view.

I was intrigued to come across this website Tudor place, put together by an Argentinian called Jorge.

Even just reading that the first wife of Henry VIII was called Catalina De Aragon or that Mary Tudor was married to Felipe gives you that little pause for thought.

Healthy legs

Why should the increased height of today’s youngsters come mainly from longer legs? To put it another way, why should improved nutrition not increase the lengths of all parts of the body?

Well there must be some minimum viable size of the major organs in the abdomen & thorax, meaning that they must have a certain minimum amount of space. probably a viale maximum size too - it would indeed be very interesting to know whether the variability between humans in the size of these internal organs is less than the variability in overall size.

So if food is short, nutrition less than optimal, or some other environmental factor imposes limits to growth, resources will naturally be concentrated on preserving the length of the torso. In times of plenty then there will be enough to spare for the luxury of long legs.

There seems to be no medical concerns about this, certainly not to the extent that there is concern about people whose extra food goes towards increasing girth to the point we call obese. There are no learned papers on the health effects of height.

But problems there are. And although most of these may need environmental rather than clinical solutions (higher ceilings & doorways, bigger chairs, higher work surfaces, more legroom on public transport, longer beds – especially in NHS hospitals where good sleep might be considered essential to patient recovery …).

But should longer legs mean that we need to recalibrate the healthy values of BMI?

Other things being equal I would expect each extra vertical inch of height to provide more relative mass in the leg than in the torso – it is all muscle & bone, less fat, water or empty space. This means that over time our healthy limits for BMI might have to be adjusted upwards.

Unless of course the doom mongers are right & famine lies just over the horizon.

Related post

Oh my aching back

Proverbial issue by Bernard Proctor

One of the shortest poems in the English language.


Proverbial issue

familiarity
breeds

Infertility

Once again we have witnessed how the shame has not completely gone away from infertility. In some ways it has got worse, since there is such a widespread belief that you can decide to have, or not have, a child just as you can choose any other consumer good.

Our beliefs have not advanced so far from those expressed in the C16th Book of Common Prayer – marriage is for the procreation of children. And so, in these days of IVF, there must be some secret darker reason for not having children if you are married.

In fact I know only one woman who has confided that she & her husband had decided from the very beginning that they did not want to have children – It’s messy, & you can’t send it back if you decide you don’t like it. It may be relevant to these feelings that she & her husband were each the only child of very elderly parents.

In the days before follicle stimulating drugs & other modern treatments were available, stories of the mysteries of fertility & infertility were legion. One of my mother’s best friends had endured 7 miscarriages before deciding to adopt. Within three years of the arrival of her chosen daughter she had produced two healthy strapping sons. Her doctor said that there was no explanation known to medical science, but there must be something about having a baby to look after – perhaps a change of diet – which put her hormones into the right kind of balance. Not quite so off-the-wall perhaps when you consider the well-attested phenomenon of cycles coming into sync in all-female residential establishments such as boarding schools or convents.

A friend of mine is 18 years younger than their only sibling – to the delighted surprise of their mother who had long before accepted that she would never again be blessed.

The daughter of a friend had fertility treatment in the very early days (pre-IVF). When her baby was a few months old she put her feelings of unwellness down to all the well known strains & stresses of new motherhood; when they seemed to get worse rather than better she plucked up courage to seek her doctor’s advice. After listening to her list of symptoms he said ‘Tell me, Mrs H, is there any chance you might be pregnant?’

‘The moment he said it, I realised. I felt such a fool.’ But then she had obviously not been taking fertility drugs while breast feeding.

If you ever read anything about the possible causes of infertility back in those days you could easily begin to wonder how any of us ever got here in the first place. And there was very little to be done about it – especially if you already had a child since it was well known that ‘The birth of a first baby is one of the biggest causes of infertility.’

Surprisingly enough however, the cause could sometimes be blindingly obvious; a small handbook of advice for GPs available as late as the 1970s began at the beginning. Make sure you see both members of the couple, & establish as tactfully as possible that they are in fact doing the necessary, which, surprising as it may seem, does not always come naturally. Hard to imagine that happening these days, but a point well worth remembering when doubts about the value of sex education are considered.

These days sex education tends to take fertility for granted & devotes more attention to protection from disease. But even before the causes of & treatments for STIs were better understood from the scientific point of view, their consequences for fertility were known – this of course was one of the reasons underlying the insistence upon virgin brides or, in some cultures, not marrying until the girl’s fertility were established in the most direct way possible.

Infertility has changed the course of history, not least in England with its dual system of hereditary monarchy & primogeniture through the male line. What would we be today if Henry VIII's efforts at paternity had turned out as he would have wished? So it is not surprising that it is, or can be, still more than just a personal private problem.

Related posts

The mystery of paternity

Genes & generations

Wet afternoons

One of the unusual things about our weather this late summer & early autumn is that the pattern of the day has had more in common with the pattern seen in a tropical island such as Singapore than we are used to in the temperate zone on the edge of Europe.

The days have generally started off bright & sunny, with plenty of blue among the clouds, but by late morning the cloud has piled in from the west & just stuck. Then an afternoon of brief but very heavy & very localised downpours, before clearing up again in the early evening, leaving a sunset fierce enough to be blinding.

Author interview

An interesting experience listening to Philip Dodd interview Tony Blair on Radio 3 last night. As Blair himself said, it was a very unusual experience for him.

I thought Dodd had Blair pretty well filleted on the issue of the influence of religion on his policies, & Blair was certainly very uncomfortable at the idea of that power necessarily involves a Mephistophelian pact.

But Bridget Kendall made one of the most interesting points in the discussion which followed the interview, & which also covered a review of this weekends tv programme The Special Relationship. Perhaps, in time, the Blair era will come to be seen as one where he attempted simply to ride the wave of a sudden belief that we were still an important country with clout & influence in the world.

Something which, almost as suddenly, has been exposed as a delusion, with China not emerging but emerged, & most sadly, the limitations of our military power cruelly exposed.

Links
BBC - BBC Radio 3 Programmes - Night Waves, Tony Blair
BBC - BBC Two Programmes - The Special Relationship
BBC - BBC Radio 3 Programmes - Belief, Series 5, Tony Blair

Emancipating fashions

According to Lisa Armstrong in The Times magazine, we had to wait until 1973 to see the first woman wearing trousers in an advertisement for perfume. ‘Things move slowly in the great battle for emancipation’ – or is it just in fashion?

Related posts
School rebellion
Daft dress codes

Storm clouds gathering

This week’s storms have at least brought us some exciting skies. For far too many days this summer the clouds have provided zero distraction or amusement at the bus stop – just a 100% undifferentiated cover of grey & white; even when there have been patches of blue the clouds have stayed stubbornly stuck, done nothing interesting at all.

This week we have had everything from mare’s tails to pleated cotton wool to grey storm clouds racing across the sky at a tremendous lick.

Pause for thought

The most likely cause of Spontaneous Human Combustion, I read in times Eureka, is that a lit cigarette accidentally ignites subcutaneous fats, which in turn ignite the rest of the body.

However as UK Skeptics point out ‘Cases of claimed SHC are rare which suggests that the conditions necessary for wick-effect burning to occur are also rare.’

The flames start to die away as the body fat is used up. So the way to reduce the risk, as a smoker, is to make sure you are as thin as possibly can be.

Links
The wick effect.
Spontaneous human combustion - Some theories
Spontaneous Human Combustion

Computers of myth & legend

It was through a piece of pure Googlestance that I came across Hector the supercomputer. I have to confess that I was not really aware that supercomputers were still needed, except for large scale number crunching jobs such as weather forecasting – we hear so much about schemes which allow you to donate spare capacity on your home computer to various large scale projects as to believe that such behemoths are no longer required for mere academic research

Mind you, a sneaky bit of me thinks that if it takes over 1.3 billion grid points and 640 processors running for 5 days ‘to achieve flow development sufficient to obtain turbulence statistics & spectra within the turbulent patch’ then there must be a simpler way - we are not nearly as clever as we need to be.

Hector reminded me of his predecessor Atlas, the British supercomputer of the early 1960s. The one acquired by London University was regarded with some awe, but looking back at how the subject was covered in The Times, it is plain that the £2,000,000 cost placed a severe strain on the university’s finances & two-thirds of its time was made available for commercial projects to ease the burden.

Looking at what The Times was reporting of the dawn of the new computer age can be dispiriting. An article by Derek Whipp in October 1961 reports that “There has been scepticism. Men who for years have made decisions based on their experience sometimes doubt what the machine tells them because the results do not seem to stand the challenge of common sense.”

A high street chemist started a computerised stock control/reordering system. People who had hitherto relied on their own mental processes doubted the results, but a check proved that human methods had allowed for unnecessary contingencies.

Using a phone to link to a computer, printing by computer (a £28,650 research grant to London University to explore the options was announced in February 1964) – these belonged to a future fantasy.

And it was not really until after the mid-1980s, after the arrival of the desk top computer &, even more importantly, the visual display screen for output right now, right here, that computers began to be the familiar objects that they are today.

Links

A non-technical introduction to the HECToR Supercomputer…
Fasten your seatbelts: Turbulent patches in oceans and atmospheres

CP2K : High Performance Quantum Chemistry on HECToR

Breakthrough in Fluid Mixing: Simulating Fractal-Generated Turbulent Flows

Forever unknowable unknowns

Tim Harford is worried that he may soon be past his prime, but on the other side Jonah Lehrer says the US’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been funding ever-older scientists, he worries that funding goes to scientists past their prime.

“Lehrer wants more funding to be directed to younger scientists, but he may be bumping against a more fundamental force than gerontocratic funding bodies. As the economist Benjamin Jones has discovered, scientists are having to specialise more and study for longer, because the frontiers of knowledge are now much further advanced than they were in Einstein’s day.”

It must be open to question whether we really know more than our ancestors. Considered just at the personal level is it plausible any one modern human can ‘know’ more than any individual from the past? What about all the things which they – rightly or wrongly – ‘knew’ to be the case but of which we are totally ignorant, or which have now been relegated to the province of the secluded scholar examining dusty tomes.

The traveller of today needs to know how to read an airline schedule or a motorway map, or how to switch on the sat nav; they do not need to know how to navigate on water.

Years ago I heard someone say that the reason why small children could set a video recorder but their grandparents could not was that a small child just pushes buttons until something happens – grandparents try to understand the instruction manual. ‘Push buttons until something happens’ is, I have found, an invaluable tip in these days of ever-evolving computer technologies – though the need to understand the instructions is the main reason that I do not want to take on the role of being my own home-IT manager.

This idea that it takes longer for a scientist to reach the stage of knowing enough to be able to make new findings has worried me for some time – I think it is one of those beliefs which contributes to the relative unpopularity of science at school. As one young woman said, in any other class I feel I can make a contribution of my own, but in science only the teacher knows, you just have to listen.

Even in my day – I actually set out to do physics A level, thinking that it must surely start to get interesting now. I dropped out by early November.

Part of the problem is that, as Collingwood argued, you cannot understand the answer unless you understand the question that scientists were setting out to answer. Yes, Boyles Law may stand the test of time & be capable of universal application, but why was the question so important then, & why did his experiments take the form that they did?

Is there any good reason why we cannot start children with Einstein, bringing in the earlier history as & when needed, or even relegating it to a separate part of the curriculum?

At the very least we should, through media such as animations, compress the file of scientific knowledge into forms that allow the principles to be quickly assimilated, leaving students to practice the true experimental method by testing their own (mini) hypotheses.

The Whiggish theory of scientific progress – of the inevitability of its particular path towards Theories of Everything – cannot be maintained forever. This approach must be ultimately self-defeating – assuming that there continues to be a limit to the length of the human lifespan, the day will come when that simply isn’t long enough to get to the end of what is known & the rest will be permanently & forever in the realm of the unknowable unknown.

Links
Tim Harford Undercover Economist

Boyle's Law .. Animated

Related post
The Universe as a bundle of thrums