Runny Thoughts

My number's up

The human mind works in very bizarre ways.

Well, mine does anyway.

The first thing that popped into my head when I read about the sad death of Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins tonight was ‘135’.

[The thought that followed it was ‘Alan Knott’, but that is irrelevant to this post and you would have to be a seriously sad sports-head (guilty as charged) to make the connection. I know at least one person, though, who will get it instantly. Looking forward to the comments.]

Sorry about that. Embedded parentheses - yuk.

The reason for this unwarranted intrusion from a number (one, incidentally, that is not even in my Top Ten of ‘Favourite Numbers Of The 1980s’) is that 135 was the break Higgins made to win the last frame of the 1982 world championship final. You can watch the end of it here. Even better is this one from the semi-final.

Now, I doubt that I have actively thought about that break, or that match, in about 28 years. But there it is, leaping into my head the moment I see the name Alex Higgins, as inextricably linked to it as the word ’vomit’ is to the words ‘Simon Cowell’.

The fact is, I spent such a large amount of my otherwise undistinguished childhood (there’s no need for snarky comments, thanks) inhaling sports and information pertaining thereto that there are some numbers that simply won’t go away. They rise unbidden to the surface at the slightest opportunity, causing my simple and trusting mind the deepest consternation and anguish.

8032, 6996, 365, 99.94, 197, 499, 19-90, 304.

Any cricket fan of the 1970s will recognise those. Sorry if you don’t count yourself among them. It is, I can assure you from my completely biased position, your loss.

But then there are others, not sports-related: 3.141592653538979323846 [I learned that, plus plenty more, from a postcard I bought at the Science Museum in Paris, where they had written it to a gazillion decimal places going round the ceiling of a circular room (I wonder if it’s still there?) - it has survived the intervening 33 years more or less intact, I find].

Sorry again. The good news is that embedded parentheses are forbidden to travel in groups of more than two by EU law.

Where was I? Oh yes, other numbers.

There are musical numbers that are as deeply entrenched as the sporting ones, of course: 9, 15, 104, 551, 626, 1048 and so on and on and on and on.

While we’re at it, and now that it’s too late for me to salvage my tattered reputation for suave man-about-townery: number plates. SFC832N, VJO731X.

Just don’t get me started on phone numbers.

By the way, if you have understood the significance of all the numbers quoted thus far, you are either my brother or have been stalking me for a very very long time.

So what does it all mean?

Well if you’re expecting profound discussion of the neuroanatomy of retention and the importance of the hippocampus in long-term memory consolidation, then I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place, as you may already have gathered.

But at least I’ve got all those numbers out of my head for a bit and it is now empty enough for me to watch Big Brother.

Thanks for that.

Higgs Boson a la CERN

It’s a commonly held misconception that the creation of a Higgs Boson particle is the province only of the professional particle chef. But it’s quite simple to rustle one up at home. Here’s one of my favourite recipes.

Higgs Boson a la CERN (feeds 0)
For this recipe you will need:
Everything You Thought You Knew About Physics
A Window
Most Of Switzerland
A Great Big Bag Of Cash
1 Large Hadron Collider
1 Linear Particle Accelerator
1 Proton Synchrotron Booster
1 Super Proton Synchrotron
1 Super-Duper Synchromesh Tronatron Da-Doo-Ron-Ron Dustbuster
6 Particle Detectors: ATLAS ((A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS), TOTEM (TOTal cross section, Elastic scattering and diffraction dissociation Measurement), ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), BOB (Big Old Bugger), CAROL (Crap AcROnym Lunacy), TED (TEDious list of stuff)
Some Particles
A Rubber Spatula
A Lot Of Very Clever Men Probably Wearing White Coats

1. Take Everything You Thought You Knew About Physics.
2. Throw it out of the window. Make sure window is open first.
3. Make sure you have your Great Big Bag Of Cash ready.
4. Take Most Of Switzerland. You don’t need to be that careful with it - it stands up to rough treatment, especially if you dip into your Great Big Bag Of Cash.
5. Dig up Most Of Switzerland and build a very big Circle Line.
6. Install your Large Hadron Collider in the Circle Line you have built.
7. Fire that baby up.
8. Oh.
9. Ah.
10. Magnetic quench in your superconducting bending magnets. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?
11. Fire that baby down.
12. Set aside for a year or so to cool.
13. Fire it up again.
14. You need to prepare your particles for injection into the Large Hadron Collider. First pass them through the Linear Particle Accelerator, then through the Proton Synchrotron Booster, then through the Super Proton Synchrotron, and finally through the Super-Duper Synchromesh Tronatron Da-Doo-Ron-Ron Dustbuster.
15. Now the particles are ready for collision. This is the fun bit.
16. Crank ‘em up and smash ‘em together. You are looking for a force of up to 7 TeV.
15. Don’t ask me what TeV means. I thought you were the particle physicist. It’s a lot anyway.
16. At this point there is a danger that the particles may curdle and that the entire known universe will be sucked into a black hole, meaning the end of existence as we know it. There is no need to panic, though. Simply take your spatula and carefully fold the particles back into the collider. Adding another egg yolk may help stabilise it, too.
17. You should now have a Higgs Boson particle. As it will only be in existence for a fraction of a nanosecond, serve immediately.

iNdecision

So the dudes at CERN have finally done it and now the particles are crashing into each other like demented but absolutely teensy dodgem cars. And we’re all still here.

So far.

Prof Brian Cox, previously mentioned here, has been tweeting up a storm, excitedly comparing the LHC to a cup of milky coffee (apparently there is more energy in the latter, making it much more of a threat to the planet than the former - I think he’s been reading me). He also threatened to chin the next person to say ‘black hole’ to him. How refreshing to see a public figure take a stand on the issues that really matter.

No sign yet, unfortunately, of the elusive Higgs Boson. It’s bound to be in the last place they look.

But even if we had been sucked into a black hole, it would have been as nothing when compared to the fathomless vortex of desire into which I am being inexorably dragged.
Bit by bit, day by day, they’re coming to get me. Clad in spotless (they obviously don’t have cats) black polo necks, and chanting strange mantras like ‘pinch to zoom’ and ‘let’s go for sushi!’, they resemble little more than the sinister beings who took over the world in The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.

Ok, so the fashion is a bit different, but you get the idea. Soon, if you’re found not in possession of an iPhone, you will be exposed as ’the uncool’ by expressionless zombies pointing at you and shrieking like my coffee machine whipping up a manchiato.

I speak as someone who has owned two iPhones, both purchased on the first day of availability. My body was snatched a long time ago.

And now there’s the iPad.

We’ve known about it for a couple of months now, and reactions have varied from ‘it’s a big iPhone. What’s the fuss?’ to ‘it’s a big iPhone that is going to change the world and I am so excited I think my head’s about to fall off’.

I have one foot in each camp, which is odd, because I could never do the splits.

On the one hand, I already have an iPhone and I already have a computer. The iPad is neither one thing nor the other and won’t replace either of them. I don’t need one.

On the other hand...drool. And slobber. And drool again. I want one.

On the third hand, there is the possibility that it will actually change the world. And if there’s any world-changing gonna be happening that involves fiddling around with gadgets instead of armed uprising or particle beams, I want to be part of it.

So it’s a dilemma. What do you think? Should I get one? My decision will be based very nearly entirely on what you say.

No pressure.

eBooks & iBooks & Real Books To Boot

Just to prove that I don’t only think about food (see all previous posts):
I’ve recently succumbed to a bit of an eBook frenzy. I discovered dozens of freebies on the iPhone, so downloaded them like a python eating a goat. Austen, Dickens, Bronte, Dumas, Fitzgerald, you name it. If it’s famous and I haven’t read it yet you can bet I have now downloaded it and will not be reading it in the foreseeable future.

Actually that’s unfair. The first thing I read on the iPhone was the first chapter of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species.

Fascinating stuff. Can’t wait to find out who did it.

I then engaged in some comfort reading. Books that I have no need to read again because I memorised them when I was fifteen. But I just wanted to check that they’re still as funny in a different format. Take a bow PG Wodehouse and Saki.

Now here’s the thing.

I’ve always been of the ‘there’s something special about a book that can’t be replicated on a computer screen’ persuasion.

I used to like vinyl, too. (Readers under the age of 35, click here.)

And now the 200+ LPs that I have collected over the course of 30 years or so lie unwanted in a pile in the cellar. I’ve transferred some of them to my hard drive, (a process I still inexplicably call ‘taping’) but to be honest the whole thing is rather fiddly and time-consuming, and I always get the levels wrong, and even though I’m by no means a picky audiophile of the kind that can never actually enjoy listening to anything because they’re so obsessed with ‘that buzz, can’t you hear it? You must be able to hear it! I don’t know how you can listen to this with that racket going on’, there are some tracks that even i can’t hack listening to, so fuzzy, clicky and generally all arsed up is the sound.

That last sentence does make sense - you just have to read it again.

The point is, it’s the CONTENT that matters, not the medium. And eBooks, I discover, are no eXception.

I’m reading The Count of Monte Cristo at the moment. A real page-turner, especially when the size of the screen means you turn a page every few seconds. And the eReader very kindly tells you how far into the book you are. 1.6%, since you ask.

But I’ve still got Alan Bennett in my bag, so to speak, for battery emergencies.