Observations from a Hill

One place from my childhood still sticks fondly in my mind, sixty-odd years on: Snow Hill Railway Station in Birmingham: the Great Western Railway's hub in the Midlands, and a magnificent structure, to boot - pictured, the incredible glass-vaulted booking hall that fronted the place. Across the street, its facade reflected across Colmore Row, the entrance of the Great Western Arcade, a Victorian shopping arcade stretching from Colmore itself to Temple Row. Of course, over the years this architectural continuity has been been rather upset by progress, with the implied connection between station and arcade subsumed by years of messing around with Brum's inner-city road infrastructure; never to great end, but always serving the profit motive of the Midlands road transport lobby, aided and abetted in the sixties by Dr. Beeching's rather specious findings about railway efficiency [the roots of neoliberalism made flesh before we even knew it even existed?] When I was a kid, we us...

Just watched a fascinating little documentary about the Svans of Svaneti in Georgia, a mountain-dwelling folk of the Caucasus. At the time of the making of the documentary [2012], the lifestyle of the Svans was very much still rooted in its ancient history, with a primitive agriculture and a society very firmly based on common and collective values and mores. The incursion of modern life was obvious to see in the occasional satellite dish and a mobile phone mast at the centre of the village that was the subject of the documentary, as were the mostly modern clothes worn by all. Their society was [is] a strictly communal one based around those essential components for a rural, agrarian and isolated [snowed in for six months of the winter] community to survive: family and continual work, religion, pagan ritual, and alcohol. The Svans speak their own, unwritten language, but are all bilingual in Georgian, itself a language that bears no connection with any of the known language groupings ...

Rust, and I don't mean the programming language du jour, is an unending fascination of mine, representing as it does a wonderfully complex interaction between ferrous materials and oxygen itself. On the face of it, rust would seem to indicate irreversible decay and despoliation of otherwise solid and reliable material. On the other, it is simply the natural combinatorial action of a reaction between a metal and a reactive element, resulting in the formation of an oxide of that metal. The beauty of it however, is that the resultant oxide can be reduced and reversed chemically, as anyone who has studied basic chemistry at school will know. The oxidation of iron of course can lead to violent reactions as well as the gradual oxidation of itself into rust, however, given sufficient heat and fuel. Iron Oxide III or red iron oxide [rust without the water-based component, if you like] for instance, provides a very good source of oxygen to fuel a thermite reaction in a number of reactive me...

Consider this when next you stand at the shore's edge gazing out to sea, marvelling in the constancy of its ebb and flow. It was never always thus and will always be changing as time inches forward and Earth's geological clock ticks on. When the Moon was much closer to the Earth after it broke away from its mother ship, its gravitational pull was much greater than now, and each incoming tide would seem to us now as violent as a tsunami. As the moon gradually moves further from our planet, it is likewise prompted on its journey by the ocean tides on our planet that it - principally - initiated in the first place; each swell of our oceans a gentle push outwards and onto our moon, gently, subtly, nudging it further out into space, its progress more remotely aided by the weaker gravitational pull of more distant solar, planetary and stellar bodies: its progress outward and away from its original home and us, imperceivibly but measurably slow and insistent. Over vast time, the tides...

Whilst the bollock-brained and ailing Trump holds the reins - ha! - of the free world [spoiler alert: he don't; he's just enabled every crook, chancer and despoiler to take advantage of his naive belief in capitalism], the planet will suffer. Every climate-denying despot under the sun has now got free run of the park and is making as much hay as the sunshine will allow, until the whole lot bursts into flames. We live in perilous times, when powerful men - pretty much almost always men - choose only to think in terms of the lives left to them, and how they can further their own interests in what's left of their selfish existences.  There has to be a turning point - a pivot - in view, otherwise there truly is no hope for us. We're now firmly in la-la-land where nothing makes any sense at all and yet seems perversely logical through the fog of bullshit that surrounds everything we do. How we got to this point in history is a very large question indeed, but I do sometimes t...

I've just been down a very interesting if mind-boggling rabbit-hole, courtesy of the podcast ' The Rest is Science ',  which is co-presented by Professor Hannah Fry and Micheal Stevens ; talking about very large finite numbers . Discounting the various flavours of infinity that theoretically exist, albeit mostly conceptually, very large finite numbers are numbers that, given enough time, could actually be counted, but are in any remotely practical sense infinite to the human mind's conception. Even one of the 'smaller numbers they discussed during the podcast - Fifty-Two Factorial , or 52!, 1x2x3x4x5 ... x52 - is pretty much inconceivable to most people, even given that it 'only' represents the total number of possible orderings in a deck of cards: approximately 8.0658 x 10⁶⁷, or 8-ish followed by 67 zeroes. The method of mentally imaging the scale of this number that was used in the podcast by Stevens ran roughly along these lines: Set a timer to count dow...