Nerds and Geeks

You don't just have to be a techie to be a nerd or geek, although many are. Just today for instance I was reading that the UK's version of the coronavirus track and trace app didn't work that well and they'd abandoned it in favour of the one jointly developed by Apple and Google. I don't know about anyone else but derrrrr. I did wonder at the outset why the UK government would bother trying to outdo the nerds and geeks from two of the biggest and in my view best tech companies going. It was always going to be an uphill battle but I'm glad at least they've now seen the light. What was it Churchill said about the Americans? He said you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing.... after they've tried everything else first. Sounds about right for the UK too.

Just this week we had some friends over for lunch (first time since the lockdown was eased) and somehow the conversation got around to accountants (spoiler alert I have an accounting qualification). Apparently they are all OCD (I think that's the correct acronym but in any event it means Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which is just about what our friend meant). Our friend therefore asked me if I am OCD. Tricky question actually. If I said no, any subsequent display of anything approaching compulsive behaviour would be highlighted no doubt. If I said yes, it would simply prove the point. Of course I said no... just before I wiped the kitchen counter 5 or 6 times. 

That isn't why I started this post though. I have been watching lots of You Tube videos in the past few lockdown weeks. What a choice! I started out searching for interesting things but quickly homed in on the daily broadcast from 10 Downing Street (I know, quite painful at times), some history podcasts about WWI in the main, but mostly live music from the bands and artists from the 60's and 70's that I like. It has become something of a compulsion for me now.... there I have acknowledged it... but what a wonderful journey.

I don't know how it has happened but as I type I am watching a 3 hour special celebrating the 25th anniversary of the death of Rory Gallagher. 

Not a well known name I know but Rory was a fantastic guitarist. I remember watching him many times in the 1970's and he was always great. He was one of those guys who had no idea or interest about the business, just about playing. He was very good indeed. This special has some people playing who I have never heard of and they are also really good. It made me think that you have to be really lucky to make it in that industry. Skill alone just does not cut it. But how on earth did I get here watching this?

It came about because I also found several channels on You Tube from people who assemble these wondrous clips and in some cases long segments of live concerts from the 1960's and 1970's ... the era that I listen to. I imagine there is the same for other interests and times. One guy I have now subscribed to has dozens of such long segments on his channel and only a couple of days ago I started looking at the dates when he/she put them together. Many were at random dates over the last 3-4 years but a growing number are coming every other day now. Clearly someone else has lots of time on their hands too! The fact that one of the segments I watched yesterday with Janis Joplin, Cream and Pink Floyd was premiered only 3 days before and had been watched by 20,000+ people already says lots I think. 

Not just me then.

Flanelled Fools

I miss cricket. I miss playing it. I miss watching it. I miss talking about it. I miss having ridiculous conversations about the game.

This is personal. I've played cricket since I was 6 or 7 when my mum would bowl to me in the back garden. Something clicked.

I love the smell of linseed oil (this is what you oil bats with). I miss the sound of leather on willow (bats are made predominantly of willow). I miss the buzz of insects on the lovely green cricket field. I miss the fantastic teas (every club would pride itself on the quality of the teas which was a huge highlight as well as a major factor in how you rated the opposition, definitely it was not skill), I miss the cricket fields themselves: when I was younger, virtually every village had a green in the middle of the village with a church, maybe two pubs, a memorial to the fallen and a cricket field upon which people would play football, hockey or rugby during winter. My cricket club's ground was in the middle of a park. The clubs would rent the fields but the cricket strips themselves would often be maintained by the parkies (sorry, the park keepers).

The strip at Cup Match in Bermuda

I miss the beer afterwards; the jugs if you made 50 runs or took 5 wickets. I miss the fines for transgressions during the match (more commonly these would be on tour). I miss the fact that after 12 hours on a weekend afternoon, the captain would come around and ask for your contribution to the match in the bar after the game was over (ridiculously cheap), most of which would go on beer shared with the other team. I miss the fact that most matches ended in draws (the best matches often ended in draws. Wins/losses were usually more one sided so less dramatic and certainly less enjoyable for one of the teams). I miss the bad umpire decisions (I could go on and on about this). I miss the scoring and the scoring books which required the skill of ... I don't know what the equivalent would be these days. Einstein couldn't have managed, that's all I'm saying. In short, I miss a lot of things.

The last match I played with Indy and Dee Dee: I miss this too.

In March usually, there would appear curious roped off areas in the middle of the larger open green spaces. Within this roped off area would soon appear the signs of a roller and more care from the mower for this was the strip; usually a number of long strips of grass side by side which during the summer will become the wicket upon which matches will be played. Care devoted now is essential for the slightest imperfection could result in the wicket becoming 'sticky'. All cricketers know what I mean for this is the language that all cricketers speak. These are the classic signs of approaching summer in England.

Cricket arrives in early April and leaves with regret in late September or early October, depending on the weather. It should be there now. No, it should be everywhere now in the northern hemisphere.

Our cricket season in Bermuda strictly followed the English season (for no very good reason as the weather outside of this time was perfectly good for cricket. Maybe the clocks going back cut off some time, but it certainly wasn't the weather). This meant that in July and August, if you were unlucky you could stand for hours on end under blindingly cloudless sky in monstrous heat and humidity. Personally, I stopped playing at the weekend in the longer format of the game some time in my 50's after getting out first ball of the match around 12.01 pm (LBW to a terrible decision which made it worse), standing as umpire from the end of the 2nd over for the remainder of the 50 overs (around 3 hours) and then taking my place in the field for another 3 hours whilst our opponents had their innings. I was a basket case by the end of the match. Nobody sympathised.

Moving to only after work evening games (I'd played evening matches since I was in my 20's as well as at weekends), I played until 2017 when we left Bermuda and there has not been a day that I haven't missed it. But, that is due to my choice not through regulations enforced by law (courtesy of coronavirus).

The upside of right now is that the BBC for example is re-running great old matches on both video and radio. The media is writing lengthy screeds eulogising matches, times and players from years gone by.

I read a terrific Guardian piece recently linking great players together throughout cricket's history via the Yorkshire great, Wilfred Rhodes. Mr Rhodes played in one of the greatest of Ashes test matches at the Oval in 1903 when England beat Australia by 1 wicket (this is known as Jessup's match) with the immortal words at the end from Mr. Rhodes being "we'll get 'em in singles".  He did.

Wilfred Rhodes

Every cricket enthusiast knows this catch phrase and will use it during their cricket careers, guaranteed. I have used it many times, not always successfully. In fact most often unsuccessfully but then again I wasn't Wilfred Rhodes. Mr. Rhodes played his last test match when he was 52 which was the basis of the story (first class cricketers playing past 50), the year before the incomparable Don Bradman played his first test match in England in 1930, and he had played his first test match in the same game as the great Victor Trumper played his first test match (he was Australian but I won't hold that against him) but more importantly this was the last test match of the even more legendary and incomparable W.G. Grace.

With WG at Lords

And then there are the insane rules... which of course everyone somehow intuitively knows. Or rather they used to. If you read the autobiography of Peter Ustinov (who? shows my age!), he made the wonderful comment that somehow if you went to school in England (he was Russian), you would absorb the rules of the game by osmosis even if you didn't play the game, and be able to talk intelligently about the LBW rule, how many different times a batsman can be out, the amazing varietals of the leg spin bowler in particular the googly, demonstrate with an orange how to swing a new ball, and a whole host of other wonderful arcane cricketing things.

Can other games do this?

How can summer be the same without this wonderful, wonderful game? Let's hope things loosen up before too long.

E really does equal MC squared

I don't suppose that many people will spend 100 years or more proving that something I either said or wrote was true. That I suppose is because I was never a patent clerk in some deathly dull small Swiss town in the early 20th century, before technology, when all I had to do for hour after hour was prove some mathematical construct involving three things that I called E, M and C. Three things that had never been thought of much before and the purpose of which could never be used for decades if not centuries. But then again my name is not Albert Einstein.

So instead of inscribing into huge books in the patent office endless patents of new Swiss clocks, or chocolate recipes or yodelling tunes.. or whatever it was Einstein should have been doing at work, this shirker came up with:

The equation — E = mc2 — means "energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." It shows that energy (E) and mass (m) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I gave up science in favour of Latin and classics generally at age 11 so I have not the slightest idea why this is important, revolutionary, or even interesting. But it is, for just this week, yet another group of scientists proved it again. Or rather a part of it anyway.

Here's the full article and it really does make me happy to know that something that was done so long ago simply trying to solve a tricky mental hypothesis, and really on the back of an envelope (maybe addressed to the patent office by some hopeful trying to register a new patent for fruit and nut chocolate) is so relevant today. And... and this is the really amazing part to me... using only the most cutting edge technology and equipment that wasn't even thought about when Einstein originally developed his theory.

'It's been nearly 30 years in the making, but scientists with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) collaboration in the Atacama Desert in Chile have now measured, for the very first time, the unique orbit of a star orbiting the supermassive black hole believed to lie at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The path of the star (known as S2) traces a distinctive rosette-shaped pattern (similar to a spirograph), in keeping with one of the central predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.'

A spirograph. Many planets do have orbits like this.

There's more to it than this of course, but this is the essence of the piece. Relativity has been something that had been doing the rounds for quite a while, but it was Einstein who tied it down.

'When Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, he proposed three classical tests to confirm its validity. One was the deflection of light by the Sun. Since massive objects warp and curve spacetime, light will follow a curved path around massive objects. This prediction was confirmed in 1919 with that year's solar eclipse, thanks to Sir Arthur Eddington's expedition to measure the gravitational deflection of starlight passing near the Sun. The confirmation made headlines around the world, and Einstein became a household name.'

Mercury's orbit... just like a spirograph

This is just wonderful! Well done again... no, yet again, Albert!

Binge Watching

Another thing that being in lockdown provides is the time to binge watch TV shows and box sets. Typically we don't like to watch programmes when they are ongoing as once started we just want to go through the whole thing. We recently did this with Game of Thrones (GOT).

What we have noticed with other long running series is that the best ideas typically come in the first season when the budget is smallest and it is when the networks pick them up for more seasons that the storyline feels like its getting weaker whilst the budget is bigger enabling the writer to come up with more and more fantastic set pieces. GOT falls into this characterisation I think.

More and more as we watch through the seasons, I like to go onto Wikipedia and find out not so much about where the story is going, but more to who the cast are and who the writer is and where it all takes place. For GOT the scenery is simply fantastic and even though it says Northern Ireland, I simply don't believe all those scenes were filmed there. OK I do know that it was filmed in other places too.... but I have been to most of those places and for the life of me cannot remember seeing any of them. Anyway that's a side thing but during this Wikipedia trawl I took a look at the writer (one George R.R. Martin) and discovered he's a sci fi and fantasy writer.

One of my favourite all time books is Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien (same middle initials? coincidence??) and obviously it is a book of its time. Written in the 1940's at the time when Britain was on the verge of losing WWII to Nazi Germany and using Tolkien's harrowing experiences in the trenches of WWI as backdrop. Clearly his writing, whilst superbly eloquent and articulate is coloured by his experiences and the time in which it was written.

Scroll forward to Mr. Martin who is 71 (according to Wikipedia).  That's only a few years older than me so his life influences are pretty much the same as mine, except of course he is American and I am not. That means the Beatles, rock and roll, the A/H bomb, Vietnam, swinging 60's, drugs, feminism amongst other things. Now I haven't read the books which is something I will correct as simply by watching the HBO series, I am amazed how much swearing, basically soft porn and really violent and gory action takes place. The stories have loose similarities but the context is totally different. I am amazed each episode has any story in it at all given the need for multiple sex scenes, ritual dismemberment and generally people standing around swearing their heads off. So I do wonder if that is how the books are written. I'll find out.

I did enjoy the earlier series more than the later ones. In the early ones, the dialogue just cracked along. Every one of the 'hero' men were as a friend of mine describes as being 'strong as horse, dumb as tree' and made clearly massively wrong decisions every step of the way. I am amazed that any survived through 8 series at all. All the women, no actually only most of the women, were far smarter and could easily out think their male counterparts. By the final series I was pretty worn out listening to all of Daenerys Targaryen's ridiculous titles particularly when things came to important moments when she or someone else had to shout out 'you are in the presence of...' and 5 minutes later came to the end. I suppose it did pad out the shows to their full time allotment. And those eyebrows.... don't get me going on that!

The baddies got all the good lines. I did like that however as the series went on and on, the dialogue became more serious and even the baddies' lines ran out of steam and sting. At the start, the most fun characters were Jaime Lannister and his diminutive brother Tyrion but as things wore on, they became far more serious and consequently less entertaining. In reading the Wikipedia entries, I couldn't make out whether Mr. Martin had actually written any of the later series (I know he didn't write the last one) or if it was just the HBO screenwriters talking to him to 'agree where the story line was going'. As an avid reader of Robert Heinlein in the sci fi genre, what made his stories so great was not necessarily the sci fi aspect rather it was the energy that he brought to the writing even when the books went on to very great length. He never let up which is rather in the end what I think happened with GOT.  Anyway, like I said earlier I'll read the first book now.

I'd like to think that left to himself Mr. Martin may have come up with something like this in the later series.

The F Word

Having time on my hands means that I can read much more and as my personal favourite topic were I to be asked onto Mastermind is 'Mindless Trivia', I of course followed an internet string that began with the words 'First Use of the F-word in Recorded Literature'.

Whilst the history is fascinating enough it is what it all portends that made me laugh like I hadn't for many years. And given our present situation in lockdown, what we all need is a darn good belly laugh.  Here's the headline:

"WAN FUKKIT FUNLING" —

500-year-old manuscript contains one of earliest known uses of the “F-word”

The Bannatyne Manuscript is an anthology of some 400 medieval Scottish poems.

Whilst the spelling is not contemporary, the feeling is perfectly encapsulated in those three words which mean.... well, er, this is where it gets tricky for these words came about during a bout of 'Flyting' between two gentlemen by the name of William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy.

Flyting is a poetic genre in Scotland—essentially a poetry slam or rap battle, in which participants exchange creative insults with as much verbal pyrotechnics (doubling and tripling of rhymes, lots of alliteration) as they can muster. (It's a safe bet Shakespeare excelled at this art form.)

Dunbar and Kennedy supposedly faced off for a flyting in the court of James IV of Scotland around 1500, and their exchange was set down for posterity in Bannatyne's manuscript. In the poem, Dunbar makes fun of Kennedy's Highland dialect, for instance, as well as his personal appearance, and he suggests his opponent enjoys sexual intercourse with horses. Kennedy retaliates with attacks on Dunbar's diminutive stature and lack of bowel control, suggesting his rival gets his inspiration from drinking "frogspawn" from the waters of a rural pond. You get the idea.

And then comes the historic moment: an insult containing the phrase "wan fukkit funling," marking the earliest known surviving record of the F-word.

It all sounds wonderful! I wish I had been there but as the manuscript itself was put together when this Mr. Bannatyne was locked down with the plague (rather like as now except that the plague killed somewhere between 30% and 80% of populations that became infected), perhaps not. In any event this brings to mind immediately Monty Python's Oscar Wilde sketch which although really funny also was based (although very loosely) on real events that regularly took place.

Now this is flyting!

Rockers Class of 2019... RIP

Each year I write a short post remembering those rockers who made a musical difference to me that passed away the year before. I am very late this year, I know, but here goes for 2019.

Neil Innes

Neil wasn't a real rocker but has a significant place in my memory because he wrote so many great songs for the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (who can forget Urban Spaceman?), Rutland Weekend Television and of course Monty Python. If you remember the 'Holy Grail' movie, Neil sang the 'Brave Sir Robin' song amongst others. A wonderful story surrounding his time in the Rutles (with Eric Idle of MPFC fame) was when struggling for a musical interlude in a show, they asked George Harrison from the Beatles to come on. He agreed but refused to play his then Number 1 song 'My Sweet Lord' on the show, which ended up in total disarray. Wonderful stuff.

Iain Sutherland

Back in 1971, I went to a day concert at The Oval in South London to see a host of different bands but mainly to see Frank Zappa who had his orchestra with him for that tour. The opening act was a band called Quiver and they were terrific. A year or so later they joined forces with a Scottish duo, the Sutherland Brothers, and I went to see them in Southend at the Queens Hotel, a dark and dingy basement club that always had great music. You never knew if they were open, or who was playing, but you knew if they did it would be on a Sunday night and this night they were open and the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver played. They were tremendous. Their big song wasn't even a big song for them but for Rod Stewart (Sailing), a song I never really liked, but they had tons of other great songs. Great band, great songs.

Ginger Baker

I first heard this maniac drumming I think in 1966 and wondered what the hell was all that noise about. He just kept on going and going and going in all directions at once. Powerful, yup. Melodic, yup. Played with the best group of ALL time, yup. That was Cream, by the way, but he also played in Blind Faith. I saw him first in Southend with a band called the Baker-Gurvitz Army. Lots of silly stories about his previous band Air Force but this one played all the old Cream songs. The band were actually pretty terrible but seeing Ginger was a pleasure all by itself. What a player.

Robert Hunter

It was my brother Jan that got me first to listen to the Grateful Dead. The LP was Live Dead, in retrospect a magnificent record and great intro to the Dead. I wish I realised at the time that even though the songs were 24 minutes long and seemed connected one with the next all through the record, that that was a pretty good thing. Many years later I managed to listen to the show all the way through without having to turn the record over every 20 minutes or so and it was fantastic. Robert wrote the lyrics to most of the tunes the band wrote, mostly with Jerry Garcia but also with the others if they needed it. So Trucking' with Bob Weir and Jerry, Box of Rain with Phil Lesh. Many others too. Great lyrics. So much more than girl meets boy, falls in love, etc. Made the songs sound interesting and also in many cases downright weird. Just what do the lyrics from Dark Star mean --- 'transitive nightfall of diamonds' -- or Box of Rain, or...

Gary Duncan

Before the Monterey Pop Festival brought Jimi Hendrix and The Who to America, US rock bands had a different edge to them. Listen to the older Big Brother and Quicksilver albums and you'll immediately know what I mean. They played and sort of played in a classical manner. Then came Jimi and The 'Oo and everything changed. Among my first introduction to San Francisco music prompted by the Dead and Jefferson Airplane, I found 'Happy Trails', a live album by Quicksilver Messenger Service. What a record. What a band. What great guitarists. Yes John Cipollina of course but also yes Gary Duncan. Great player.

Peter Tork

It was only the really young teeny-boppers that liked the Monkees but OK yes some of us others also liked them but didn't really admit to it. I liked the songs. I thought they were really good, catchy tunes, really nice harmonies, all the rest of it. I didn't care if the actors really didn't do the playing. I still don't know what instrument Peter Tork played. Some episodes had him on keyboards, others some sort of guitar, others still nothing just that goofy grin. Peter Tork was definitely my favourite Monkee.

Others

As the years pass and I acknowledge how old I am, I then have to add on a few years and pretty soon it gets to three score and ten, 70. Lots of the old rockers who are left are comfortably past this landmark. Mention goes out to Larry Wallis of the Pink Fairies (just listen to The Pigs of Uranus, that's him), Larry Taylor of Canned Heat, Ian Gibbons of the original Kinks, Dr. John and Dick Dale, the original surfing guitar guy. Also Peter Fonda of Easy Rider fame which movie brought the world Steppenwolf and many other great classic rock bands of the 70's. RIP all.

Anyway I'll leave the last word to Neil Innes and George Harrison from Rutland Weekend TV.

Time On Your Hands... Lots of It!

I've been humming and hawing about writing about coronavirus but for the life of me cannot think of much to write about that isn't flippant (the entire thing is not funny), sad (why would I want to write about something sad? This is meant to be entertaining... well at least for me anyway), intelligent (I failed Biology O Level 3 times) or on point (see above comment in addition to which I have been trying to follow the politicos online and all seem to waffle a bit and then pass the microphone over to an expert who scares the hell out of me with explanations I don't understand that well). I think I am not alone in this.

So, rather than write about it, I will write about another one of those marvellous things that have no point at all but which I find massively interesting. This time it is about why are there 360 degrees in a circle. I can do maths, so find stuff like this inordinately fascinating.

In school we learn there are 360 degrees in a circle, but where did the 360 come from? When it is pointed out that the Babylonians counted to base-60, rather than base-10 as we do, people often ask if there is a connection. The short answer is no. The longer answer involves Babylonian astronomy.

So it was mostly the Babylonians ... But then also the Greeks.

It also involves calendars and most importantly a phenomenal amount of data gathering. Interesting parallel with you know what today as the experts from today go on all the time about the need for lots more hard data before they can know how to deal with things.

The Babylonians began observing the stars and various constellations around 2000 BC (according to the earliest texts), in the southern city of Uruk referring to a festival for the goddess Inanna so it was probably earlier than that. It all started with Venus being the brightest 'star' (no telescopes so look at the nearest/brightest object in the sky) and pretty soon they figured out that Venus along with the moon and other planets they could see lie on the same great circle, called the ecliptic, which had as its reference point the Sun as seen from Earth during the course of a year.

In order to record all this accurately, they needed a calendar as well as a method of recording positions along the ecliptic.

So calendars. The clever Babylonians figured out that it was the different phases of the moon which formed a rhythm in the life of their (and in fact all ancient) cultures, so that's where they started. Day 1 would be the evening of the first crescent at sundown.

With good visibility, a lunar month lasts 29 or 30 days and by about 500 BC, the Babylonians had discovered a scheme for determining the start of each month.

This used a 19- year cycle: 19 years is almost exactly 235 lunar months and the scheme works on seven long years (of 13 months) and 12 short years (of 12 months). This led to a fixed method of interleaving long and short years, still used today in the Jewish calendar and everything in the Christian year based on the date of Easter.

This phenomenally almost impossible to believe calculation (certainly when you think that our calendar these days is fixed and probably like me, most people wonder why the days of Easter, or Chinese New Year or some other dates change every year, well now you know) were derived by these amazingly clever Babylonians who started to record their observations.

The records that helped them discover this cycle began in the mid-eighth century bc, when Babylonian astronomers wrote nightly observations in what we now call ‘astronomical diaries’. These continue until the end of cuneiform scholarship in the first century ad, yielding eight hundred years of astronomical records: a terrific achievement, far longer than anything in Europe to this day. It facilitated great advances, notably their discovery of the so-called Saros cycles for predicting eclipses. Each one is a cycle of 223 lunar months, perpetuated over a period of more than 1,000 years. There are Saros cycles operating today first seen in the eighth and ninth centuries. They remain the basis for eclipse prediction and appear in detail on the NASA website.

800 years in those days was maybe 30+ generations given an average life span, enough for even the pickiest expert who wants data to prove a theory. Also a phenomenal achievement of relentlessly recording what to many must have seemed to be arcane nonsense but which today has a basis in almost everything that we do.

Once they had the calendar and could see that an annual cycle of life encompassed broadly 12 months, they were on the way but had to move onto problem two: method of recording positions along the ecliptic.

As it happened, the Babylonians seemed to like the organisation of 12 so split the months into smaller units of measurement. Obviously one day is one day but what about the time during the day? Again obviously you have before midday and after midday, so they decided to split both these periods into further units of 12. They also liked 30 as 30 was the usual number of days in a month so they further split up these units of 12 by a further 30 so as to be able to record data in their astronomical diaries more accurately, using fractions.

As for the sky, the firmament, the stars along the eliptical, well that was easy too now. They split the elliptical up into 12 sections:

the ecliptic was divided into 12 equal sections, each split into 30 finer divisions (also called uš), yielding 360 uš in total. For finer accuracy an uš was broken down into 60 divisions. Each of the 12 sections they labelled by a constellation of stars and, when the Greeks took on Babylonian results, they preserved these constellations, but gave them Greek names – Gemini, Cancer and Leo – most of which had the same meanings as in Babylonia.

My sign Pisces

Sadly for them at least, by this time the Babylonians passed into memory and were overtaken by the Greeks who thankfully had similar interests and courtesy of no TV or internet, plenty of time on their hands too. So they developed Geometry single handedly bringing order to many things at the same time as creating a method by which children of the future could legally be tortured (actually I liked geometry and particularly the acronyms by which we remembered various geometrical terms and calculations).

The quadrants of a circle. How we remembered which quadrant at school was ASTC which stands for All, Sine, Tangent, Cosine or in schoolboy parlance All Sausages Turn Cold. Moving one step further into the calculations of the various functions: Sine is opposite/hypotenuse, Cosine is adjacent/hypotenuse, Tangent is opposite/adjacent. This was wonderfully learned as Some Old Hags Can Always Have Their Oats Anytime. I did enjoy Geometry.

As Greek geometry developed, it created the concept of an angle as a magnitude – for example, adding the angles of a triangle yields the same as two right- angles – but in Euclid’s Elements (c.300 BC) there is no unit of measurement apart from the right-angle. Then, in the second century BC, the Greek astronomer Hipparchos of Rhodes began applying geometry to Babylonian astronomy. He needed a method of measuring angles and naturally followed the Babylonian division of the ecliptic into 360 degrees, dividing the circle the same way. So, although angles come from the Greeks, the 360 degrees comes from Babylonian astronomy.

So there you have it. Why 360? Fascinating. Here's the full article.

Darwin

I am torn between wanting to be a scientist and being glad that at age 11 when I was offered the choice of O Level studies in Physics, Chemistry and Biology or Latin that I chose Latin. I know its a big divide but at least when I was young I didn't clutter up my brain with bits of this and that that I'd never use (that's science) but at the same time maintain a healthy admiration for those that can and do use whatever they learned to do what seems to be miraculous things.

As I write this on Day 4 of coronavirus lockdown in Penang, I am amazed that it was only last week that it was announced that a Cambridge scientist had 'finally' proved one of Charles Darwin's theories a mere 140 years after he'd hypothesised them. 

I've now read two articles on what this theory is that has now been proven (it's to do with species and sub-species) and I'm afraid I barely understand what it is that has been proven and why it is actually important. Besides, I thought that Darwin became famous 140 years ago and that everyone believed him then, so was a little puzzled why all these years later it has become a big thing, well biggish in scientific circles.

One thing jumped out at me though... 

She used a tool Darwin never did

Van Holstein, however, had what those scientists didn't: Data modeling software.

She wanted to show that the number of subspecies in a species is correlated to the number of species in a genus. If she could prove that, she'd have more evidence to suggest that subspecies are the "raw material" for a new species, she said.  

I love this stuff. Anyway, here's the full write up from Science Daily.

All I can do is echo Caesar's words: 'Alea Jacta Est'. It's only taken 140 years!

Visitors Volume 3 -- Charlie!!

The whirlwind continued with Indy, Cat and Charlie due to arrive for a couple of weeks. We'd talked a lot about the coronavirus and whether they should still come but as that point things hadn't deteriorated as much as later, the answer was yes!! Couldn't wait. Also they were flying in through Doha which to that moment had had no issues... another plus!!

It all seems such a long time ago now though for as I write this we are into Day 4 of the lockdown here in Penang due to that *&%$$#%#@ coronavirus. It is quite amazing how fast it has taken over the lives of I would think everyone on the planet.

I wonder what Charlie will think. Obviously he's too young to have a detailed memory of his trip here but he had a whole series of firsts whilst with us (as did Mum and Dad) including:

• first time in a swimming pool

I think he enjoyed the swim

• first time seeing orang utans ... he slept through most of it so maybe that memory won't be too strong
• his first laughing session with a cuddly warthog; that character from the Lion King movie courtesy of Uncle Dee Dee

At this age, they seem to grow up bit by bit before your eyes. If there's something he didn't do yesterday, well he's doing it today and he's an expert already. 

But he would not roll over. 

He would but obviously he wasn't that fussed as he put either an arm or leg in just the right spot to stop him rolling over. I'd push him but after the first time that he immediately vomited onto the carpet, I stopped doing that. Don't get it. If he just rolled over, he would be able to push himself up on his arms and start to at least think about crawling. When he was having his 'tummy time' he'd almost immediately roll over and lay on his back like a dead bug. He would be waggling his arms and legs though and often laughing and chuckling to himself.

As for mum and dad, well obviously lovely to see them too. Viv and I were able to take Charlie for the evening actually on three occasions so they could have a date night out. I say Viv and I but it was mostly Viv, I was almost useless and had forgotten almost everything about being a new dad but Viv just picked it up from where she'd left off with Dee Dee back in 1989 and rolled on.

Food as can be imagined played an enormous part. We'd been winding Indy up in particular and had many (far too many) gastronomic events. The one he'd been looking forward to the most was the seafood dinner with congee as the last course that I'd told him about. It was again terrific. Our friends Lisa and Ted came along with us too as it needed to be a big affair so we could order enough things. I shouldn't have worried!

Like I said before, it all seems such a long time ago. The virus here has formally put us into lockdown nationwide until 31st March but today's paper suggested that may have to be extended to 60 days as people here keep gathering together contrary to health warnings about the virus' spread. We don't plan to be going out anywhere other than for food and other necessary things. Writing this I wonder if the next time I see Charlie, he'll be walking or not.

Doesn't matter, I'll treasure the time they were all here with us. 

Charlie's and my evening ritual

Visitors Volume 2

With Dick and Anna leaving, Hannah arrived. Hannah is Viv's god daughter and is on a post university tour around the world. As Hannah's plan was to spend 3 weeks in Hainan Island in China around this time, tacking on a week before would be easy. It didn't turn out that way later on but nobody had heard of coronavirus at that time.

We decided that amongst all the hanging out, eating and drinking we'd also head off for some outings and as Hannah's degree was to do with marine biology and environmental protection, we thought take her out for some animal-y things, starting with the butterfly farm called Entopia.

This was the first time we'd been there and it was really good. Lots of butterflies of course but also the big monitor lizards and other things were there too. Sort of an aquatic zoo as opposed to an aquarium.

Clever, they had laid out these hibiscus flowers and covered them with I think honey so the butterflies swarmed all over them for the benefit of we patrons to enjoy

Another day we drove out to Bukit Merah to check out the orang utans again. We'd done this before with Hannah's mum and it was really nice to go back particularly when we ran into one of the celebrity occupants who was riveted by the actions of a workman and tracked what he was doing. We'd had virtually no rain for months by this point so the lake in which the orang utan refuge island stood was at a very low level exposing lots of the foreshore. As there had been a fire at the centre a short while before, there was plenty of debris lying around and it was this that the workmen were clearing up.

I watched for ages and of course this is ridiculous but after a while I had the notion that I knew what the orang utan was about to do. I used the 'well of course their DNA is a 97% match to humans' hypothesis for my incredible scientific breakthrough, but its true. I just knew that when the workman got close enough, the orang utan would just scrabble away at the sand and throw a handful at him. And he did! Really hilarious to watch!!

Mind you, I didn't share this mind meld that I had just experienced with anyone else. I kept that to myself.

We also went back to Kee Lok See temple at night to check out the lights which were truly spectacular. This time we climbed the 7 storeys of the pagoda and were rewarded with fantastic views. The lights were terrific.

All along Hannah had been in touch with the school in Hainan where she was supposed to be teaching English for 3 weeks when all of a sudden she told us there may be a problem with her getting there as there was a disease that was spreading all over, a new type of virus.

We'd heard that there was something going on in Wuhan in China but not much else. However as we all know now, things moved fast from this point and the virus spread out exponentially to the point where the school said sorry, no children to teach so no need to come. I think we were all a bit peeved that that had happened for Hannah's sake not realising the enormity of things for after this cases started cropping up in other countries too. We suggested that Hannah should therefore head south to Australia instead as she had another internship organised in Sydney after the proposed Hainan trip which in the end did happen.

Our farewell dinner -- Korean BBQ

In fact all ended well for Hannah organised a nice road trip along the east coast of Australia to her new internship. Bon voyage and thanks for coming!

Visitors Volume 1

In early January, we'd just returned from spending Christmas in Canada with Dee Dee and the following day Viv's mum Anna moved in, swiftly followed by Viv's uncle Dick a day later. This is Dick's first visit and he hadn't seen Anna for several years. 

It was just before Chinese New Year started (which began in the last week of January and lasted 2 weeks this year). It is the Year of the Rat so everywhere was highly decorated with what looked to me less like rats but more like cuddly-ish mice so everywhere was very pretty and as it is the new year, pretty much everything was cleaned up too.

We did a lot of stuff! 

Georgetown's UNESCO World Heritage Centre was decked out nicely and after a nice walk and some lunch one day we went to the Sun Yet Sen Museum in Armenian Street.

Sun Yat Sen was the father of the Chinese Republic and amongst other places lived for a while in Penang. The object of that really was to raise funds for his next rebellion. He was involved in several unsuccessful ones as well so was a person of interest for the Chinese who after a little while objected to the British about his rabble rousing presence in Penang, whereupon they asked him to move on. In all, he was in Penang for less than one year.

Fascinating museum. Small but amongst it all, you get to learn a bit about Sun Yet Sen the man too, in particular his lady loves which were described in some detail rather surprisingly. Most know him as the revolutionary not the lover, husband and all the rest. However, he was very active and traveled everywhere trying to raise interest and of course funding. One exhibit was set aside just to this; how much he raised and in which country. Remember this is back at the turn of the 20th century so the amounts are of course smaller but the country which provided the most funds for his struggle was..... wait for it.... Canada! Who'd have thought?  

Very nice museum housed in a lovely shophouse in Armenian Street. Well worth a visit!

Viv's tennis friend, Lee Pin, asked us out for a day trip over to the mainland in Butterworth to visit a Chinese temple that was both huge and beautifully decked out for Chinese New Year. We'd never really been to Butterworth other than on that occasion when we'd taken a wrong turning and were headed towards the docks so were keen to check it out. Basically it's just one Main Street with a temple at the end. Big temple though.

Lee Pin had organised a dinner at a restaurant on the beach at Batu Ferringhi with a special dish she wanted us to try (Duck and Yam soup) after the temple but before that she wanted us to try the 'best ' local Rojak. Now when a Penangite says that such and such is the 'best' it of course means in their opinion which again is of course reason enough to try it out. Viv and I had eaten rojak before but not Anna and Dick so this would be all new to them.

The famous rojak kopi (coffee) shop

Rojak

The place was a coffee shop in the middle of Butterworth. Coffee shops like this are where the locals go for dessert and of course the local incredibly black coffee. Beans are roasted in a special way so that the beans are coal black as is the coffee. Not terribly strong but with a definite flavour to which is added condensed milk -- that's for the black coffee which apparently without the condensed milk is rather like engine sump oil. For the white coffee, you add evaporated milk to the mix. Did I mention sugar? Lots of that too. The experience leaves quite a film in and around your mouth for quite some time.

How to describe rojak? It is a popular dessert hereabouts. Take cut up chunks of fruit and raw vegetables and cover it with a sweet and sour but something else thick, sticky, gooey gloop and sprinkle with ground nuts. It is a curious taste to be sure, and not unpleasant. 'Interesting' was a word I heard quite a bit from Dick and Anna.

On the way back we stopped off at the snake temple near the airport for a brief visit. Snakes were everywhere although thankfully not crawling around too much. Just sort of lying there and writhing. I think they all came around one day and nobody cleared them out, so the snakes stayed.

I'd driven through Batu Ferringhi often enough. It's where the tourist resorts are located but as the beaches are pretty awful and the water very muddy brown with pollution and run off from farming on the mainland, we never had any intention of going to the beach. Not after Bermuda anyway! However the restaurant we went to was right on the beach and it turned out to be actually.... really rather lovely: the beach not the water. As was the duck/yam soup and the meal overall. Thanks Lee Pin!

Sunset on the beach at Batu Ferringhi

We also decided to take Dick to the Blue Mansion in Georgetown. He is keen on history and heritage, or at least he said he was so we made sure to load him up on it.

The Blue Mansion

The Blue Mansion is simply extraordinary. The original house was built and lived in by a Chinese guy called Cheong Fatt Tze. A true rags to riches story, he started out as a coolie labourer in Indonesia in the 1870's where he made his first great move: he married the boss' daughter and took over his trading business. 

He was really good at it and moved to Penang because the British were there and more trade was possible. He was into everything, built this mansion and became the wealthiest man in China towards the end of the 19th century. The Emperor even appointed him as special counsellor making him the 3rd most powerful person in China even though he didn't live there. We went on a tour of the mansion which has been massively renovated after it became derelict during WWII when the Japanese arrived. They persecuted important local Chinese people and Cheong's heirs (he was dead by this time) received no favours from them and had to rent out the mansion to several hundred squatters simply to survive. The result was dereliction and the mansion was abandoned for years until private money acquired it and turned it into this lovely museum.

It has been a movie set many times including movies based on the life of Sun Yat Sen but more recently of Anna and the King of Siam. Because the Thai government felt that the movie disrespected the royal family, they refused permission to film in Bangkok so the movie used the Blue Mansion and more generally Penang as the site location for the movie.

Another outing, although not so long but still pretty onerous was visiting the Kee Lok See temple at Penang Hill. It is the largest such temple in SE Asia. For Chinese New Year, they always garland the temple and grounds in flowers, lights and all the other ornate stuff that goes with Chinese New Year so at this time of the year it is definitely worth a visit. Lots of stairs but very worth it.

The seven storey pagoda is a key point in the temple

I think Dick was exhausted by the time he left!!

Visitors, Culture, Eating and ....

I've been lazy in the past few weeks when it comes to writing my blog. For sure we had some visitors... actually quite a lot of visitors, then we moved house, then there was the big tennis tournament that I played in when Viv was away, then I hurt my back .... and then came the coronavirus which has locked us down in out apartment for at least the next two weeks.

Yes, I just slipped that last thing in. My goodness, this is the biggest crisis facing the world probably since WWII and to think I was going to write about the hardships of going out to eat in Penang!

But I'd started and had some really neat photos so I will go ahead and complete the blog but obviously with the benefit of current thinking. Realistically sitting here in our apartment, I would obviously love to go out to restaurants and stuff but that can't happen for a while. I'm still amazed how quickly all this has taken to come to pass when it was only just last week...

Anyhow, here it is:

***

I think we've lived here long enough that the Penang coolaid that we've drunk is starting to take effect. Penang info front and centre always says that Penang is the foodie capital of (1) Malaysia, (2) the Far East, or (3) the world. I don't know about that but recently in some periodical or another (or maybe a Far East food programme on TV), it was announced that either Penang or Malaysia (can't remember which) has 162,000 small holding food sellers.... a better word was used but you can't really call fooderies here 'restaurants' because most aren't. For sure there are restaurants like you'd recognise in the west but they are realistically few and far between. You have boutique fancy restaurants too. Then you go to the non-fancy restaurants that are more like US diners and a couple of further rungs down you get to the hawkers and the guys that prepare food off trolleys (you can't call them trucks). Anyway there's 162,000 of these apparently either up and down the country or in Penang, probably up and down the country now that I think of it.

Hawker centre on Beach Street

It feels like we've visited them all this last week.

Also by some extraordinary combination of events, we have had some of the most stunningly good meals and dishes that we've eaten in the entire time we have been here. So you can't say no to eating them, can you? (That was pretty lame, wasn't it? Even so, 100% true).

We had guests in the shape of Viv's mum, Anna, and uncle Dick from San Francisco so were in tourist mode as well so visited some pretty interesting places too but I'll just keep to the food on this post.

After the obligatory chicken rice on collecting Dick from the airport, we went on a bit of a tour ending up at a local Malay Nonya Indian sort of 'fusion' restaurant which had recipes from all over the region. Called Jawi Restaurant, the chef told us that his people are Indian muslims that came to Penang 200 years ago bringing with them traditional dishes that they made with local ingredients, substituting as needed and intermarrying over the years which brought different ways and means to the cooking. Its in Armenian Street opposite the Sun Yet Sen Museum and was very nice.

Our friends Ted and Lisa had asked us all out to join them at a Teochow restaurant called Goh Swee Kee, a fish restaurant and yet another style of Chinese cooking from the Teochow region. Wonderful fish, amazing pork curry and those veggies!!

Viv's tennis buddy asked us (Viv, Dick, Anna and I) for a day trip that included Dim Sum in Butterworth and another fish restaurant on the beach at Batu Ferringhi where the specialty was Duck and Yam Soup. Talk about hearty!

I took Dick out for a walk around Georgetown that included breakfast and of course lunch. Along the way we found the famous Nasi Lemak stall on Beach Street and some amazing looking tandoori chicken in Little India on Chulia Street.

Banana Leaf, rice cooked with coconut milk (hence fatty or 'Lemak'), dried anchovies, hard boiled egg and a huge dollop of chilli out of those buckets makes Nasi Lemak (aka fatty rice), a spectacular breakfast dish.

We realised that we'd not taken our visitors to any Nyonya Restaurants in Penang. Nyonya are the local Chinese/Malay mix cuisine restaurants. I love the food and Ted and Lisa again found a wonderful place called Aunty Geik Lean's Old School in Georgetown. I'd walked past this place dozens of times and never realised I should have stepped in for the fish and indescribably good pork curry.

Then there was the 'quiet' dinner at the Penang Swim Club and the huuuuge Korean BBQ that we went to with our friend's daughter, Hannah...

I felt like a balloon at the end of all this.