Rock of Ages

Two men sit in a bunker somewhere underneath Whitehall.

Fu….g TNT!

Christ Gordon where?

No you bampot. No the explosive, the so called fu….g ‘ Logistics Facilitator’

Oh thank God for that!

It’s god actually in here Tony. You’re a wee bit twitchy since you came back from Palistan or wherever it is.

You’ve no idea, Gordon. It’s like surfing on sewage full of land mines.

Well that must be a new experience for you.

Ok, ok I can live without Mr Sarky. Ms Manzanilla is bad enough. Anyway how about some devil’s buttermilk as the Baroness would say.

Right I’ll get one of the little people to rustle up a few bottles of Glenn Miller.

Glenn Miller?

Disappeared into the wide blue yonder just like those disks.

Yes, I heard about that. Did I tell you I met this guy in Gaza, great sense of humour, dreadful personal hygiene, said he had leads on 25 million potential terrorists, two generations worth, convenient format, can play on any i-Pod; are you interested?

No thanks Tone, no just at the minute. Here we are. Give us your glass. I must say I’m impressed at the cellar in this place since I took over.

Yes lots of good vino and such; quite a few bodies as well, if I remember correctly, Ha! Ha!

Speaking of which have you seen La Mandleson. Are you sure he’s not wearing a syrup these days along with the pallor of the recently undead?

Now Gordon!

Ok Tone, just can’t resist it. It’s ma flawed nature te he he….

You’re right Godron, it is good stuff this Glenn Miller. God bless him wherever he is.

Ok Tone, I’ll give you the capitalisation at the beginning of a sentence.

Speaking of which, Godron, I don’t suppose there is any chance of slipping me the date of the nationalisation of the Old Rock! You know, Rock of Ages cleft for me for a slightly higher fee! Ms Manzawhatsit is whinging about the lack of the old spondoolicks in the communal kitty, meow, meow!

No chance Tone! We have to be squeaky clean. Jings, Rock of Ages, you are shome pieceh of work Tone you know that. Iztha two bottlesh already.

Yezz! I haven’t laughed so much sinceh the old queen died!

Yesh Tone! But which one?

Now Godron!

Capitalism 101 and jokes!

It has been so hard not to comment about the Rock. So many things to say! My amazement is that so many of us fail to understand the mechanisms of oh, capitalism. Damn! There, I have said it!
You invest in an enterprise, it is successful, it pays a dividend, its shares increase in value.
Off you go to the pub to realise some disposable income!
You invest in an enterprise, it is unsuccessful, it does not pay a dividend, its shares decrease in value, it goes tits up. Off you go to the pub to drown your sorrows with some borrowed capital. Nuff said; no whingeing.

Yes the weak business, if it is a failing bank , can have catastrophic effects on ' business sentiment'. If depositors in a bank are constantly worried about getting their boodle when they need it, bad news. Seeing people queue for their money is so 1920s. Not to mention the poor sods who work for the bank and don't have 2 mil. in shares! (Not sure Baroness Dagenham was too worried about decimating the mining communities either!) So where am I?

2 Jokes.

- How can you distinguish stoats from weasles.
Weasles are weasily distingused from stoats which are stotally different.

Thanks to a colleague, with children, for that one.

-Are there any Jews in Northern Ireland?
Yes of course!
But are they Catholic Jews or Protestant Jews?
Protestant Jews of course.
Why?
Don't we all have Orange Jews for breakfast!

Doh!

Birthdays

So if you get to be 91 what do you do to celebrate; well I guess you celebrate with the village and those members of your family that are around. Not sure I will get near that age at all but good luck to those that do. In the meantime, a snap of a Mum and two loving daughters.

Oh; and a really nice bit of NT real estate in the background.

An exceptionally simple theory of everything.

You thought it was 42 didn’t you, well it seems like it could be E8 according to A. Garrett Lisi. (original paper) No, that’s not a part of Hackney but the E8 Lie algebra…

perhaps the most beautiful structure in mathematics.

I can hear the groans already but hang on to your hats this could be a fascinating trip.

You know how all the forces in the universe, nuclear, electowhatsit, gravity and the like are all described by pretty little equations of course you do, so far so good.

In his introduction to the paper Lisi sketches his mathematical approach to describing the universe.

Although It is interesting to consider that the universe may be the physical instantiation of all mathematics, there is a classic principle for restricting the possibilities… A successful description of nature should be a concise, elegant, unified mathematical structure consistent with experience. Hundreds of years of theoretical and experimental work have produced an extremely successful pair of mathematical theories describing our world. The standard model of particles and interactions described by quantum field theory is a paragon of predictive excellence. General relativity, a theory of gravity built from pure geometry, is exceedingly elegant and effective in its domain… Any attempt to describe nature at the foundational level must reproduce these successful theories, and the most sensible course towards unification is to extend them with as little new mathematical machinery as necessary. The further we drift from these experimentally verified foundations, the less likely our mathematics is to correspond with reality. In the absence of new experimental data, we should be very careful, accepting sophisticated mathematical constructions only when they provide a clear simplification. And we should pare and unite existing structures whenever possible…By considering these two theories and following our guiding principles, we will be led to a beautiful unification.

He’s off then on his merry way. The first subheading draws me in

A connection with everything

My kind of pizza. You may have a certain reluctance to follow the next few pages if your maths is a wee bit rusty but I defy you to ignore Figure 2 on page 17. The E8 root system, with each root assigned to an elementary particle field.

After a few more equations Lisi summarises his conclusions

The theory proposed in this paper represents a comprehensive unification program, describing all fields of the standard model and gravity as parts of a uniquely beautiful mathematical structure… Some aspects of this theory are not yet completely understood, and until they are it should be treated with appropriate skepticism. However, the current match to the standard model and gravity is very good. Future work will either strengthen the correlation to known physics and produce successful predictions for the LHC, or the theory will encounter a fatal contradiction with nature. The lack of extraneous structures and free parameters ensures testable predictions, so it will either succeed or fail spectacularly. If E8 theory is fully successful as a theory of everything, our universe is an exceptionally beautiful shape.

Now men, and it is usually men, who think they have the secret to the universe, and if you just let them have 4 hours of your time and provide them with lots of paper, will write out the equations in a very small hand in green ink. They are not uncommon. They are not quite as common as men who think they are the son of god, or even god! However, I don’t think this is in the same league.

Two points really:-

In an article in the New Scientist

Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years”…

A not inconsiderable achievement as one our prime ministers used to say. As I have mentioned before Lee Smolin seems to be a sharp cookie with a good overview

There is also testability. Those three letters LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, it is a big machine for hurtling particles at high energy towards each other. A very sophisticated way of finding out what stuff is made of. Just like kids bashing toys on the ground to see what’s inside! There are great hopes of finding the Higgs.

Now there is a theory, needs a bit more work and there is no guarantee guv, but it could be tested! So let's get bashing those poor old hadrons.

On a Winter’s Afternoon.

Listening to the Goldbloom Variations after a bowl of soup and hand wrought onion bread I feel a little like Chris in Northern Exposure.

Great temptation when away from home comforts to philosophise.

It is grey, cold and miserable out there. Still, I passed my MOT last week, alive but overweight was the verdict. I wonder if the car will be so fortunate this week. Can you have an overweight car?

Meanwhile hiding in winter! This from a hide last year.

From the Forest of the Dead. Maybe not!

Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris! Or not as the case may be.

Luz

Hay Luz!


Y despues?

A Prodigious Talent 2

A trip to London and a visit to Hampstead Heath gave me the chance to go and see the “Fancy Woman”.

Shock! Horror! Phwat are you talking about? Have you not plighted your troth, whatever that might be, to the goodladywife, your partner of some(mumbles indistinctly) years!

Of course! However, I am only human and I am very taken with the works of a certain Mr. J Vermeer, one of which is permanently on display at Kenwood House, when it is not being stolen by various gobshites.

There she is and I try to see her as often as possible.

Not the gurl with the pearl

or the the gurl with the red hat (and no kn..…. stop it at once!)

A master of light. Would that there were more! Ojala!

A Prodigious Talent

A trip to London and a visit to the Grauniad Newsroom which currently has an exhibition of the “Unknown Bown”, a photographer of Prodigious Talent.

I was convinced after seeing it that my memory only graduated to colour from black and white (as far as I know she only worked in this medium) after about 1965. The Gypsy Child, Maidstone ’61 is a real stunner. By-election, Rochdale, ’58, is an interesting storyboard of politics at the time. I think the name of the candidate on the leaflets carried by the people in the shot was Jack McCann. If it is possible go and see it. Be shocked at how parts of England in the 50’s and 60’s looked like a failed communist state.
If you’ve got it you can plough a singular furrow to great effect!

Visits to Hampstead Heath and Anglesey Abbey convinced me that, even if you have no talent, a dodgy, digital, daguerreoista, with a bog standard point and shoot can hardly fail in decently lit, autumn arborial surroundings.

And of course it was too tempting to miss a snapper snapped.

Apologies to the woman whoever she is.

Glasgow Games

Many of our non-co-respondents complain about my lack of interest in sport, notwithstanding my goodladywife's passion for beefy men throwing an odd shaped ball around. Now, to set this matter to rights.
Glasgow is due to host the Commonwealth Games in 2014. Hooray!

The Leader of the Scottish Government, a Mr Salmo Salmar, is quoted in the Grauniad as saying

... the city would "make these games the greatest sporting event our country has ever seen".

The same article quotes a Mr Godron Broon, the Leader of the English Government,

"It's looking like a great sporting decade for our country," he said.

It was alleged that he

called many Commonwealth heads of government to bolster Glasgow's bid last week

Hats off all round. Nice to see the old chums getting on so well and being so effective. See what you can do when you work together as a team lads? No nasty sniping about all that (Scottish) lottery money being smuggled over the border for the (English) Olympic Games. You'll be whinging on about the (Scottish) oil next.

As the workperson once said when they were demolishing the roof of the Rector's office at Edinburgh University( I believe the Rector was one G Broon Esq. at the time)

It's no polical, pal!

Fun and games in the years ahead!

Reading Bad Science, see side panel, I was reminded of the Glasgow sobriquet common in my time in the north - YOU TUBE. - Maybe it persists to this day and is still a term of affectionate banter, as well as being something to do with the interweb. However, I would be vary wary of calling anyone a copper tube.
Thanks to Ben Goldacre for the link, possibly.

Crunchy and good!

Nice explanation of the little local difficulty in the wonderful world of wonga (WWW?) which I might have mentioned previously.

Thanks yet again to John Naughton and his contact. I missed it too.

Resolutions.

Panic over

Cloth hats –
Rep = cloth
Tiles = hats!

Doh! Useful little site for xwders.

Araucaria can be a real bugger!

Ben Hammersly had a very naughty link

Suggested that the Scots might want it fried!

There we go then!

So, that’s alright.
Amazing what people get up to.

Cautionary Tales

I am aware that this could become a theme.

However, an aside. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of the answer to the following question is implored to email to prop.for.06@btinternet.com.
What is the connection between cloth hats and lizards, monitors and/or reptiles? We solved the prize Araucaria in the Grauniad last week, despite not being able to make the connection between 'cloth hats and lizards, monitors and/or reptiles'.
All contributions gratefully received and acknowledged.

Moving on, a fine autumn afternoon for a bimble.

http://explore.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/os_routes/show/683

I am deeply grateful that the OS feel obliged to contribute something back to the little people just because they are a Treasury Trading Fund!

But, my god, are the ducks prolific in this part of the world; it's November for heavens sake!


Yes. That is a brood of ducklings!
Feckless buggers.