Celebrating Abdul

Abdul reaches the final!

One of Andre's good friend and workmate, Abdul, has reached the final of Bake Off. It is not a program we normally watch, but we have watched this series faithfully in tribute to Abdul, and this week he got through the semi-final to reach the last test. The contestants are each allowed to invite a number of family and friends to the final, and I know Andre and Edwin went down to the marquees in Berkshire this summer to watch it with Abdul's partner. They all had to sign NDAs and had their phones confiscated, and they have both been faithful in refusing to drop any hints about how Abdul got on. They will still be in Brazil next week, so won't be able to watch the final, nor catch any glimpse of themselves in the crowd of supporters, but we will watch it. The semi-finalists feature on the cover of Radio Times this week, so we will buy a copy for them to keep.

Our son Dan paid a flying visit yesterday, on his way back to Yorkshire. We went into Clare for lunch at the Swan, before he headed for home, but coming out of the Swan, the road was blocked for about twenty minutes while the meat wagon unloaded carcasses for the butcher's shop. Dan said he'd come all the way up from London without getting into a single traffic jam, until he hit Clare.

I often wonder why non-scientists have such difficulty with basic concepts. I get a copy of Artnet news in my email each week, generally filled with new artists' work, or interesting stories. This week had an article titled  “The World’s Oldest Map of the Stars” by Sarah Cascone. There have long been rumours that Hipparchus, the inventor of trigonometry and greatest overall astronomer of antiquity, had drawn one of the first star maps, but it has been lost to antiquity. Now a new document has been found in the Vatican Library that is a palimpsest, i.e a parchment on which old writing has been erased and overwritten. A clever student researcher has discovered that the original scratched out writing was probably a copy of Hipparchus's star chart, thus confirming its existence. This is a fantastic discovery, and well worth writing up in an arts newscast. However, Hipparchus's other great discovery was the precession of the earth’s axis. Precession is the slight wobble we see on anything that is spinning round, such as a gyroscope's wobble. Sarah Cascone repeatedly called it "procession", as if the earth and the other planets were marching round the sun like a coronation parade. By studying Egyptian historical records, Hipparchus found that the appearance of Sirius in spring had grown two weeks later every 1,0000 years, until it no longer coincided with the flooding of the Nile. He then correctly predicted the earth's precession every 26,000 years. It is even mentioned in poetry:

Canto IV

   Though no one man could dare compute the course of heaven,

   Yet some there were who puzzled at the wayward signs:

   Slight noted shifts within the ordered span of lights;

   While agile planet wanderers would errant run,

   Charted by watchful men through scores of centuries.

   Egyptian goddess Isis named bright Sirius,

   Whose dawn approach foretold the rising, fertile Nile:

   Yet even she would lag two weeks each thousand years,

   Until too tardy to predict a flooding land.

   This long, through dynasties of Pharaohs, did it take

   To chart numerous regressions in the mystic seven,

And note a perturbation in the spin of heaven.

 from Girders in the Sand

Another minor infringement is in The Importance of Being Interested: Adventures in Scientific Curiosity, a wonderful book I am reading by Robin Ince. Even he mixes his units in one place, quoting the speed of light as 300,000 kilobits per sec, instead of kilometres per sec. Perhaps he thinks light travels through a computer at the speed of information.

My dreams lately are very vivid and disturbing. Ann says I no longer snore, but have started shouting out in my sleep, which disturbs her even worse. The first night, I dreamt of being chased and attacked by a great bear; the second night, I was swimming desperately with a huge crocodile beside me; the third night it was an oversized serpent, looking more like the Basilisk, baring its fangs at me. Then I dreamt I was attempting to tackle some rough terrain in something like a camper van. It required two people to pull the tarpaulin over the frame to create something of a shelter, but I was struggling to do the job alone and failing badly.