"Yossarian longed to sit on the floor in a huddled ball right on top of the escape hatch right inside a sheltering igloo of extra flak suits ... That was where he wanted to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddamn cantilevered goldfish in some goddamn cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddamn foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire."
"In the morning he stepped from his tent looking haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an eaten shell of a human buliding rocking perilously on the brink of collapse." re Hungry Joe
"The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as ... the frog?"
"Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There were no miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune tramped with equal brutality on the virtuous and the corrupt..."
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Anyone for a cup of tea?
I have a primal need to put the kettle on everytime I get in through my front door.
It doesn't matter if I fancy a cup of tea or not, though usually I do, but I always go to the kitchen first, fill up my lovely shiny kettle, and light the hob. The kettle has a whistle and the interval before it whistles lets me go to the loo, look at my plants and wind down. When it has done its magic and whistled, I'm properly home. It marks the line between the outside world and my little domestic zone.
My kettle obsession is largely unshakeable even if I actually want a cold drink or a glass of wine. Once the kettle has whistled - like a hypnotist bringing me out of a trance - I am capable of judging whether I do want a cup of tea, which luckily, as I've already said, I generally do. I don't like needlessly wasting energy, but its like its not me doing it!
I'm sure its my inner cave woman speaking. May be there some ancient cerebral link between the kettle and the hearth or the fire in the middle of the cave. Its my little wifey bit in my character, which doesn't generally respond well to things like ironing, vaccuming and dusting.
I always turn to tea in a crisis. Its the least or the most I can do.
It doesn't matter if I fancy a cup of tea or not, though usually I do, but I always go to the kitchen first, fill up my lovely shiny kettle, and light the hob. The kettle has a whistle and the interval before it whistles lets me go to the loo, look at my plants and wind down. When it has done its magic and whistled, I'm properly home. It marks the line between the outside world and my little domestic zone.
My kettle obsession is largely unshakeable even if I actually want a cold drink or a glass of wine. Once the kettle has whistled - like a hypnotist bringing me out of a trance - I am capable of judging whether I do want a cup of tea, which luckily, as I've already said, I generally do. I don't like needlessly wasting energy, but its like its not me doing it!
I'm sure its my inner cave woman speaking. May be there some ancient cerebral link between the kettle and the hearth or the fire in the middle of the cave. Its my little wifey bit in my character, which doesn't generally respond well to things like ironing, vaccuming and dusting.
I always turn to tea in a crisis. Its the least or the most I can do.
The day we told our neighbours we had to demolish half their house
So we're sitting there sharing a cup of tea and a chocolate chip biscuit with our upstairs neighbours and every minute the conversation is edging towards the inevitable.
"So how bad is it? What will you need to do to repair it?"
The "it", of course, is.... the blot, the £20,000 question, the end of the house of which we do not speak, the room behind the door which is shut where we keep boxes of rubbish CDs, old letters and lots and lots of guitars (don't ask). It is the small question of the far end of our home sliding millimetre by millimetre into the latent floodplain of the Thames. We are sinking. And no-one thought to tell us before we bought it.
"Well," says my Dad expansively, "one of the things they might try is to prop it up."
"And what would that involve? How would they do that" says our neighbour slowly, he's grasping towards it, the cat is sharpening its nails and getting bored of its brown paper prison....
"Oh well," says Dad, adding comfortingly skating over the real issue with technical phrases such as "steel joist" and "RSJ".
Tom and I are desperately trying to maintain a serious, graven expression of concern as if it's all news to us too.
Then suddenly, without warning, its out! "Worst case scenario is that all this has got to come down," Dad says, standing on the balcony gesturing at the floor and the kitchen. His hands gesture the wall of their house away, he sweeps aside the roof and we're all standing on the ground floor surrounded by rubble.
I'm biting my lip, you've got to laugh really... haven't you? "I wanted a new kitchen anyway," says Gillie (or Ginny, after a year we're not sure), laughing to make us all feel better about it. But Anthony (previously Patrick) looks white, showing no trace of amusement.
And then we're off, thanking them for the evening, like we've all had a jolly time and they're not going to dream of demolishing balls and dust and destruction of their lovely home. I feel wretched about it, but the moggie is well and truly out of the bag.
"So how bad is it? What will you need to do to repair it?"
The "it", of course, is.... the blot, the £20,000 question, the end of the house of which we do not speak, the room behind the door which is shut where we keep boxes of rubbish CDs, old letters and lots and lots of guitars (don't ask). It is the small question of the far end of our home sliding millimetre by millimetre into the latent floodplain of the Thames. We are sinking. And no-one thought to tell us before we bought it.
"Well," says my Dad expansively, "one of the things they might try is to prop it up."
"And what would that involve? How would they do that" says our neighbour slowly, he's grasping towards it, the cat is sharpening its nails and getting bored of its brown paper prison....
"Oh well," says Dad, adding comfortingly skating over the real issue with technical phrases such as "steel joist" and "RSJ".
Tom and I are desperately trying to maintain a serious, graven expression of concern as if it's all news to us too.
Then suddenly, without warning, its out! "Worst case scenario is that all this has got to come down," Dad says, standing on the balcony gesturing at the floor and the kitchen. His hands gesture the wall of their house away, he sweeps aside the roof and we're all standing on the ground floor surrounded by rubble.
I'm biting my lip, you've got to laugh really... haven't you? "I wanted a new kitchen anyway," says Gillie (or Ginny, after a year we're not sure), laughing to make us all feel better about it. But Anthony (previously Patrick) looks white, showing no trace of amusement.
And then we're off, thanking them for the evening, like we've all had a jolly time and they're not going to dream of demolishing balls and dust and destruction of their lovely home. I feel wretched about it, but the moggie is well and truly out of the bag.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
A man who went a very long way to prove a point
New Scientist press release
02 August 2006 The man who was both alive and dead under embargo until 02 Aug 2006 18:00 GMT
TO BE, or not to be? The question that tormented Hamlet also seems to have been an obsession with Ettore Majorana, the celebrated Italian physicist who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1930s. An analysis of his letters suggests that Majorana answered the question with his own unique quantum mechanical twist, managing to achieve the illusion of being both dead and alive at the same time.
Born 100 years ago this week, Majorana’s genius was likened to that of Newton and Galileo by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, his supervisor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. Majorana is today credited with predicting that neutrinos have mass – something that was only confirmed during the last decade. And more of his prescient theories are now coming to light (see “Ahead of his time”, below), suggesting that Majorana’s achievements were underestimated when he was alive.
The young physicist’s promising career was cut short with his sudden disappearance at the age of 31 during a boat trip between Palermo and Naples in Italy. His body was never found despite several investigations, and opinion is divided on whether he committed suicide, was kidnapped, or changed his identity and started a new life.
Now, theoretical physicist Oleg Zaslavskii at Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine is suggesting that the ambiguity surrounding his fate was part of an elaborate illusion engineered by Majorana himself to demonstrate quantum superposition. This paradox, in which a particle can simultaneously exist in two mutually exclusive quantum states, is exemplified by Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment in which the cat can be both alive and dead.
Majorana wanted to mirror this paradox with events in his own life, says Zaslavskii (www. arxiv.org/physics/0605001). The argument centres on a bizarre series of messages that Majorana sent to his family and to Antonio Carrelli, the head of the Institute of Physics at the University of Naples. First, Majorana sent a letter expressing his intention to commit suicide, which he followed with a telegram refuting the idea that he was suicidal. It was his third letter, however, that struck Zaslavskii as most odd. In it, Majorana describes his hope that Carrelli received both the original letter and the telegram at the same time.
“A sender should hope that the second message came first, to cancel the earlier one with the more disturbing content,” says Zaslavskii. Instead, Majorana wanted two mutually exclusive outcomes – his suicide or survival – to co-exist, making it the “quantum mechanical version of the Hamlet question”, he says. When Zaslavskii analysed other events surrounding the disappearance he saw the same pattern. For instance, Majorana is thought to have hired impostors to pose as himself during the boat trip. “I suddenly realised that all these separate and seemingly extravagant details are united by the same underlying idea,” says Zaslavskii. “It was very impressive.”
“Zaslavskii has quite consistently shown how skilfully Majorana could have implemented his knowledge of quantum physics,” says Gennady Gorelik, a science historian at Boston University. “His theory resolves the strange and crazy behaviour of a great physicist and shows that it could have been logically organised.”
But Majorana’s actual fate and motivations will probably remain a mystery. “It’s very difficult for any historian to know what is going on in the mind of another figure,” says Gorelik. “But perhaps it takes another theoretical physicist like Zaslavskii to be able to make the intuitive leap into Majorana’s mind.”
Author: Zeeya Merali.
02 August 2006 The man who was both alive and dead under embargo until 02 Aug 2006 18:00 GMT
TO BE, or not to be? The question that tormented Hamlet also seems to have been an obsession with Ettore Majorana, the celebrated Italian physicist who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1930s. An analysis of his letters suggests that Majorana answered the question with his own unique quantum mechanical twist, managing to achieve the illusion of being both dead and alive at the same time.
Born 100 years ago this week, Majorana’s genius was likened to that of Newton and Galileo by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, his supervisor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. Majorana is today credited with predicting that neutrinos have mass – something that was only confirmed during the last decade. And more of his prescient theories are now coming to light (see “Ahead of his time”, below), suggesting that Majorana’s achievements were underestimated when he was alive.
The young physicist’s promising career was cut short with his sudden disappearance at the age of 31 during a boat trip between Palermo and Naples in Italy. His body was never found despite several investigations, and opinion is divided on whether he committed suicide, was kidnapped, or changed his identity and started a new life.
Now, theoretical physicist Oleg Zaslavskii at Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine is suggesting that the ambiguity surrounding his fate was part of an elaborate illusion engineered by Majorana himself to demonstrate quantum superposition. This paradox, in which a particle can simultaneously exist in two mutually exclusive quantum states, is exemplified by Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment in which the cat can be both alive and dead.
Majorana wanted to mirror this paradox with events in his own life, says Zaslavskii (www. arxiv.org/physics/0605001). The argument centres on a bizarre series of messages that Majorana sent to his family and to Antonio Carrelli, the head of the Institute of Physics at the University of Naples. First, Majorana sent a letter expressing his intention to commit suicide, which he followed with a telegram refuting the idea that he was suicidal. It was his third letter, however, that struck Zaslavskii as most odd. In it, Majorana describes his hope that Carrelli received both the original letter and the telegram at the same time.
“A sender should hope that the second message came first, to cancel the earlier one with the more disturbing content,” says Zaslavskii. Instead, Majorana wanted two mutually exclusive outcomes – his suicide or survival – to co-exist, making it the “quantum mechanical version of the Hamlet question”, he says. When Zaslavskii analysed other events surrounding the disappearance he saw the same pattern. For instance, Majorana is thought to have hired impostors to pose as himself during the boat trip. “I suddenly realised that all these separate and seemingly extravagant details are united by the same underlying idea,” says Zaslavskii. “It was very impressive.”
“Zaslavskii has quite consistently shown how skilfully Majorana could have implemented his knowledge of quantum physics,” says Gennady Gorelik, a science historian at Boston University. “His theory resolves the strange and crazy behaviour of a great physicist and shows that it could have been logically organised.”
But Majorana’s actual fate and motivations will probably remain a mystery. “It’s very difficult for any historian to know what is going on in the mind of another figure,” says Gorelik. “But perhaps it takes another theoretical physicist like Zaslavskii to be able to make the intuitive leap into Majorana’s mind.”
Author: Zeeya Merali.
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Can my ipod read my mind?
Walking to work today I lazily left my listening choice to "shuffle" on my ipod, wondering what it would come up with to suit my gloomy mood and the overcast day. I was left, not for the first time, thinking the thing could read my mind. I'll think you'll agree this is the ideal gloomtastic playlist for a grey Tuesday.
"Fell on Black Days" Soundgarden,
"I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine" Beth Orton
"Time Has Told Me" Nick Drake
"Fake Plastic Trees" Radiohead (I had to skip this one it was too much)
"Panic" The Smiths
"In Bloom" Nirvana
"Something in my eye" Ed Harcourt
"Season" Ash (Nothing like their typical poppy fare)
"Fruit Tree" Nick Drake (I mean, Nick Drake twice, there must be something going on)
"Fell on Black Days" Soundgarden,
"I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine" Beth Orton
"Time Has Told Me" Nick Drake
"Fake Plastic Trees" Radiohead (I had to skip this one it was too much)
"Panic" The Smiths
"In Bloom" Nirvana
"Something in my eye" Ed Harcourt
"Season" Ash (Nothing like their typical poppy fare)
"Fruit Tree" Nick Drake (I mean, Nick Drake twice, there must be something going on)
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