bhikku

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 03:57:24 +0000

'Careful of that brook: it breaks up the whole field. Mark it on your map.' Ah, I was to remember that serpent in the grass near Motril! It looked like nothing at all, and its faint murmur sang to no more than a few frogs; but it slept with one eye open. Stretching its length among the grasses in the paradise of that emergency landing-field, it lay in wait for me a thousand miles from where I sat. Given the chance, it would transform me into a flaming candelabra. And those thirty valorous sheep ready to charge me on the slope of a hill! Now that I knew about them I could brace myself to meet them.
'You think the meadow empty, and suddenly, bang! there are thirty sheep in your wheels.' An astounded smile was all I could summon in the face of so cruel a threat.

Fabien, the pilot bringing the Patagonian air-mail from the far south to Buenos Aires, could mark night's approach by certain signs that called to mind the waters of a harbour - a calm expanse beneath, faintly rippled by lazy clouds - and he seemed to be entering a vast anchorage, an immensity of blessedness.
Or else he might have fancied he was taking a quiet walk in the calm of evening, almost like a shepherd. The Patagonian shepherds move, unhurried, from one flock to another; and he, too, moved from one town to another, the shepherd of those little towns. Every two hours he met another one of them, drinking at its riverside or browsing on its plain.
Sometimes, after a hundred miles of steppes as desolate as the sea, he encountered a lonely farm-house that seemed to be sailing backwards from him in a great prairie sea, with its freight of human lives; and he saluted with his wings this passing ship.

'If you please - draw me a sheep.'

- St-Exupéry

Borneo rain

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 09:05:48 +0000

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:36:56 +0000

click to enlarge

Two sets of sand samples from Borneo islands: Upper 2: from Pulau Dinawan, off Kinarut Lower 2: from Pulau Tiga, Kimanis bay

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:54:12 +0000

* * * bhikku is off to Malaysian Borneo to see the giant earthworms, your men the orangutangs, and maybe this kind of thing:

The beauty and brilliancy of this insect are indescribable, and none but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it. On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day, so great was the excitement produced by what will appear to most people a very inadequate cause. - Alfred Russell Wallace, The Malay Archipelago

See you later on * * *

some maths

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 07:27:49 +0000

There are some, king Gelon, who think that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude; and I mean by the sand not only that which exists about Syracuse and the rest of Sicily but also that which is found in every region whether inhabited or uninhabited. Again there are some who, without regarding it as infinite, yet think that no number has been named which is great enough to exceed its magnitude. And it is clear that they who hold this view, if they imagined a mass made up of sand in other respects as large as the mass of the Earth, including in it all the seas and the hollows of the Earth filled up to a height equal to that of the highest of the mountains, would be many times further still from recognizing that any number could be expressed which exceeded the multitude of the sand so taken. - Archimedes

How many grains of sand are there in the world? It's difficult if not impossible to know this, but instead we can work out how many sand grains there aren't - or at least a figure that we know is greater than the actual number, just to show ourselves (a) that we can do some kind of sensible calculation involving sand, but more importantly (b) that there isn't an infinite number of grains. Our starting point is an approximation (always start from one of these so your readers can begin to pick holes in your argument straight away - this makes them feel better), that a litre of sand contains about 10 million grains. Since there are 10¹² litres in a cubic kilometre, this gives us a figure of 1 x 10¹⁹ grains per cubic kilometre. Now, how much sand is on the planet? We don't know and have no way of knowing, so let's set up a reductio ad absurdam which will generate a ballpark total answer to our problem. Imagine that all water in all seas is replaced by sand, like Archimedes said. Average sea depth is 3.7 km, let's take that as a yardstick (eh?). Now fill the space above sea level to the height of the world's tallest sand dune (the Cerro Blanco in Nazca, Peru) which is 2 km above sea level (note - not the highest mountain, Archimedes wasn't so cute there). We have now covered the planet in a layer of sand about 5.7 km thick. This of course is much more than is in fact present on Earth, so we need to make a guess as to what fraction a run a calculation on. We can't guess - is it a millionth, a squillionth, or what? Let's make it easy by dividing by 5.7 so our layer is exactly 1 km thick (readers very pleased now). What's the volume of this layer? Assume that the radius of the Earth is 6370 km, add our sand layer and calculate the volume of the whole using the formula 4/3πr³:

4/3 x π x 6371³ = 1,083,206,916,846 km³

(Note to self: Earth volume is about a trillion cubic km). Now do the whole thing again without the sand layer:

4/3 x π x 6370³ = 1,082,696,932,430 km³

Now take one from the other to find the volume of our sand layer, which turns out to be 509,984,416 km³. Or more simply, 5 x 10⁸ km³. Multiplying up by our grains per km³ figure, this gives us a sand layer containing 5 x 10²⁷ grains. This is about ten thousand times Avogadro's number, so as many sand grains as there are water molecules in ten thousand (small, 18ml) glasses of water. Or if we're out by a factor of ten thousand-ish and our 1 km sand layer was way too thick, there may be only as many sand grains on the planet as there are water molecules in single, small glass of water. Disappointing.

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 12:20:04 +0000

. . . then there was Millet's Man With The Hoe. I had never really wanted a photograph of a picture before I saw Millet's Man With The Hoe. I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I had read Eugenie Grandet of Balzac, and I did have some feeling about what French country was like but The Man With The Hoe made it different, it made it ground not country, and France has been that to me ever since. France is made of ground, of earth.
When I managed to get a photograph of the picture and took it home my eldest brother looked at it and said what is it and I said it is Millet's Man With The Hoe. It is a hell of a hoe said my eldest brother. - Gertrude Stein, Paris, France

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:38:42 +0000

Summer vacation is here, children, and I'm sure you're looking for something exciting to fill up the days with. What better thing to do than go outside and Become a Nature Detective. Simply get hold of a hand lens (x10 will do, any hardware store or scientific supplier will sell you one) and hold it over the end of the lens of your old digital camera. Then point it at whatever interests you and look more closely. You will find yourself seeing the natural world in a whole new way! Here are a few examples:

Fig. 1 Clematis Seed Head

Fig. 2 Veins in a leaf

Fig. 3 Bark of a tree

Fig. 4 A wasp

If it is raining out, you may find yourself restricted to the Great Indoors. A friend of mine can help you here. Mr Leonard de Vries has written a wonderful Book of Experiments for you, most of which can be carried out inside with ordinary household materials. Whichever one you try, you won't be disappointed.

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:14:28 +0000

Leonid Pasternak, Boris and Alexander, the Artist's Sons, 1905

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 06:02:51 +0000

There are so many islands! As many islands as the stars at night like falling fruit around the schooner Flight. But things must fall, and so it always was, on one hand Venus, on the other Mars; fall, and are one, just as this earth is one island in archipelagoes of stars. My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last. I stop talking now. I work, then I read, cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast. I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars. - Derek Walcott, from The Schooner Flight

wild wild wood

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 09:55:55 +0000

When I saw this splendid miserichord in Hereford Cathedral, phrases came immediately to mind such as through bushes and through briars and as I walked through the wilderness of this world, in which the complexities of the natural world are used as a metaphor for human difficulties. Particularly difficulties of the mind: in more than one Eric Rohmer film as the heroine is going through an emotional crisis, the director cuts in a shot of trees tossing in a wind, or grass blowing - Herzog does it at the opening of Kaspar Hauser, too. Uccello's The Hunt in the Forest may well be an example. And then I remembered that at the very end of The Singing Detective the woods/brain connection is made even more explicit - fast forward to 8'15":

dînerblog

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 10:56:19 +0000

Made a wonderful thing last night, a lamb, aubergine and and orzo oven dish redolent of Greek bus-station café cuisine: you could almost smell the exhaust fumes and hear the sounds of Greeks shouting at each other (διαλεκτικος - they invented it). We were out of the ingredients for horiatiki, and short on retsina, but there'll be a next time. Sooner rather than later.

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:26:27 +0000

Earthworms obtain & encrease (sic) in the grass-walks, where in levelling they were dug down more than 18 inches. So that they were either left in the soil, deep as it was removed: or else the eggs or young remained in the turf. Worms seem to eat the earth; also brick-dust lying among the earth, as appears by their casts. They delight in slopes, probably to avoid being flooded, & perhaps supply slopes with mould, as it is washed away by rains. They draw straws, stalks of vine-leaves, &c. into their holes, no doubt for the purpose of food. Without worms perhaps vegetation would go on but lamely, since they perforate, loosen, & meliorate the soil, rendering it pervious to rains, the fibres of plants, &c. Worms come out all the winter in mild seasons. - Gilbert White, 22nd September 1774

Beautiful observation and interpretation here by White, anticipating Darwin by over a century. So much is so well expressed here in such a short journal entry. White the master of the succinct.

chant de gaffe

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 18:39:30 +0000

I always enjoy a word with no etymology: picnic/pique-nique for instance has no known origin either in French or English. Now here's another (from the OED):

Shandy, n. Short for SHANDYGAFF. Also, a mixture of beer and fizzy lemonade.
First recorded usage 1888, The Daily News.

The French call it panaché (a mixture), the Germans radler (a cyclist or cyclist's drink). Mixing beer with soft drinks seems fairly recent, and while some concern has been expressed at mixing the savoury (beer) with the sweet (lemonade) across the Atlantic (shandy is not big in the US), there are some other horrors lurking out there . . . something called diesel, drunk in the Low Countries, which is a mix of lager and cola. Diesel is also sometimes a lager/cider mix best known in the UK as snakebite; some pubs refuse to serve it (on the grounds that it goes too far, provoking riotous behaviour among the clientele) and I've even been denied a black and tan (Guinness and bitter mix) on the grounds that it might have similar properties. Back to shandy:

Shandygaff, n. A drink composed of a mixture of beer and ginger-beer.
First recorded usage 1853.

So we seem to see an evolution from ginger-beer shandy to lemonade shandy: the default now of course is lemonade, perhaps following the change in popular lemonades from the green to the clear (the green is unimaginable mixed with beer). Given that the adjective shandy (now obs.) meant crazy or muddled (and some cocktails even now are made by muddling) the whole thing may be made clearer, but the OED steadfastly persists with : of unknown origin. And by the way: Happy Solstice.

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:03:57 +0000

I've just put this site onto a new server, following a 2 month-ish hiatus involving an argument with a peculiar host ("Script overuse/abuse warning." "I only run Movable Type scripts, and an infrequently-used comments script." "Well it's those other scripts which are abusing system resources." "Please tell me which scripts these are." "We are unable to specify individual scripts." Impasse - migrate to new host), and the initial stats are in. The first ten hits from search engines are typical in their charm and reassurance: diatoms fay godwin bertie why do you bound cloud study volvox giacomo joyce imaginary mc escher depth mc escher kite nize baby

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:58:58 +0000

Shearwater burrow, Skomer

Perhaps the most poetic, quasi-human, yet other life of all is lived by the Manx Shearwater, which 'comes in to land at breeding places at night, with weird cooing cries and wails, and shuffles to tunnels from which sepulchral voices coo "kuk-kuk-hoo-coo"'. With a little rearrangement this is pure Tennyson:

in breeding haunts at night And weird in tunnels, cooing cries and wails Sepulchral husky voices coo 'hoo coo' Under long glories of the winter moon. - Paul Jennings, Birds That Never Wert (quoting The Observer's Book of Birds)