A fiery dawn over London, a couple of months ago. Purists, honesty compells me to confess: Yes, I toyed with South-East England’s settings to enhance the effect.
Archive for November, 2004
Having established my incompetence as a lepidopterist, I shall now effortlessly demonstrate my near complete ignorance of matters botanical. This blossom is one of many adorning a large shrub outside the house I live in. It reminds me in its way of an Alpine flower called edelweiss, in intrepid search of which Asterix and Obelix once went to the place latterly known as Switzerland, in typically Gallic-Celtic-comic-epic fashion.
When I looked for the above links (thereby discovering that this tropical blossom, beyond being small & white, scarcely resembles that Alpine flower), I found something else called Edelweiss. ‘Expérience pour DEtecter Les WIMPs En Site Souterrain.‘ A Science Project Calvin would be proud of, looking into the nature of Dark Matter, no less, through the prism of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles and Supersymmetry, using ultrapure Germanium. The site is disarmingly dodgy; the language swashbucklingly sumptuous. It starts like an exuberant Olympic Sumo commentary before really hitting its stride in far-fetched 50’s comic strip mode:
With unprecedented confidence, and zero background, EDELWEISS excludes the WIMP candidate reported in February 2000 by the DAMA experiment, set in the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory… The EDELWEISS experiment, protected by 1600 meters of rock under the Alps, is using ultrapure germanium detectors, operated at a temperature of 20 millidegrees above absolute zero… The 1600 meter rock overburden reduces the cosmic flux by a factor 2 million, and the neutron flux by a factor ten thousand.
I remember reading somewhere about another big budget physics experiment at CERN that offered the remote but titillating possibility of spoiling everybody’s afternoon by creating a mini-black hole. Well, not yet, apparently. But it did start an appropriately apocalyptic discussion at gyre.org.
More from my garden later today, thrillingly. Meanwhile, how about a little life and death to start the week? The bathos and denial of a blog in its death throes (now inert). Offset by the all the angst and queasy possibility of a new-born blog.
Extra: These new ones are more ambitious: an Antarctic climbing expedition (will the laptop cope with the cold?) and someone on a mission to get a job at the UN, armed, so to speak, with two years of back issues of Foreign Affairs, a degree in Speech, something called a Circa book and an Internet connection.
From my garden at around midday today. I didn’t get her name, but I did find a good place to look.
Extra: Also a good place to ask. Michael van der Poorten kindly wrote to tell me that this is Papilio polites romulus ~ aka the Common Mormon, stichius form. She is indeed a she, I learn. She eats curry and pretends to be the less edible Common Rose.
This one’s by Carine. It could have been taken anywhere on this island.
From a gallery window in Palermo. I regret I carelessly lost the sculptor’s name.
One of the tendencies of bloggers, I notice, is to announce their readers what music they are listening to/book they are reading/mood they are in/etc. Sometimes this comes across primarily as a statement of identity (online clothing): ‘I am erudite.’ ‘I have eclectic tastes.’ ‘I am atypical.’ ‘I am more into science fiction than anyone I have ever met.’
Individuality seems to me at once the most certain and the most illusory aspect of being a person. We are all unique, yet we are all alike. The awareness of our similarities can strike us as reassuring or threatening, according to our condition. [Extra: History and components of the idea of 'individualism'.]
Anyway, today I am very much impressed by what is special about Eric Bibb (whose music my sister recently kindly sent me) and part of my enjoyment arises from recognition of the ordinary emotions we have in common.
I saw the dog-catcher in Jaffna today, slowly pushing his cartoonish cage ahead of him, looking only marginally more approachable than the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. As for the subsequent treatment of captive curs, toe-curling rumours abound. Happily enough, he’s not the most zealous hunter of hounds, and many of the same people who normally curse the very existence of the strays (as I do when they’re all barking at night) surreptitiously usher one or two into their houses until he’s moved on. Perhaps they’ve all seen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and 101 Dalmations, too.
Dengue is also known as breakbone fever, but it doesn’t make you dance like James Brown. It’s spread with the help of an elegant black-and-white mosquito called Aedes aegypti (above) who likes to help herself – very gently and quietly – to a modest amount of blood of Homo sapiens in the morning. She’s been knocking down my co-workers like skittles. Readers in Jaffna: cover up.