Why Do People Kill Flowers?

I enjoy seeing flowers on plants in the garden, or even on plants indoors in pots, but it depresses me when people gather flowers. Sometimes people kill flowers and take the corpses with them when going out for a meal, but the worst massacres are inspired by funerals.

It was a small consolation to learn that flowers killed in honour of the late Queen will be composted and the compost used to nourish plants in parks, but if the object was to make compost people could have donated grass cuttings, the products of dead headings and weedings, and vegetable peelings from the kitchen instead of slaughtering very pretty plants.

Another Reminder of my Antiquity.

As a young man I took it for granted that those in authority nwould be older then me. When John Major was appointed as Prime minister in 1990 I realised that he was the first British Prime Minister younger than me. I believe that in David Cameron's coalition Government of 2010, every minister was younger than me, but until this week there was still one authority figure I couold look up to. At least I was youger then the Queen. After her death I can't think of anyone important who is not younger then me.

Multi-headed Sharks

Each morning I scan listings of television programmes to select escapist material to be saved for later watching. I recently noticed something about a double headed shark attack. A few days later there was a promise of a three headed shark attack, then a five headed shark.

2, 3, 5 are successive fibonacci numbers so I braced myself for an 8 headed shark, followed by a 13 headed shark. Would we ever get to the 1597 headed shark, or perhaps even the infinitely headed shark?. Alas, no. The progresion seems to have stopped at a six headed shark and six is not a fibonacci number. However let us not lose hope. Six is a perfect number. The next two perfect numbers are 28 and 496 so we may still hope for a 496 headed shark. Would it have 496 digestive tracts with outlets to match?

Abolish the Water Closet

After heavy rain water mixed with sewage has been discharged into rivers and into the sea. Subsequent discussion has ignored the part played by the water closet. Sewage is a mixture of human bye-products with a large quantity of water. The odious mixture is made in the water closet. Without those monstrous engines of pollution and disease there would be no sewage.

At one time human effluvia were valuable commodities. The solid and semi-solid material was used as fertiliser. People collected it and sold it to functionaries called 'night soil collectors' who paid for it and re-sold it to grateful farmers. The nitrogenous liquid we produce was used in the tanning business.

Water closets should be replaced by some device to convert our products into dry, sterile briquettes we could sell to the successors of the night soil collectors.

A Depleted River

When I went shopping yesterday I looked at the River Welland, expecting to observe the effect of the quite heavy rain that fell the previous night. I had to look quite hard to see any water at all. The trickle of water in the bottom of the channel was mainly concealed by the dense vegetation that has grown up during the drought.

Home Produce in season

I've just started to harvest home grown tomatoes and lettuce, always very satisfying

Cooling Down

Feeling uncomfortably hot I called on the latent heat of evaporation of water. I took off my shirt and wet my skin with a flannel soaked in cold water. I did not dry myself and did not replace my shirt, just letting the water evaporate. I cooled down in a few seconds. Once body heat had dried me, I applied the flannel again.

Why didn't the media recommend this simple treatment?

The Incautious Multitude

I still wear a face mask when shopping but on recent shopping expeditions I noticed that very few others have worn them. During the lockdown I never had a cold and realised that promiscuous gregariousness spreads many other diseases as well as covid19. A permanent lockdown would be impractical but wearing a face mask in crowded places is no burden. Do some people want to spread infection?

Welcome Clouds

In my childhood the occasional very hot day was welcomed with joy - at least joy on the part of my parents; I had some revervations. The parents revelled in the large numbers hot weather scored on the Fahrenheit scale and welcomed the opportunity to acquire sunburn - in those days considered a badge of honour proving that one had survived a challenging encounter with the elements. With no refrigerator milk went sour and butter melted, but we bore those afflictions with fortitude. Father converted the sour milk into cheese by straining it through one of his socks which he suspended from the tap over the kitchen sink.

Today I was very pleased that the day started cloudy, and went shopping earlier than usual to avoid the heat. The television shows maps coloured according to the expected levels of high temperatures, ranging from the merely worrying to a possible emergency. We no longer boast about sunburn!

Slowing Down

When I started to backup files on my primary PC I noticed that this was my first backup since January. I'm becoming very slack; yet another sign of my antiquitiy!

Wittgenstein's Tractatus

I bought a copy of Wittgemnstein's Tractatus Logico Philosophicus more than 60 years ago. From time to time I have dipped into it, puzzling over a few remarks here and there, but I'd never read the complete work until now. A few days ago I started from the beginning and, reading a few pages each day, I finished yesterday.

As the title suggests the Tractatus is primarily concerned with philosophical logic. In it Wittgenstein affirms that all logical truths are truth functional tautologies, so no apparatus of proof is necessary, since the truth of a tautology is in all cases obvious. That thesis is false as are a number of Wittgenstein's remarks about Mathematics.

Among philosophical works the Tractatus is unusual in containing so many statements which are clearly false.

My edition has the German original and an English translation on opposite pages, and would be useful to an English speaker wishing to learn the vocabulary to discuss philosophical logic in German, or to a German speaker wishing to discuss such matters in English. Someone looking for an introduction to the subject matter would be wise to look elsewhere.

Imperial Measure.

Noticing suggestions that we should in some way rehabilitate Imperial Measure, I tried to see how much I could recall about it. After writing this I shall check, but first I want to see what I can remember.

I remember spending a lot of time at the primary school performing complicated calculations with imperial measures. There were definitely sixteen ounces in a pound, 112 pounds in a hundred weight and 20 hundredweights in a ton. There were also stones and quarters. A stone were a multiple of 7 pounds - I'm strongly inclined to think there were 14 pounds in a stone, but am not quite sure. My memory of the quarter is much vaguer. If it was a quarter of a hundredweight it might have been two stones.

There was also the bushel, but that may have been a measure of volume. There was also more than one ounce I think there were Troy ounces and Avoirdupois ounces - I have an idea that gold may have been weighed in smaller ounces than boiled sweets.

Ounces too were subdivided; there were drams, which may or may not have been the same as drachms, and there were also grains. I think that one of the ounces may have been divided into 480 grains. While I was preparing this reminiscence a comment in an Internet forum reminded me of the scruple, which I believe was intermediate beteen a dram and an ounce. Perhaps a quarter of an ounce, perhaps an eighth.

When I was 10 years old, in my last year at the primary school, we were given horrid calculations on the lines of:

"Multiply 7 hundredweight five stones eleven pounds thirteen ounces by 37". We had no calculators in those days. I doubt if any of us ever had to perform such an absurd calculation later in our lives

Lengths had 12 inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, 22 yards in a chain, 10 chains in a furlong and 8 furlongs in a mile. Areas were usualy square inches. feet or miles. I don't recall encountering square chains or square furlings, but an acre, 4840 square yards = 10 square chains = one tenth of a square furlong = 1/640 of a square mile

Then there were volumes. The obvious measure of volume is the cube of the unit of length. Although cubic feet were used from time to time, the common measures of volume were pints and gallons.

Few, if any, enthusiasts for the Imperial system could convert gallons into cubic inches. The most knowledgable could do not better than stall by asking which of the three gallons one had in mind, replacing one question they couldn't answer by three, all of which still baffled them.

A pint was 20 fluid ounces, and the fluid ounce was the volume of an ounce of pure water, at some temperature and pressure that I never heard specified. Hence:

"A pint of clear water weighs a pound and a quarter"

Five fluid ounces also had a special name which I can't recall, though there was something called a gill. Eight pints made a gallon. We weren't taught any other imperial measures of volume, though I think bushels were rather larger than gallons, and minims rather smaller than fluid ounces.

Finally I recall mention of rod, pole and perch. I have an idea they might all be the same and be units of area, but we weren't taught about them at school, so I shan't be sure until I do my check.