Gruts

Tobago last week.

…Well, when I said I was going on a TIP TOP SECRET assignment, what I actually meant was that I was going on holiday.

But there was a grain of truth in my claim: I did end up in Scarborough (albeit briefly); Scarborough, Tobago, that is. Very nice place. Tobago, that is. I didn't think much of Scarborough.

More photos to follow on Flickr.

Apparently, airline stewardesses aren't called airline stewardesses any more; they're cabin crew these days. Call me old-fashioned, but it just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Anyway, one of our female cabin crew had a few problems with her announcements as we travelled to Tobago the other week. As our plane was taxiing along the runway, about to take off from London Gatwick, she welcomed us on board Virgin Atlantic Flight VS51 to Grenada. A couple of hundred passengers immediately sat bolt upright and cried, "GRENADA!!!?".

At the other end of the flight, as our plane came to a hault in Grenada Tobago, she made another announcement, which included the following request:

Those of you who require wheelchair assistance, please remain seated.

Call me puerile, but this made stuff come out of my nose.

Overheard in the meal queue at our hotel last week:

Jen: "What soup is it today?"
Woman guest: "Smells like pea."

One of the many stereotypes that we Brits have of the Germans is that of sun-lounger hoggers. Apparently, when on holiday in sunny climes, they rise hours before dawn to bag all the prime locations around the hotel pool.

As a person who doesn't like lounging about in the sun, I don't see this activity as much of a problem. In fact, it sounds pretty damn sensible to me. But I have often wondered whether the stereotype was true. So, last week, when I found myself staying in a hotel in Tobago that had a number of German guests, I decided to find out.

Fortunately, the verandah outside my room overlooked the hotel's swimming pool. So I rose one morning well before dawn and found myself a good vantage point.

Within minutes, shadowy figures began to emerge from the gloom and stumble their way towards the poolside. Some of them even brought their own sun-longers, which they had presumably stashed in their rooms the night before. Those fiendish Germans! I thought to myself.

But, hold on! As my eyes gradually adjusted to the pre-dawn light, I began to recognise some of these swimming-becostumed early birds. They were British!

A lump came to my throat. Never before had I felt so proud of my countrymen. They weren't going to be beaten by the likes of Herman the German; they were going to beat Fritz at his own game.

But alas! They had fallen into the Germans' devilish trap! The sun-lounger-hogging stereotype was, it turned out, a decoy—a myth spread by the Germans themselves. For, while the British (and one plucky, little Belgian) were preparing to fight them on the beach-towels, in a manoeuvre reminiscent of the Maginot Line débâcle, the Germans had completely circumvented the pool, made an all-out assault on the breakfast room, and commandeered all the sausages.

Ruthless cunning.

I carried out what I believe is a unique experiment at work on Friday. I document it here for posterity, in GCSE-approved standard scientific format:

Experiment: To investigate the extraction of loose tea leaves from a tea bag.

Apparatus:

• one Taylors of Harrogate Yorkshire Tea bag
• one standard tea mug
• one industrial-strength paper-shredder

Method:

• the mug was placed into the bottom section of the shredder, directly under the shredding slot
• the shredder was turned on
• the tea bag was fed slowly through the shredding slot
• once the tea bag had been fully shredded, the machine was disengaged and the mug was removed from the shredder

Results: When examined, the mug was found to contain a residue of loose tea leaves and shredded tea bag paper. These were easily separated by hand.

Conclusion: The method under investigation is an effective way of extracting loose tea leaves from a tea bag. However, upon further investigation, the extracted tea leaves were found to be smaller in diameter than shop-bought loose tea leaves. They would be unsuitable as a hot drink ingredient, in that they would tend to escape through the holes of a standard tea strainer and contaminate the resultant beverage.

BBC: Prince Charles to marry Camilla

Shouldn't all us loyal royalists be getting a day off work? Better still, why not make it a week? Hurrah!

As the keeper of a Charles Darwin website, I receive occasional emails from fundamentalist Christian loonies, who inform me that evolution is "only a theory", but who don't seem to realise that the first chapter of the Book of Genesis is only a creation myth.

When it comes to explaining reality, give me a theory over a creation myth any day.

Curiously, these loonies never attempt to explain what makes them think the Genesis creation myth is so much better than any of the hundreds of others they could have chosen. I don't bother arguing with them any more, and simply refer them to my standard response.

Employing divine intervention to explain how the universe came about clearly explains nothing, in that it begs the obvious follow-up question, "So where did God come from, then?" Adhering to Occam's Razor (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate, in case you were wondering), we make fewer assumptions if we claim that the universe was created out of (and by) nothing, than claiming that God was created out of (and by) nothing and then took it into His divine head to create the universe.

The latest scientific thinking is far simpler:

New Scientist: How 3D space survived the great destruction

Why do we live in a space with only three dimensions? Because, at some time in the past, all the universes with four or more dimensions collided and destroyed each other, while our 3D space survived by slipping between collisions. Or at least, that is what a new theory claims.

Easy-peasy, you see?

It sounds like a tall tale. Can't we accept that our universe has three space dimensions and that's that? Not if you believe in string theory—physicists' best bet for a fundamental description of all particles and forces—which needs nine spatial dimensions.

Nine dimensions. Got that?

In one interpretation of string theory, called braneworld, those extra dimensions are large, perhaps even infinite, and our universe is just a 3D membrane drifting in a higher-dimensional space. However, that does not explain why our "brane" has three rather than, say, four or seven dimensions.

Now a team led by Ruth Durrer of the University of Geneva in Switzerland has an explanation. The idea is that the cosmos once included branes with up to eight dimensions, floating about at random in nine-dimensional space. In their model, this 9D space has the form of a torus, or doughnut, with each dimension circling back on itself (www.arxiv.org/hep-th/0501163).

Mmmm! Nine-dimensional doughnuts!

CNN.com: Arthur Miller dead at 89

I'm gutted: Chattanooga Choo-Choo is one of my all-time favourite tunes.

Some pelicans recently.

I've posted some photos from my recent holiday in Tobago on Flickr.

Flickr is very cool.

When I comment on news stories, I have been known to look for the occasional quirky slant. But sometimes the stories are quite odd enough on their own:

Reuters: German 'Homosexual' Penguins Spark Gay Protest
A plan by a German zoo to test the sexual appetites of a group of suspected homosexual penguins has sparked outrage among gay and lesbian groups, who fear zookeepers might force them to turn straight.

…and not forgetting this one:

Guardian: Monkeys go ape for a little allure
Scientists reported last week that male rhesus monkeys will 'pay' to check out pictures of female monkey bottoms or images of socially dominant members of their species.

I found myself using the phrase selling like hot cakes earlier this week. It suddenly occurred to me that this is a very strange expression. I have never eaten a hot cake, and I have never seen one for sale. Perhaps that's because they sell out so quickly.

Hot cakes? Pretty odd.

Jen thinks it might refer to fairy cakes (what the Americans call cup cakes), which are particularly tasty when eaten warm, fresh out of the oven. That's as maybe, but, if so, shouldn't the expression be selling like warm fairy cakes?

But even if Jen's interpretation is right, do warm fairy cakes sell particularly well these days? If they do, I've certainly never noticed. In this day and age, wouldn't it be more appropriate to say selling like iPods, or something like that?

…All of which got Fitz and me talking in the pub last night about the Fosbury Flop. Good old Dick Fosbury is one of those totally cool individuals who have had a manoeuvre named after them. His particular manoeuvre revolutionised the world of high jump. It added several inches to most people's high jumping ability. No high jumper in their right mind would be without it. Indeed, when it comes to high jumping technique, it's the only game in town—it has been a massive success.

So why's it called the Fosbury Flop?

Not only did animals use a mysterious sixth sense to escape the recent dreadful tsunami, but it would appear that supposedly primitive people (who, as we all know, are much more in tune with their environment than we are) also saw it coming—although saw isn't exactly the word:

BBC Radio 4, Thinking Allowed (16-Feb-05): What is the role of the senses in society? Why do many people in west-African societies hold hands when they talk? Did a group of islanders in the Bay of Bengal really 'smell' the Tsumani coming? And thus survive?

No, they didn't.

Of course, the sociologist and Thinking Allowed presenter, Prof. Laurie "I misquote people on air to make them sound stupid" Taylor, being a total expert on the scientific hypothesis front, immediately challenged the utterly preposterous assertion made by this week's guest, David Howes, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, that the members of an ancient tribe in the Andaman Islands smelt the tsunami coming. Here is what Prof. Taylor said:

…

Yes, that's right, he didn't even bat an eyelid. Nice one, Laurie!

Why do people always have to look for mysterious explanations? The BBC has already published a far more sensible account of how the ancient tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands happily managed to survive the tsunami:

BBC (20-Jan-05): Tsunami folklore 'saved islanders'

Traditional knowledge handed down from generation to generation helped to save ancient tribes on India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands from the worst of the tsunami, anthropologists say…

The aboriginal tribes—some of the oldest and most isolated in the world—have oral traditions apparently developed from previous earthquakes that may have allowed them to escape to higher ground before the massive tsunami struck the island chain off Indonesia.

The Onge tribe, for example, have lived on Little Andaman for between 30,000 and 50,000 years and, though they are on the verge of extinction, almost all of the 100 or so people left seem to have survived the 26 December quake and the devastating waves which followed.

Their folklore talks of "huge shaking of ground followed by high wall of water", according to Manish Chandi, an environmental protection worker who has studied the tribes and spoke to some Onges after the disaster.

No voodoo. No mysterious sixth sense. Just good old-fashioned folklore.

Guardian: Official: Britons are most cultured Europeans
The Italians have Michelangelo, the French Molière and the Germans Beethoven. But, according to an Italian survey, the British—the beer-swilling, tabloid-reading, supposedly sports-crazy British—are more cultured than any of them.

Presumably, that's cultured as in Petri dish.

This sort of snobbery really winds me up: beer-swilling, tabloid-reading and watching sport are cultural. You can't compare amounts of culture; everyone in the world is surrounded by the stuff 24 hours a day.

Unless they live in Dumfries.

Sunday Times: Hunts kill 91 foxes on first day of ban
On the first day of the hunting ban 250 hunts rode out into the wintry sun and killed no fewer than 91 foxes. It looked very much like business as usual, apart from some huntsmen dragging effigies of Tony Blair for their hounds to pursue.

I've been doing some maths:

• I don't know the size of a typical hunt, but as a conservative (in both senses of the word) estimate, let's say it's 30 horse-faced toffs and associated hangers-on, plus a pack of, say, 30 dogs. (I'll ignore the horses, hunt saboteurs, police, and Sunday Times journalists to keep it simple.)
• That's 7,500 people and 7,500 dogs working a whole day to kill 91 foxes.
• That's 0.0121 foxes per person/dog per day.
• That's 82½ person/dog days to kill a single fox.

Doesn't that strike you as spectacularly inefficient?

It makes a lie of their argument that fox hunting is was all about pest control.

Either that, or the hunting ban has been highly successful in reducing the number of foxes killed for fun.

BBC: Oldest fossil 'rabbit' unearthed

I originally misread this as Oldest fossil 'rabbi' unearthed.

Now that would have made an interesting story.

I recently discovered what Ann would no doubt describe as a snookie—an obscure, roundabout route which is actually quicker than going the sensible way, provided you don't get lost—near her old house in Liverpool. Liverpool is mad busy with roadworks at the moment, thanks to the Capital of Culture thing. Out of necessity, I have been discovering a lot of new snookies lately.

So it was that, yesterday evening, I found myself playing the Beatles' Drive My Car while actually driving my car down Penny Lane. Yes, that Penny Lane.

Talk about spooky synchronicity or what?

I didn't see any sign of a barber showing photographs, a banker with a motor car, or a fireman with an hour-glass, but I did see a Wash-o-Rama laundrette, a Sgt. Pepper's restaurant, and about a dozen speed bumps. Signs of the times, I guess.

Say what you like about the Beatles, but they did have a gift for song titles: Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, Norwegian Wood, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da—pure genius.

Only Lennon and McCartney could spot the potential of a name like Penny Lane. It's the perfect song title.

If it had been down to me, I would probably have plumped for the adjacent road: Croydon Avenue.

Ladies and gentlemen, they said it would never happen out here, half-way up a hill in the back of beyond, but, wait for it…

We have broadband!!!

My, that was fast! Where should I go next?

New Scientist: Gay men read maps like women

Upside-down, presumably.

Guardian: Report doubts future of wind power

Wind farms are an expensive and inefficient way of generating sustainable energy, according to a study from Germany, the world's leading producer of wind energy.

The report, which may have ramifications for the UK's rapidly growing wind farm industry, concludes that instead of spending billions on building new wind turbines, the emphasis should be on making houses more energy efficient. Drawn up by the German government's energy agency, it says that wind farms prove a costly form of reducing greenhouse gases.

BBC: Saddam's half-brother 'captured'
A half-brother and one-time aide to former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has been captured, according to Iraqi interim government sources. Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan al-Tikriti was number 36 on the US military's list of 55 most wanted former regime members.

It would appear that Saddam Hussein isn't the only member of his family to bear an uncanny resemblance to someone else. His brother is the spitting image of Queen's dead frontman, the late, great Freddie Mercury:

Mercury

Hasan

Totally, totally uncanny!