The Single Helix

"One single star of the Aquila galaxy, ten thousand light years from home, has a cloud of ethyl alcohol around it big enough to provide a bottle of the finest Johnny Walker for every person on Earth every day for the next five thousand billion years."

This consoling thought comes from Steve Jones' "The Single Helix" (Little Brown 2005). Whatever the scientific equivalent of illiterate and innumerate is, I'm it. This book is full of many excellent and unfamiliar - to me - scientific thoughts, such as Zipf's law. I paraphrase, obviously, but it applies to the size of either animals or businesses - and many other things - and the frequency of their occurrence: the smaller they are (insects, self-employed), the more there will be of them - the larger (elephants, multi-nationals), the fewer. The relationship is constant in a huge range of examples, with notable exceptions. There are far more - relatively large - farm animals than there should be for their size, and about ten thousand times as many humans as there should be according to Zipf. A reckoning awaits?

On voting systems, Jones tells us that the Mathematical Association of America and the American Statistical Association, packed with people who understand numbers better than most of us, use an approval system of voting to elect their committees. This involves voting for as many candidates as you like - those you approve of, that is - with each vote carrying the same weight. The result is, statistically, the nearest to the concensus view. Fantastic! Say goodbye to negative voting and/or voting for someone for fear of another getting in. Everyone votes for the people they think are ok, and the result is a reflection of this. No votes wasted. Simple and much easier to understand than single transferable votes. Will someone please tell the electoral reform society? In fact, I think I'll right to Dr. Ken Ritchie tonight.

Tories and Class 'A's

Not much more than an hour after the announcement of David Cameron's election as Tory leader, Shadow Home Affairs Minister Cheryl Gillan put out this press release.



Given the newly minted Cameron slogan, the nasal emphasis of the photo and the peculiar US dateline (12/06/2005), I suspect this may not entirely bona fide.

Freemantle

I recently read Freemantle by John Buchan (1916). A ripping yarn of the finest quality but, more interestingly, packed with the prejudices of the time. For those who don't care this sort of thing themselves, here are some choice examples of racism, sexism, anti-semitism and (repressed homosexual) homophobia. Buchan, of Thirty Nine Steps fame (Freemantle is the second in the Richard Hannay series), was a very popular figure, who became an MP and, finally, Governor-General of Canada. As it says in the introduction to the Penguin edition, "selective quotation can make him seem absurd, or disgraceful" so here goes...

Senior civil servant and 'good guy', Sir Walter Bullivant, on the Germans - "You are an intelligent fellow, and you will ask how a Polish adventurer, meaning Enver, and a collection of Jews and gipsies should have got control of a proud race."

On a sympathetic, yet enemy, German - "Gaudian was clearly a good fellow, a white man and a gentleman. I could have worked with him for he belonged to my own totem."

On another sympatico German - "That fellow gave me the best 'feel' of any German I had met. He was a white man and I could have worked with him. I liked his stiff chin and steady blue eyes."

On a 'bad' German's poor notion of psychology - "In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises."

The 'bad German again - "There had never been a woman's hand in that place. It was the room of a man who had a passion for frippery, who had a perverted taste for soft delicate things. It was the complement to his bluff brutality. I began to see the queer side to my host,"

Richard Hannay on himself - "I could see that I was becoming rather a figure in the captain's eyes. He liked the way I kept the men up to their work, for I hadn't been a nigger-driver for nothing."

On a swaggering Turkish official - "He strutted away and it was all I could do to keep from running after him. I wanted to lay him over my knee and spank him."

Hannay and his pal are of low cheer - "We were both in pretty poor spirits. 'Europe is a poor cold place,' said Peter, 'not worth fighting for. There is only one white man's land, and that is South Africa.' At the time I heartily agreed with him."

They are accosted by some Turkish ruffians - "They jabbered among themselves, and then one said very slowly: 'He...want...pounds,' and he held up five fingers. They evidently saw by the cut of our jib that we weren't Germans."

Hannay goes for a drive with Hilda von Einem, the evil yet beautiful German lady behind the conspiracy - "Women had never come much my way, and I knew about as much of their ways as I knew about the Chinese language... I had never been in a motor car with a lady before, and I felt like a fish on a dry sandbank. The soft cushions and the subtle scents filled me with acute uneasiness."

Hannay's pal, Sandy Arbuthnot, on women - "There never was a man so near the divine as Joan of Arc. But I think, too, they can be more entirely damnable than anything that was ever breeched, for they don't stop still now and then and laugh at themselves."

On his pal Sandy Arbuthnot, "He had a pair of brown eyes like a pretty girl's"

On the impressive Enver, a Pole on the German's side - "He was a slim fellow of Rasta's build, very foppish and precise in his dress, with a smooth oval face like a girl's, and rather fine straight eyebrows."

On his pal Peter Piennar, "He had a face as gentle as a girl's."

Selective quotation can be so unfair. Make of that lot what you will.

Interactive Voice Response systems

Here's something you don't hear very often. I heard an interesting piece on You and Yours today (a tedious Radio Four consumer programme, for those of you lucky enough not to know it). It was about how to get through to a human being when you dial a company and are offered endless options and/or are put on hold forever. The only responses I can remember off hand are to keep hitting zero fast, which confuses the system, or to remain silent so that it thinks you don't have a touch-tone phone. Most companies have specific codes to enable select people (usually those who work for it) to get through.

The piece was based on a website run by a Bostonian called Paul English. His blog is a curate's egg of tips on all sorts of things, many - though not all - good for techy-types. His IVR Cheat Sheet contains ways to get round the IVRs of specific companies. This is very american, but you get the idea and he says he is now getting info from other countries, including the UK. You can also listen to the programme (Automated Phone Systems, 05/12/05), though how long they keep it, god knows.

Kids, hunh?

Susanna at breakfast, à propos de rien,

"Dad, is it against the law to make a gravestone that doesn't say RIP on it?"