Democracy in action

On the 23rd of June last year there was a most hotly contested election for a seat in the british parliament. The election was contested by a select bunch of 26 Lords, Viscounts, Earls and Dukes, and the leading candidates were Viscount Montgomery of Alemain (son of the bloke who saw off Rommel in Egypt) and the Earl of Effingham (a descendant of the bloke who crushed a rebellion by Thomas Wyatt the younger against Mary I in 1544). The electorate consisted of 28 assorted noblemen and women, who chose Viscount Montgomery.

Viscount Montgomery now sits in the House of Lords, the second chamber of the British Parliament. Any law passed by the House of Commons must be approved by the Lords before it comes into effect. The House of Lords consisted for many years of a combination of leading religious figures (archbishops and the like), life peers, and hereditary peers. The special thing about a hereditary peerage is that it is passed on when the holder dies. Thus there had been Effinghams in the house for five centuries, and when one Earl died his son took his title and seat.

This all changed in 1999, when the labour party realised that there was a slight imbalance. Because hereditary peers are pretty much immortal there were lots of them (759 to be precise). And as they tended to be rich and live in big houses, they alomost always voted for the conservatives. Trying to correct this imbalance, the labour government pushed through an act to reduce the number to 92, to represent the interests of the 759. This drastic cull still leaves them with a fair proportion of the 713 current peers, and they still tend to vote conservative, but it is a slight improvement.

If one of the 92 dies, then they are replaced not necessarily by their son, but by any hereditary nobleman. This means that elections must take place, with the electorate being those hereditary peers who are already in the House of Lords who support the party of the deceased.

Ingerland

I've gone back home for a couple of weeks. I will be trying to observe the differences in English and German culture, whilst being fed lots by my mum.

The most striking things about England are the taps. Every time I try to wash my hands using the standard english procedure:

1/ Turn on warm tap.
2/ Work soap into a lather.

(by this point the warm water will be very hot.)

3/ Frantically try to turn on the cold tap using burnt hands.

(this will of course fail as they're covered in soap lather.)

4/ Use the forearms to turn on the cold tap.
5/ Rinse lather off burnt hands with freezing cold water.

by this point several litres of hot and cold water will have washed down the sink, but the blood circulation in your hands will have been optimised, like in a sauna.

Goodbye Hermes

My last shift ever was brightened by speaking to a guy called Lu. I've forgotten his first name, and will probably never see him again, but we got on well. Lu has what I used to have: an excitement about all things physics.

My boss tried a few times in the last couple of years to interest me as to what happens to the spin of an electron if you make the electron go round in a circle, which is one of his favourite little topics. My unspoken response was to think "vacuum leak, broken magnet, radiation damage, it's an academic question as that electron aint never gonna get round a full circle anyway". As my boss was also here today, he started explaining this problem to Lu, who then spent the next hour working out this problem using the basic principles of physics. I'd like to think that there was a time when I'd have done this, and that one day I'll feel like that again about physics again.

As it was, I spent the last few hours finishing off the Guardian crossword. Today I learnt about the Crimean war, 19th century russian literature, and finally about the Sea of Azov (it's the light blue sea in the picture), which happens to be next to the Crimean peninsula, which happens to be under a whisp of cloud.

Lanose and other words.

Whilst sat on shift here in Hamburg I have been quite busy solving crosswords from the Guardian. My favourite clues of the past week have been

8's is 2. (two words, four letters each)

and

Author who can balance a pint on her head whilst playing snooker. (two words, first word seven letters, second word six letters)

The first is very easy if you think in the right way, the second requires a knowledge of english children's literature and of bad puns. In total I needed several hours and a few extra letters to solve them, though. In addition to these nice clues, which give an AHA! feeling when you find the answer, there are some clues which give a WTF?! feeling. One such answer was "Lanose", which was the last clue I found today.

Lanose is of course a little-known synonym for woolly. Little known in this context means that I have never heard of it. Any reasonably all-round educated person (such as my intelligent and discerning readers) would spot that it is derived from "lana" which is latin for wool, but being a beer-swilling germanic sort of bloke it passed me by.

But now I know, and I will try to remember. I will also try to remember that 2 is the cube root of 8, and that beer-tricks potter wrote some lovely children's books.

I now only have one shift left, and am slowly getting the hang of it. The key is to turn off your mind, and just follow stupidly the rules from here. It is then very refreshing to occasionally turn on the mind again and take a random journey through the world of english language and culture.

DESY bicycles

As an equal opportunities employer, DESY has to make sure that they don't discriminate against anyone. As all employees have the right to hire out a bicycle, these bicycles must all be suitable for everyone. On the principle of the lowest common denominator, this means that everyone gets a bicycle designed for a female midget.

It took me 2 days to work out that I had borrowed a ladies bicycle. I sort of wondered why my knees could touch, and why my back leg kept crashing against the basket above the rear wheel as I got on and off. Today I realised that the cross-bar was missing, and that I could just swing on and off lady-like. I don't cycle lady-like, though, I cycle like a baboon, with arms and legs pointing out at ridiculous angles.

This afternoon my bike got a puncture, so I pushed it to the nearest bike shop and asked whether they could repair it. They said that they could have it done by Friday, but they let me borrow the tools to do it myself, which was nice of them. This sort of cheered me up, I think, and I am feeling much better than in the past couple of days.

The importance of being useless.

Yeah, I know, it's a shit title, but this week was never going to be a literary highlight for this blog. I have nearly got through four of my seven shifts, which is some reason for hope. I am still sat here on shift, and am completely incompetent. When I started at HERMES five years ago I saw some people here on shift and wondered "how can anyone be so fucking stupid". Now I know, for I have touched the depths of utter incompetence.

My job here could be performed by a rather unintelligent robot, and 99.9% of the computing time for this dumbass robot would be trying to walk up a flight of stairs to reach terminal 2.

Situation: Monitor says "Magnet preparation"
Response: Type command list (a) into terminal 1, and press enter.

Situation: Monitor says "Luminosity run"
Response: Press button routine (I) into terminal 2.

Then every 2 hours type command list (b) into terminal 1, and press enter.

and every 4 hours copy some values from terminal 3 onto piece of paper.

Situation: Monitor says "Please turn off your HV"
Response: Press button routine (II) into terminal 2.

Situation: Something goes red, or beeps.
Response: Call phone number x-xxxx

Typically I have to perform a couple of these tasks in an eight hour shift. The saddest thing is that I am useless at it. It should be impossible to fuck up this job, but I keep forgetting to do stuff.

I have a feeling that my job performance and state of mental happiness are interlinked. It's not easy to care when you don't give a shit.

You're so perfect you don't interest me at all.

I went for a walk today, from DESY through the pretty suburb of Othmarschen, down to the River Elbe, then along the beach to the Museumshafen (literally a harbour museum, this is where several old ships are maintained). Everything is beautiful, green, clean, safe, and friendly, for this is one of the richest suburbs of one of the richest towns in the world. Everything was just like it was the last time I was here, and it will stay this way for a while, too, as it is pretty much perfect the way it is.

I don't know whether it's just the monotonous perfection, or the fact that every cafe and restaurant reminds me of someone I once loved, or the fact that I'm on shift, sat 20m underground doing fuck-all, but I'm feeling down. I wish I was excited by being in a big city, but I've seen all I want to see of Hamburg, and I want to go home.

Hamburg again

The least said about Hamburg and Hermes the better. It's depressing me too much, and I want out of here.

I'm surfing the internet quite a lot at the moment, and am desperate enough to read the reports of english county cricket matches. The bitterest rivalry in county cricket is Yorkshire vs. Lancashire. It all goes back to the wars of the roses, and neither team likes to lose this match.

Often, if a match is heading for a certain draw because there won't be enough time for all the innings to be completed, a captain in a commanding situation will make a "sporting declaration". This means that he forfeits some of his batters to speed up the game, losing potential runs in the process. The upside is that there is then more time to bowl out the other side and win the match, the downside is that the other team could win. In any case the spectators will be entertained, and a win would be worth many more points than a draw.

A defeat by your bitterest rivals is unacceptable, though, so Yorkshire decided to carry on batting through the last day to secure a safe draw. For the last few hours of the match there was no possibility of victory. Blah blah blah, you say. Well all this is leading to a lovely quote from the match report on the bbc website.

Such was the dull nature of the game in the closing stages, Lancashire's Mal Loye fielded wearing a trilby hat.

Dimensional Analysis

The thing that most fascinated me about physics is that the dimensions work. If, for example, you multiply mass by a velocity squared then you always get an energy. People knew this long before Einstein came along with his E=mc^2, a revolutionary equation which changed the world but completely obeys the laws of dimensions. Had he claimed that E=mc he would have been laughed out. Physicists are prepared, eventually, given enough evidence, to believe that even the most boring lump of rock could explode with an energy that would put dynamite to shame, but they won't let you fuck around with dimensions.

Biologists, on the other hand, will quite happily fuck around with dimensions. Ever wondered what the surface area of a human body is? Probably not, unless you're into body painting (tell me darling, do you think 20 litres will be enough for your whole backside?) or are looking for an animal-skin rug with a difference.

Well wonder no more, because it's easy to find out. Just take your mass (m) in kilograms, and height (h) in centimetres. Then pick an equation from the ones below to find your surface area in square metres:

Gehan and George A = m^0.51456 * h^0.42246 * 0.02350
Mosteller A = m^0.5 * h^0.5 / 60.
Haycock A = m^0.5378 * h^0.3964 * 0.024265
Du Bois and Du Bois A = m^0.425 * h^0.725 * 0.007184

The ^ sign means "raised to the power of". My body surface area is therefore between 2.06 and 2.1 square metres, depending on which equation I choose.

How did anyone come up with these equations, and what does this have to do with dimensions, you ask? The first people to develop such an equation were D. Dubois and E.F Dubois in 1916. As far as I can tell they took their subjects and covered them completely in Post-it notes of known area. They then counted up the notes, and had their measurement. Only 9 people were measured before the glue (presumably) went all funny.

The Dubois' were certainly rather good at dimensional analysis, for if you take their exponent for mass and multiply it by three, and add the exponent of height you get exactly 2.

3*0.425 + 0.725 = 2.

It is possible to show that this sum will always be 2 if the dimensions of the equation are to be correct. If the result is anything other than 2, you will have calculated an "Area" in metres, or cubic metres, or "metres to the 2.01", rather than in square metres, so the Dubois' had given the calculations a good start.

There are two problems with Dubois' equation, however. The first is that it systematically overestimates the surface area, the second is that it requires competent use of a scientific calculator with a "power of" button. Gehan and George got round the first one by measuring a few more people and choosing more accurate exponents. Their equation sadly doesn't result in square metres

3*0.51456 + 0.42246 = 1.966

but it seems to work quite well nonetheless, provided you have a nifty calculator. Hancock did something similar with a similar disregard for the correct units for an area. So there were now several equations which worked but which were vastly more radical than anything ever proposed by Einstein.

But all was not lost! A simplified version of the Gehan-George equation was provided by Mosteller, who presumably had a calculator with only a square root button (remember that raising to a power of 0.5 is the same as taking the square root). Either by chance or by design he got the dimensions right, too, for three lots of 0.5 plus another 0.5 gives exactly 2.

Another nice thing about the powers of 0.5 is that this is exactly what you would get for a thin cylinder, and any mathematican could tell you that people are, to all intents and purposes, cylindrical. A mathematician could have saved 80 years of plastering people in Post-it notes by pointing out that it was obvious the powers should be both 0.5, and measuring one person to find the necessary factor of 1/60.

It seems that the Mosteller equation is slowly being accepted, so the next time you want to know your surface area just take the square root of your height, multiply with the square root of your weight and divide by 60. Go on, do it!

Some links

Source for the equations
History of the equations
A calculator for body surface area

Food!

Today I ate the following:

Breakfast: Boiled egg and toast, porridge and a peach.

Morning snack: 1 apple

Lunch: Soup, 2 sausages, mashed potatoes, pasta salad, green salad.

Afternoon coffee: 2 Muffins, 1 apple, 1 ice cream.

Dinner: Plate of pasta salad, 1 yoghurt, 1 apple

Supper: Plate of chips

Midnight snack: 1 Muffin with a mug of cocoa.

I don't know how many calories this is, but it seems to be quite a lot to me. The funny thing is that if you remove the chocolate muffins, ice cream and chips you get a nice healthy diet. Ever since cycling to the Dillberg on Sunday I have been eating as much as possible. I'm tired, and seem to be using most of my energy to digest food. I suppose that I should just count myself lucky to be hungry, thin and well-off in a country where food is plentiful.

Rain Stopped Play

A cricket match at the highest level has five days to be completed, with roughly six hours per day. If it rains or it is too dark then play is suspended, and the time is usually lost. Should the match be incomplete after five days then a draw is declared. It is therefore possible to draw a match simply by having bad weather. Take for example the first test of the ashes series of 1926, played at Trent Bridge in Nottingham. After less than an hours play it started raining, and kept on raining. Play was never restarted and the match was drawn. Only two of the England team even got onto the pitch, the rest stayed in the Pavilion and presumably drank a lot of tea. Fortunately there were four more matches in the series, which England won 1-0.

The Pakistan team of 1998 were unluckier. Trailing 1-0 after the first two matches of their series against Zimbabwe they must have fancied their chances of winning the last match in Faisalabad to draw the series. Unfortunately the match was abandoned due to four days of fog.

Our local cricket match yesterday suffered a similar fate. A pitch inspection revealed that it was raining, and so we moved directly to the beer garden. By the time the rain had stopped the light was too poor, and play was abandoned.

Here is a link which can be saved for a rainy day: a list of strange weather events which have occurred during cricket matches, which goes to confirm a quote by Benny Green, which roughly went as follows

The world is divided into two groups of people: those who think that nothing ever happens during a cricket match, and those who know that anything that could possibly happen already has.