the wall

A friend showed me something interesting—and unexpected—a few weeks ago: a brick wall! He’s taken leave of his senses, you might conclude at this point. But see for yourself:

It does seem unremarkable, but look more closely:

Notice that the bricks are all different sizes, and the edges are irregular, from which I conclude that these bricks were moulded by hand. Notice too that for every five brick courses there is a narrow sandstone course. Given that this is a boundary wall, not part of a building, it would seem unlikely that this was done for decorative effect. Perhaps the sandstone courses were inserted to stabilize the structure, given the irregular brick shapes, although this is the conjecture of someone who knows very little about masonry or bricklaying. Whatever is the truth, the wall’s foundations seem to have been inadequate; as you can see, the brick and stone courses are no longer horizontal. And I can say that the masonry courses are not Penrith sandstone, which has a distinctive reddish brown colour.

I have no idea how old this structure is, but it could be one of the oldest in Penrith. I would be very surprised if there is another wall like this one in the town. It should be preserved.

If you want to see the wall for yourself, it separates the local government offices car park off De Whelpdale Lane from the backyards of houses on Sandgate. And if you can shed any light on the age of this wall, please leave a comment.

the right angle

It is often said that there are no right angles in nature, but this is not strictly true. Of course, there are no animals or plants with square corners, but the human visual field is determined by two lines that intersect at 90 degrees: the horizontal, as defined by the horizon (if you live on the coast or are aboard a ship at sea); and the vertical, as defined by gravity. The need to define these lines started when humans began to build structures in brick and stone.

Defining the vertical is easy—a plumb line does that job—but in order to define what is horizontal, it is necessary, somehow, to produce a right angle. The first civilization to do this was probably Sumer in the third millennium BC, but both the Babylonians and the Egyptians were able to construct right-angle triangles around 4,000 years ago. While the Egyptians used only the 3:4:5 triangle, they may have been aware of other number combinations, but the Babylonians certainly knew other ratios, which they calculated using a sexagesimal (base 60) system of arithmetic. This strikes me as being a seriously unwieldy way to perform calculations, but it’s why there are sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour, so it must have had some benefits.

Most people will be familiar with the theorem of Pythagoras—possibly the most famous theorem in the whole of mathematics—which states that in a right-angle triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides, as in this diagram, which illustrates the simplest of the ratios (3:4:5) that produce right-angle triangles:

However, I wondered whether I could work out any other ‘Pythagorean triples’. I already knew that the ratio 5:12:13 produced a right-angle triangle, but were there any more? That question turned out to be surprisingly easy to answer. First, it is not possible for the smallest value to be 2 or 4, and if the smallest value is 6, then the only combination that works is 6:8:10, in which the three numbers are not coprime (they have a common factor, 2). In other words, 6:8:10 is simply a multiple of 3:4:5 and therefore doesn’t count as a separate Pythagorean triple.

On the other hand, if I set the value of the smallest term at 7, then it’s straightforward to find two consecutive numbers, the squares of which have a difference of 49. At this point, I noticed that while the increases in the value of the smallest term were linear (3, 5, 7), the other terms increased more rapidly. Thus, 4, 12, 24. Could the middle term in the next triple be 40? It is. The left-hand column in the following table illustrates how far I went in identifying further triples, first calculating the appropriate values using the method I’ve just outlined, then confirming that the calculated values fitted the formula using the time-honoured method of long multiplication on the back of an envelope.

It seems to me that this is a series that will continue to infinity, and I could say the same about the right-hand column in the table, in which the difference between the two larger numbers is 2. This one works only when the smallest number is divisible by 4, because where the smallest number is divisible only by 2, the result is a multiple of one of the ratios in the left-hand column.

This is where things get more difficult. When I tried to find a ratio where the difference between the two largest numbers is 3, all I could come up with was multiples of other ratios that I’d previously discovered. At this point, I remembered that Jacob Bronowski had quoted, incredulously, the ratio 3367:3456:4825 in his landmark BBC TV series on the history of science, The Ascent of Man, as an indicator of the arithmetical prowess of the Babylonians 4,000 years ago. My first reaction was that this must be a multiple of a primitive Pythagorean triple, but I was amazed to find that the three terms are coprime (one of the prime factors of 4825 is 193).

This must have taken some calculating! It is clearly a primitive Pythagorean triple, but it immediately occurs to me that it may be part of a series like the simpler ratios described above. It was time to see what the internet had to say on the subject. The first page of my search included the statement that there are 16 Pythagorean triples in which the value representing the hypotenuse is less than 100. I’d already identified nine of these in the table above; here are the other seven:

I spotted immediately that the difference between the two larger numbers in the second and fourth ratios is 8, so I wondered whether they were part of the same sequence. They are, and this is another sequence that I’m assuming continues to infinity.

Notice that the difference between the two larger numbers in the first of these two tables is also 8, but the difference between the two smaller numbers is just 1, meaning that it is not part of the same sequence. However, it is difficult to identify a sequence from just one triple, especially when that triple is as large as the Babylonian example cited above.

I’ve concentrated so far on triangles where the values representing all three sides are integers, but there is what I assume to be an even larger category of Pythagorean triples involving irrational numbers. For example, if the lengths of the two sides enclosing the right angle are 2 and 3, respectively, then the length of the hypotenuse is the square root of 13, which is irrational (meaning that it cannot be represented by a fraction).

The general conclusion that I draw from my investigations is that there are an infinite number of ratios that meet the Pythagorean criteria, but I’m unable to explain why this particular juxtaposition of squares produces a right angle, or even what is special about 90 degrees that makes it the right angle.

a graffiti mystery

I recorded the results of my explorations of the Ashton Canal in Some Consolation: Part 2, but I deliberately avoided including the graffiti in one small location for reasons that will quickly become apparent. Most of the graffiti that I included in that report were in a relatively small area on both sides of the canal, starting almost immediately after the towpath passed under a road bridge. However, before reaching the first graffito in this location, I noticed a narrow gap in the concrete panel fence, so naturally I wondered if it led anywhere. It did!

There was a drop of about 1.5 metres to a small area choked with young trees. It was enclosed on three sides by brick walls and on the fourth by the concrete fence. And there were six well-executed graffiti, starting with this one on the concrete fence:

You will notice immediately that all six are in distinctively different styles, although the next one is a very basic design. The photo is probably improved by the shaft of sunlight:

The yellow writing on the left of the next photo appears to have been done by the artist responsible for the tag, which is highlighted in the same shade:

Because of the trees, I couldn’t get far enough away to be able to photograph the whole of the next tag, which is unusual in that individual bricks in the wall have been highlighted in white:

The rounded lines in the next tag—not a straight line anywhere—are quite common, but I’ve not been able to locate any more graffiti in exactly the same style:

This is easily the most elaborate of the graffiti here:

The word I’d use to describe it is ‘reptilian’.

And here’s the mystery: graffiti such as these are intended by the artists to be seen, which explains why so much graffiti is painted on the abutments of bridges and walls running alongside railway tracks. Indeed, the trackside out of Cologne was covered in graffiti for several miles out of the city. And three graffiti artists were killed in south London in June when they were hit by a goods train on a section of track without any refuge from such intrinsic dangers.

And here’s the rub: the graffiti that I’ve featured above are not visible from the towpath, and the opening in the fence is inconspicuous, to say the least. The six graffiti appear to have been painted by different artists, so were these examples merely practice? Was the idea to reproduce these designs in more public locations once the necessary skills had been honed?

I can’t answer these questions, although it does seem likely that the various artists knew each other and may have been part of the same ‘crew’. But they do underline the need to understand the motivation of artists if one is to fully appreciate their work. I come to graffiti with almost no knowledge of the background culture and history, although this type of graffiti appears to have originated in New York in the 1970s, when subway trains were plastered with tags. There may be links from that city with gang culture and hip-hop music, although that is mere speculation on my part. All I can do is describe what I see. And a lot of the graffiti I recorded in Manchester is well worth seeing.

turf wars update

When I posted Turf Wars in 2011, I did so in the expectation that the story still had some distance to run. At the time, the only hints that something may have been about to happen were the large number of signs proclaiming that the area in question was private property, and the counter-signs protesting that the land should continue to be used for ‘farming’.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before most of the previously cultivated areas had been fenced off to prevent their continuing use to grow vegetables, while almost every stone and brick building in the area was razed to the ground to prevent their reuse (wooden and tin shacks were simply left to fall down of their own accord). I recorded the state of play in A Blot on the Landscape in February 2015.

Nothing changed between that update and April this year, when a protest camp was set up to challenge the property developer, Henderson Land, and the way it had evicted the people who had been cultivating some of the land. The general area where all this argy-bargy has been taking place over the past five years is indicated by the red ellipse on the following map, while the location of the protest camp is shown by the large blue dot.

The following photograph was taken on 5th May from the south side of Ma Sik Road and shows the protest camp. The banner on the left reads ‘NO LAND, NO FARMING. PROTECT OUR FARMLAND’, while the green banner alleges collusion between the developer and the Hong Kong government. Because some characters on the banner on the right are obscured, it is impossible to provide a complete translation, but there are references to a systematic land carve-up and an insistence that land in the northeast New Territories be protected from development. The banners in the middle appear to be in Arabic, although it is more likely that they are in a South Asian script.

A better view of the protest camp is shown in the next two photos, which were taken on 1st and 3rd May, respectively. The roughly painted Chinese slogan reads ‘against New Territories northeast development’, while the two white Chinese characters translate as ‘guarding fields’.

At this time, a large contingent of security personnel was drafted into the area, although they were obviously told simply to monitor the situation. This was the state of play when I left for the UK at the end of May. However, at some point during the summer, Paula informed me that ‘things were happening’, although she didn’t have the time to keep too close an eye on the events that were unfolding.

Naturally, one of the first things I did upon returning to Hong Kong a week ago was to see what had changed during my absence. The protest camp had gone, and the site was now surrounded by industrial steel panelling. Most of the banners had also gone, but the next photo shows one that has apparently escaped the developer’s clearance team. As you can see, the English reads ‘Henderson kills HK’, but the Chinese is a rather more pointed comment: ‘Uncle Four, put down your butcher’s knife’. Uncle Four is of course the geriatric chairman of Henderson Land, Lee Shau-kee, and as I pointed out originally in Turf Wars, such an avuncular sobriquet is often used by greedy local box wallahs to imply benevolence.

Incidentally, it is gratifying to note that the door of the cat man’s hut has been preserved, even if the hut itself was demolished a couple of years ago.

So what else changed while I was away? The next two photographs were taken from a footpath about 100 metres east of the site of the protest camp, the first looking west and the second looking east. The third photo is of the footpath, which happens to be a public right of way and therefore cannot be blocked (in theory).

I have no idea what this is all about. There are scores of the concrete blocks seen in the first two photos, and it must have been a considerable logistical exercise to get them to where they are now—I estimate that each weighs significantly in excess of 2 tons. But to what end? Yet another oddity is seen in the next photo, which is of a large mechanical digger. This machine has probably been here since the blocks were brought to the site, but why is it now standing idle? A machine like this needs to be in constant use to justify its existence from a financial perspective, so I must assume that Henderson Land doesn’t mind the financial loss that the digger’s continuing idleness represents.

It would be reasonable to assume that that is it, but there is a mystery to clear up. Although I referred to cultivated areas being fenced off above, there are cultivated areas that have not been fenced off and are still being cultivated. These are shown by the red dots on the map (above). The next photo shows the most easterly of these cultivated areas, looking east. The fenced-off area to the left of the path was being cultivated five years ago but is now choked with head-high weeds. The blue sign reads ‘24-Hour Security Patrolling In Service’, and many such signs appeared during the summer, but I have yet to see anyone who looks even remotely like a security guard in this area since I returned.

So why has this and other cultivated areas not been closed down? There must be a link to the following sign, which is headed ‘LAND EXCHANGE APPLICATION’. For obscure legal reasons, Henderson Land has been unable to evict some of the ‘farmers’ here, which appears to make it impossible to develop the land in the way it would want, so it is trying to offload this troubling asset from its property portfolio. Or something like that. If you can explain this strange legal conundrum, please leave a comment. I’m baffled.

footprints in the sand

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land.

There are scores of squatter huts in my neighbourhood, most of which have now been abandoned and their occupants rehoused. Inevitably, given the construction standards originally followed, such huts quickly fall into disrepair as extreme weather, termites, rust, creepers and other natural agents go to work.

Some of these huts were more substantially built than the average, but most consist of nothing more than thin sheets of galvanized steel nailed to an insubstantial wooden frame. Surprisingly, many had both electricity and running water while still occupied. I frequently take a close look at such ruins, mainly to see whether there is anything worth recording before the hut in question is overwhelmed by the forces of nature.

This is the story of one such hut, located in the area covered by my recent post South Side Story. The footpath shown in the following photograph passes within 10 metres of the hut, but the hut is completely hidden by the encroaching jungle—and you would probably struggle to find the path anyway, even with detailed instructions—so it is likely to moulder away undisturbed.

The next photo shows the hut itself. The main living area is on the left of the picture, behind what must have been quite a substantial stove, but there is an extensive covered area behind the tree on the right.

Judging by the limited extent to which trees and other vegetation have taken over the structure to date, it is likely to have been abandoned quite recently, probably no more than two or three years ago. But who lived here? There are some clues:

This is a photo of the entrance to the main living area. The apparently cryptic jumble of letters and numbers on the wall indicate that the occupant(s) has been rehoused by the relevant government agency, although I do not understand any of the details that may be recorded in this code. Note the dark wooden cabinet, which is a common item of furniture in Chinese homes that functions as a shrine. This tips the probability towards the occupant(s) being elderly, while the presence of discarded fast-food containers on the floor suggests male occupancy.

Of course, this is all speculative, and I can only offer even wilder guesswork in my lame attempts to explain the next photo.

This was taken in what may once have been some kind of kitchen area (the white pillar is there to support a stone shelf along one wall, although there is no sink). It shows a large number of teacups and a few teapots discarded on the floor, and the obvious question is why. This strange phenomenon might have been explicable had all these items been made of plastic, but they are regular ceramic cups and teapots. I can’t help wondering whether they were accumulated here for roughly the same reason as that behind the piles of jars described in The Mystery of the Chinese Jars, and that remains a mystery that I’ve failed to resolve.

How long will traces of this building survive? It was never built to last, but I would still expect to see evidence of its having been here ten years later. A hundred years? There wouldn’t be any obviously visible traces, but anomalies in soil chemistry would give the game away. And after a thousand years, there is a good chance that there won’t be any humans around to look.

Like footprints in wet sand on the edge of a rising tide, this hut is destined to vanish, leaving no detectable trace of its ever having existed. Even this account of its existence will soon be read for the last time. Nothing lasts for ever.

a flock of seagulls

One of the more pleasant aspects of the recent hot weather has been the opportunity, rarely granted to the long-suffering residents of these islands, to sit in the sun outside one’s local pub and enjoy a few beers. During one such sojourn at my own local, I found myself thinking about the Mesozoic era of the Earth’s history. This must sound like a bizarre juxtaposition of ideas, so an explanation of what triggered this train of thought is in order.

My home town, even though it is more than 30 miles from the nearest sea, has a large population of seagulls, many of which could be seen swooping and swerving overhead recently as the pub’s patrons basked in the unaccustomed warmth. Seagulls are highly adaptable creatures, so having any knowledge or experience of the sea is not essential to their continuing survival. Their behaviour is driven by only one imperative: the need for food.

So what’s the prehistoric connection? The Mesozoic era began with the last throes of the Permian mass extinction, 250 million years ago, when more than two-thirds of all land-based vertebrates and 95 percent of all ocean-dwelling species disappeared. During the Triassic period, the first of the three periods that comprise the Mesozoic era, the most significant replacements for these losses were reptiles, in the sea, in the air, and on the land.

In addition to the large reptiles that appeared during this period, there was also a group of smaller reptiles with some mammalian characteristics, known as therapsids. Towards the end of the Triassic, some of these had evolved into the first mammals, which were no bigger than small rodents that were unable to compete with the lumbering leviathans of the Jurassic period. These early mammals were therefore nocturnal, because reptiles are exothermic, meaning that they rely on the environment to maintain their body heat and are thus much less active at night.

Now, if we were to imagine the arrival of extraterrestrial visitors towards the end of the Cretaceous period, 70 million years ago, what would they have made of what they found here? They would not have been able to predict the precise direction in which evolution would have proceeded, but they would have concluded, surely, that the future lay with the big sauropods that dominated every landscape. The rat-like mammals that scurried around would not have registered as having any significance for future developments.

And they might well have been right, had it not been for the arrival of an extremely large meteorite 65 million years ago. When this unexpected projectile crashed into Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the resulting explosion threw up huge quantities of dust. This had two effects: global temperatures plummeted; and the ensuing reduction in light levels severely inhibited plant photosynthesis. Both proved disastrous for the large reptiles: lower temperatures made it almost impossible to maintain body heat, especially if the body in question was extremely large; and reduced levels of photosynthesis meant that much less food was available for the big herbivorous dinosaurs, which in turn meant much less food for big carnivores such as the tyrannosaurs. They died out, leaving the way clear for mammals to take over the world.

We know that this was a worldwide phenomenon, because the thin layer of rock that marks the Cretaceous–Tertiary boundary can be seen on every continent, and this stratum can be linked definitively with a meteorite impact because it contains unusually high levels of iridium, an element that is rare here on Earth but relatively common as a constituent of meteorites.

If we imagine a second group of alien visitors to the planet now, what conclusions might they draw? They would surely note the environmental stresses induced by the dominant lifeform—an expanding population, resource depletion, pollution, etc.—so they might well conclude that, like the dinosaurs, Homo sapiens is doomed to extinction. If that really was their conclusion, they might then speculate on which creatures would fill the niche left behind. And this is where I return to the beer garden of the Agricultural Hotel, and the seagulls wheeling overhead. They have all the necessary attributes: adaptability, small size, audacity and speed of movement. And they will eat almost anything, stealing it if necessary, including food that has been discarded by humans (the main attraction for seagulls around these parts is a large landfill site). They are the ultimate opportunists.

This is all merely speculation, but humans shouldn’t forget that, like the dinosaurs, they haven’t been given any guarantees of their continuing survival, and we could still screw it all up, after which seagulls, or their descendants in the remote future, will inherit the Earth. The meek will have to look elsewhere.

future imperfect

In 1900, the material condition of the human race was unquestionably better than it had been a century earlier. In a country like England two hundred years ago, the poor lived in conditions that were worse than those endured by all but the poorest in the world today. Smallpox, cholera and typhoid were rife. Judicial punishments were often unbelievably harsh. Violence was part of the everyday landscape. Even children were required to work. In factories. Down the mines. And education was only for the privileged.

Although the main beneficiaries, in financial terms, of much of the progress that was achieved during the nineteenth century in England and other industrializing countries were the grande bourgoisie, the owners of capital, many advances also benefited the general population: public sewerage systems, railways, changes in medical practice, including the use of antiseptics and anæsthetics, and universal education are among the most obvious examples. Hence the positive appraisal of the human condition framed in the opening sentence.

A hundred years later, and despite two catastrophic world wars, the human race was once again in a position to assert that real progress had been made in the intervening century, with inventions such as motor cars, aeroplanes, computers, antibiotics, radio and television, and double glazing to set against the nuclear weapons and general brutality of the most violent century in the entire history of civilization.

Now fast forward to 2100. Will the human race be able to say that, on balance, progress has been made in the twenty-first century? The portents are not good. Although the problem had been brewing quietly for a couple of decades, the rise of militant Islam registered with the general public only after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. There have been plenty of reminders since.

It is unlikely that this problem will be resolved anytime soon, and the potential for a global conflagration, originating in the Middle East with terrorism as the spark, should not be discounted. Islam and Christianity have been in conflict since the emergence of the latter in the seventh century, and the grievances that motivate modern Islamist terrorists are unlikely to disappear overnight.

However, there are even more serious threats to global stability. The most critical is probably population: the world’s human population is currently 6.9 billion. It was 2.3 billion in the year I was born. The rate of growth peaked at 22 percent per decade in the 1950s but has since declined. It is projected to continue to decline, but world population is still likely to exceed nine billion by mid-century, by which time the total will have stabilized, according to most projections.

If these projections are even reasonably accurate, then a major problem presents itself. The example provided by developed countries suggests that a population will stabilize only in response to increased prosperity, which is in effect a proxy for improvements in healthcare and thus increased life expectancy. As birth rates fall, the population pyramids of individual countries, then regions and finally the world will become increasingly top-heavy. A numerically stable population is an ageing population.

The pressures imposed by an expanding population impact heavily on resources, a catch-all term that includes food, energy and raw materials. The availability of food, in particular, is a serious problem: fish stocks have already collapsed in many parts of the world’s oceans, famine is an ever-present threat in some poor countries, and commodity speculators have entered the market, pushing up food prices beyond what many can afford. In addition, huge quantities of processed food are discarded in rich countries merely because it has reached its sell-by date, while in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa up to one-third of all food produced is lost through spoilage because harvesting and distribution systems are woefully inefficient.

Sell-by dates are a blunt instrument as a measure to protect public health. A few years ago, I visited my local supermarket about ten minutes before closing time. It was selling Galia melons at five pence each because it had only ten minutes in which to get rid of them or be forced to dump them. I bought six, because they weren’t even ripe! It took between two and three weeks for that to happen. They were delicious, but that’s not the point. It’s just one small example of the kind of inefficiencies in our food distribution systems that if sorted out would go some distance towards alleviating what is probably the most shocking statistic on food, that an estimated one billion people in poor countries don’t have enough to eat and are often hungry when they go to sleep at night. Meanwhile, I can buy Galia melons in my local supermarket, even if I usually have to pay the full price. I feel vaguely uncomfortable with this kind of privilege.

The availability of energy is also likely to be an increasing problem. Eradication of poverty worldwide, a laudable goal that was set by the G8 group of countries just a couple of years ago, is not possible without almost unlimited supplies of cheap energy, yet energy costs are skyrocketing, principally because there isn’t enough to go round. Consequently, we hear the familiar exhortation by environmental activists to conserve energy. This may be the correct short-term strategy, but it is counterproductive in terms of alleviating global poverty. On the contrary, there is no solution to this problem without invoking a radical new source of energy. And there is only one candidate that fits this description: nuclear fusion.

I’d like to be able to predict that success in harnessing the vast amounts of energy available from nuclear fusion is just a decade or so away. Unfortunately, I’m not optimistic. Here’s the problem: it’s relatively easy to smash atoms to pieces, but it’s much harder to stick them together, and it requires a lot of energy to get started, because atoms only stick together at very high temperatures. Hydrogen–helium, the simplest of all fusion reactions, requires a temperature of 20 million degrees, at which point individual atoms no longer exist. Everything becomes a kind of subatomic soup, known as a plasma. As you can imagine, the behaviour of this nuclear fireball is difficult to control, which is the object of the exercise.

And here’s the rub: you may think of someone who studied physics at university as a physicist, but by the time they graduate, they will have already started on the path into one or another specialism. In this case, because nuclear fusion is a nuclear process, research in the field is conducted by nuclear physicists, yet they are attempting to control a plasma, something that plasma physicists know a lot about. But because there is so much to keep up to date with in their own field, nuclear physicists don’t read plasma physics journals. Oh my!

Using raw materials unsustainably has been the default position since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and little has changed even though reserves of some key commodities are now perilously low. Although there is little likelihood that the ores of common metals like iron, copper and aluminium will run out soon, the availability of rare earth elements, which are vital in the electronics industry, is already severely constrained, mainly because, as their name implies, they were scarce to begin with. There aren’t many minerals of which you could say supplies are plentiful.

Many raw materials can be produced sustainably, including timber and natural fibres, but this is never enough to meet demand. So we still see clear felling of old-growth boreal forests around the world, and tropical hardwoods such as teak and mahogany cannot be replaced fast enough to meet demand for luxury toilet seats from consumers in developed countries.

Natural fibres would seem, self-evidently, to present a ‘natural’ and sustainable alternative to their man-made counterparts, most of which derive ultimately from petroleum. However, it is instructive to look at two examples of the kind of environmental damage that can result from using land to produce these materials.

The mountains of the English Lake District were once covered with trees, which were cut down during the Neolithic period, when it must have seemed like a good idea. By the time the Middle Ages rolled around, wool had become an important commodity, with lots of money to be made, which is why sheep were introduced to the area by monks from local abbeys. It is a matter of regret that the monks’ successors continue to graze sheep on the mountains in large numbers, because one effect has been to prevent the regrowth of trees. Sheep are aliens in this fragile ecosystem because they will eat anything—except bracken. Nothing likes this highly adaptable fern, except fungi. So it continues to gain ground, choking everything in its path that hasn’t been eaten by the sheep.

Cotton is even more environmentally unfriendly, mainly because of the quantities of irrigation water required. Cotton cultivation can even be said to be behind one of the world’s worst man-made environmental disasters: the slow disappearance of the Aral Sea, which currently has an area only 10 percent of what it was in the mid-twentieth century. Planners in the Soviet Union in the 1940s decided that it would be a good idea to divert the two principal rivers flowing into the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, in order to irrigate what had previously been desert in order to grow rice, other cereals and, principally, cotton. In keeping with this ramshackle plan, many irrigation canals were appallingly badly built, and up to 75 percent of the diverted water was (and still is) lost through either evaporation or leakage. And cotton is a notoriously thirsty crop anyway.

This sorry tale is one facet of a critical resource problem that is likely to become increasingly serious in the coming decades: the availability of water. In addition to individual requirements for drinking, cooking and washing, water is needed in large quantities for both agriculture and manufacturing industry. To take two examples, 6,000 litres of water is needed to produce a pair of denim jeans, while between 15,000 and 30,000 litres is required to produce a kilogram of beef. And, as usual, when there isn’t enough to go round, the potential for international conflict increases. We can safely assume that China knew what it was doing when it started building dams on the headwaters of the Brahmaputra in Tibet, and that India didn’t when it recognized Chinese sovereignty over Tibet.

One aspect of the water supply crisis is inextricably linked to the phenomenon of climate change as a result of global warming, because as the temperature of the atmosphere rises turbulence increases, so precipitation events (rain, snow, hail) become shorter and more intense. More water disappears as runoff, resulting in more catastrophic floods, and less percolates into the soil, so the water needed for agriculture has to come from other sources.

The Ogalalla Aquifer, which underlies most of the Great Plains of the United States, is the type example of environmental mismanagement here. This huge source of what is essentially fossil water has been tapped on a large scale since the 1950s to transform a vast plain whose natural climate is semi-arid (this is ‘dust bowl’ country) into the most productive agricultural region in the United States. Unfortunately, the level of the water table has been falling by as much as 1.5 metres per year in some places. And recharge rates are extremely slow. Does America have a Plan B?

It will be obvious that all these factors—population, food, water, raw materials and climate change—are interrelated, so any measure designed to address one must take into account the effect that it will have on all the others. And nobody will want to make concessions, so nothing significant will get done, even though we’ve already moved beyond taking our own bags to the supermarket, in case you hadn’t noticed.

A cosy theory has been doing the rounds since the early 1970s. It’s called the Gaia Hypothesis, after the Greek goddess of the Earth, and it postulates the planet as a gigantic, self-healing super-organism. It’s a seductive idea. However, a counter-theory has emerged recently. Palæontologists studying mass extinctions in the Palæozoic era noted that in the run-up to the extinction event, the dominant life-forms progressively bespoiled their environments, until, within a surprisingly short period, complete ecosystems collapsed. They have therefore proposed the Medea Hypothesis. In Greek mythology, at least according to Euripides, Medea ate her own children. Oh my!

the curse of the midland railway

The Midland Railway was in 1923 the only railway company running into London that didn’t have its head office in the capital, and before Britain’s railways were consolidated into just four companies in that year, it was the third largest in the country. It connected London with the cities of the East Midlands and Yorkshire, finally terminating in the small border city of Carlisle.

Although it offered a route to Scotland, it couldn’t compete with the London and North Western Railway’s alternative, which merely skirted Birmingham and split the difference between Manchester and Liverpool on its way to Carlisle. Nor could it match the Great Northern Railway, with its partner the North Eastern Railway, whose combined line reached the south bank of the River Tyne before encountering the largest population centre en route to its eventual destination, Newcastle, on the north bank of the same river.

The Midland, by contrast, served six major cities—Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford—in addition to several important industrial towns. Because of the delays that serving so many large population centres entails, the Midland’s main line carried a negligible share of the Scotland traffic. However, the company did have a huge market in short-range intercity transport. It also had a monopoly on traffic from the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire coalfields, which was bound to cause problems as business expanded, because mineral trains are heavy and therefore very slow, and the Midland developed an abysmal reputation for punctuality. It was rumoured that engine crews sometimes spent an entire shift waiting at a stop signal, and a journey from London’s St Pancras station to Carlisle might take two or three days instead of the scheduled eight hours.

The Midland’s great competitor was the Great Central Railway, which was based in Manchester. It had previously been known as the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (MS&LR), or Money Sunk and Lost Railway by the locals, a name later taken up by the popular press. Its original Manchester–Sheffield main line through the Woodhead Tunnel was the most arduous of the trans-Pennine routes, with nominal gradients of 1 in 40, although some sections were actually steeper, the result of subsidence caused by mining.

In the 1890s, the MS&LR, which had built docks at Grimsby and Immingham to facilitate the export of coal from south Yorkshire, started to extend its operations into Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire to tap into the lucrative coal traffic from this region. Then, in 1895, it began to build its own line into London, motivated perhaps by the delusions of grandeur of its directors, who had decided to rename the company to better reflect its image. The vainglory of these people is amply demonstrated by noting that in 1913 they commissioned a new class of express passenger locomotives, the so-called ‘Director’ class, each of which was named after a member of this clique.

Unfortunately, by this time all the ‘easy’ routes had been taken, and although it served Nottingham and Leicester, the bulk of the route passed through sparsely populated rural areas and small market towns on its way to Marylebone station in London. It was not, in other words, a sound business decision. Shareholders saw little return on their investment, which was reflected in a new sobriquet: the Gone Completely Railway.

Needless to say, the citizens of Sheffield, Nottingham and Leicester preferred the more direct and thus cheaper Midland Railway route to London, so the GCR’s so-called ‘London extension’ operated at a loss almost from the start. The company’s directors, who had by this time voted to move their head office from Manchester to London, could come up with no ideas to stem this severe drain on its coffers (more money sunk and lost). In desperation, they decided to call for suggestions from the railway’s workforce, and many were forthcoming, but not one was both practical and easy to implement.

The most bizarre of these suggestions came from Duncan Drummond, nephew of the Caledonian Railway’s former chief mechanical engineer Dugald Drummond and a foreman in the GCR’s Gorton locomotive works in east Manchester. The younger Drummond was well known in the company as ‘Drunken Duncan’, for obvious reasons, so his contribution was dismissed by the board without a formal debate. It consisted of a single quatrain, which Duncan said had been composed by his grandmother, who lived in Ballachulish in the Scottish Highlands and was believed by her neighbours to be a witch. According to Duncan, it had once, many years ago, taken her more than three days to get from London to Carlisle, most of the time not moving at all. Some things never change.

The original paper on which the quatrain was scrawled has not survived, but the quatrain itself remained part of the folklore at Gorton until the locomotive works closed in 1963. I heard about it during a tour of the works in 1961, and although there is no guarantee that the version I heard was a verbatim rendition of the original, I believe it to be substantially accurate. I made a note of it at the time because it seemed so strange, and also because nobody knew what it meant:

The six citadels have raised regiments of foot,
and all will count amongst the most renowned,
but in final judgement shall they be cast down
and the bounty of the sky will be lost for ever.

I have shown this to adherents of the mountebank Nostradamus, but none of the interpretations I received were even remotely convincing (much like the so-called prophecies of their hero). However, in the past few years, I have finally succeeded in deciphering this apparent gibberish.

The ‘six citadels’ are the six cities connected to London by the Midland Railway—Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford—and the ‘regiments of foot’ are those cities’ football clubs. In the modern era, ‘the most renowned’ must refer to membership of the English Premier League, and it is the case that Leicester City, Nottingham Forest, Derby County, Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield United, Leeds United and Bradford City have all spent more than one season in this exalted company. The Nottingham, Derby and Leeds clubs all topped the old First Division in my lifetime, while Forest were actually champions of Europe in 1979 and 1980, so there is some illustrious history there. Unfortunately, all have since been relegated, and several have even dropped into the third tier of English professional football (‘shall they be cast down’).

If you’ve been following so far, you will probably have deduced that ‘the bounty of the sky’ is a reference to the satellite broadcaster BSkyB, known colloquially as ‘Sky’, given its responsibility for the obscene amounts of cash sloshing around the Premier League nowadays.

An intriguing tale. I’m not sure if I believe it myself. Do you? Do you believe in prophecy? Was the precipitous decline of these once famous clubs foretold more than a century ago by an old crone with a grudge? Or are they in the wilderness because their football teams are crap?

black magic

I have suggested in previous posts (Who’s Fooling Who? and Knowledge or Certainty) that a degree of mysticism attaches to modern theories in cosmology and particle physics, but these suggestions were thrown into sharp focus by an email that I received today from my son, who provided a link to an article about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has been fairly described as the largest science experiment ever conducted.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this extremely expensive attempt to recreate the hypothetical conditions in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, the LHC is a 27-kilometre circular tunnel beneath the Franco-Swiss border along which beams of protons are fired in opposite directions. The protons travel round and round, guided by massive helium-cooled electromagnets, and pick up more and more energy with each circuit, until it is time for them to collide.

If theory is correct (and, remember, this is all based exclusively on mathematics), the resulting collisions will be so powerful that the protons disintegrate, producing among other debris a particle known as the Higgs boson. Finding this particle will be regarded as conclusive proof of the so-called ‘standard model’ of the origin of the universe. Unfortunately, the LHC has been plagued by unanticipated problems since the beginning of the project, resulting in a series of delays to the intended start-up date. However, a short test run was eventually achieved in December, and the LHC is currently scheduled to start running at full power next month, but “two…respected physicists are now claiming that the much hypothesized Higgs boson might have a ‘backward causation’ effect to stop itself being discovered.”

What?

The two scientists referred to in the article have published papers to this effect, and I’ve no doubt that these will be beyond my ability to comprehend, but if the above quote means anything, it is that a subatomic particle that has never been observed because it hasn’t existed since that first trillionth of a second has somehow caused the series of setbacks to the project, including one, last November, where a piece of a baguette had inexplicably become wedged behind high-voltage wiring, which seriously affected the ability of the cooling system to perform according to its job description.

I can’t help wondering whether this is a case of getting the excuses in early when the Higgs boson is not found. And I can’t help wondering why the Big Bang theory should be taken any more seriously than clairvoyance, fung shui, palmistry or a tarot card reading, all of which have the distinct advantage of costing their adherents considerably less than nine billion dollars.

is anybody there?

Have you ever wondered why alien visitors to this planet never contact anyone even remotely sensible? And have you noticed that this same ranking of mental acuity can be applied to those who believe the notion that when President Bush (the not quite so stupid one) proclaimed ‘a new world order’ after the end of the Cold War, this was code, for those in the know, for the takeover of the world by a race of reptilian aliens? This is not to suggest that there aren’t aliens out there. The problem is the lack of evidence.

Which is where scientists come into the picture. Some of them have been looking for that evidence. SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) is the collective name for the various attempts to identify intelligent signals from space that have been conducted over the past fifty years, so far unsuccessfully. In the meantime, we’ve sent out maps (Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 in 1972 and 1973, respectively) telling any passing spaceship that happens to retrieve one how to get here. And the Voyager probes carried the same maps, together with sufficient information to give the finders a very good idea of conditions on Earth.

There is clearly a presumption that a race with the intelligence to intercept and decipher this information will be benign, but this is mere guesswork based on our own experiences here on Earth and an optimism about the future of the human race that may be misplaced. What if the information were to be intercepted by a military civilization that already rules half the galaxy with a level of ruthless efficiency and routine cruelty that the police states of the twentieth century couldn’t even begin to dream about? An empire that is driven by moral imperatives that would not have been considered out of place in Nazi Germany, led by beings compared to whom Pol Pot would have been diagnosed as someone with a mild personality disorder? An empire that has the technology to cross the intervening distance in a matter of days? The military mismatch would be beyond imagining. The best that we could hope for would be perpetual enslavement. At worst, we might be considered a substandard species, to be exterminated to make room for incoming colonists.

However, as with the invention of the atomic bomb, our actions cannot now be rescinded or reversed. We live with the daily threat of sudden invasion, although it has to be said in mitigation that the probability of this occurring is vanishingly small. The moral of this story is that it is pointless worrying about something that you are utterly powerless to influence or prevent. Have a nice day.