…if you please

In Hong Kong, there is a government department whose sole function is to get rid of all the water that falls on the territory, especially during the summer: the Drainage Services Department (DSD). To this end, over the past couple of decades, it has canalized all the major rivers of the New Territories, and smaller watercourses have been lined with wire baskets (gabions) filled with rip-rap (large angular pieces of rock), so major flooding events rarely happen nowadays.

Some time ago, I started to notice signs put up by the DSD prohibiting fishing in any of its rivers, like this next to a bridge over the Ng Tung River close to the village where we live:

I was struck immediately by how polite all these signs were. I hardly need to emphasize how the same injunction would be worded in the UK (and probably, with appropriate changes in language, in other Western countries):

NO FISHING

This prohibition is widely ignored, not only by the local population but also by the local egrets and herons, which perch on the edge of the winter channel of the river looking for a quick meal.

Over the past few months, I’ve started to notice other signs that include the unexpected word ‘please’ in their message, and the remainder of this post provides more examples.

The next photo is of temporary construction barriers alongside our local river:

The request to cyclists to ‘Please dismount and push’ is repeated every couple of metres across the temporary bridge, but I’m not sure why people are also asked to ‘Please Cross Bridge’, given that there is nowhere else to go at this point.

I spotted the signs in the next photo on one of the entrances to Green Code Plaza, a shopping mall on the eastern edge of Fanling. I think that the owners were in the process of repairing the affected doors:

I’ve needed to attend Fanling Clinic on several occasions recently, and on one occasion, while waiting to see the doctor, I spotted two signs where ‘please’ was unexpected:

I would have expected signs like these, in a government-run medical facility, to be more peremptory (in fact, three of the signs here include the word ‘please’)!

The next photo shows a sign on the fence surrounding the Kam Tin Tree House, which I wrote about in A Grand Day Out:

I don’t know whether the warning is against climbing the tree or just the fence, but in terms of conveying a message, ‘please’ is redundant here.

The next photo shows an informal sign alongside San Tin Tsuen Road, a quiet road that we cycle along on our way ‘out west’:

I can’t imagine that the water here is particularly deep—it’s just a large lotus pond—and in any case you would have to climb the barrier, but I have seen wildlife photographers here who might fall in the water. Although it is quite common to see the reason for a prohibition on a sign in the UK, it is more likely to read:

KEEP OUT

I’ve kept the most bemusing sign till last. I didn’t spot it when taking photos for Hidden History #6, only when I was preparing the photos for that post:

While ‘beware of traffic’ is a reasonable exhortation, to see it preceded by ‘please’ seems unnecessary. The additional length of the warning may even be counterproductive, and there is no equivalent pleasantry in the Chinese translation.

Incidentally, there is a warning, only in Chinese, on the red construction barrier that reads ‘beware of pedestrians’. I can’t imagine that many drivers turning left here will even see it, let alone read it.

postscript
I compiled this post two days ago, and yesterday Paula and I were cycling ‘out west’, which meant passing the location of the last photo above on our way through town. To my surprise, not only the construction barriers but also the signs had been removed, which struck me as odd.

hallelujah!

I don’t believe in angels, even though I’ve seen their trumpets. Angels’ trumpets is the name given to an ornamental shrub that I see from time to time in Hong Kong. They are not common, but there is an impressive specimen in the village where I live. There used to be one in the next village, but for some unaccountable reason it was cut down a few years ago, but here is a photo that I took of Paula posing alongside it as we returned home from a bike ride:

The flowers might seem particularly striking, but there is one feature that is even more remarkable about this plant. At the time, I couldn’t help but notice that it produced a display of flowers four or five times during the seven months I spent in Hong Kong. I was disappointed when it disappeared.

However, about three years ago, someone decided to plant an angels’ trumpet bush in our village. Even now, it isn’t as big as the one pictured above, but this winter, it has burst into flower every two or three weeks. We pass it every time we walk into Fanling, and its most recent outburst, which I photographed this morning, is by far the most impressive to date:

The path to Fanling can be seen behind the flowers in the first photo, and the village shrine is on the left. Sadly, all these flowers will be gone within a couple of days.

However, I have one (obvious) comment to make about encountering such an uplifting display.

Hallelujah!

uninvited guest: update

When I wrote about our uninvited guest—a wasp—last week, I did so in the expectation that it had completed it’s task. I was mistaken.

Two days later, it was back, and although I didn’t see it seal the first ‘pod’, I caught it in the act of constructing a second alongside the first:

And this was the completed ‘pod’, with neatly sculpted entrance hole:

A day later, Paula and I went out cycling, and during our absence the wasp had sealed the second ‘pod’ and completed a third:

I didn’t see it seal the third ‘pod’ either:

However, the last four days have been damp, and although the wasp’s handiwork is protected from direct rainfall by the top of the balcony rail, it does seem to have been affected by dripping water. The previous photo was taken today, four days after the wasp’s latest nefarious activity. And it hasn’t been back.

further update
I was enjoying my morning coffee on the balcony on 16th May when I noticed that a hole had appeared in the wasp’s first ‘pod’:

Paula and I then went for a bike ride, and when we returned, the second and third ‘pods’ had also been vacated:

I waited for a few days before posting this update to see whether the occupant of the fourth ‘pod’ would emerge, but it never did. Either it tunnelled into an adjacent ‘pod’ and made its escape that way, or it was the victim of the skullduggery that I hinted at in A Cuckoo in the Nest?

an uninvited guest

When I stepped out onto my balcony this morning, I couldn’t help but notice a wasp that was hovering around. I tried to waft it away, not because I was alarmed by it, but simply because I didn’t want it getting into the house before I’d closed the screen doors. I did notice that it appeared to be hovering around a particular spot on the balcony rail, but then I went back indoors and thought no more about it.

If I’m not either writing or out cycling, the next most common activity that you’re likely to find me doing is sitting on the balcony drinking beer. And, having been out cycling yesterday and planning to go out again tomorrow, that is what I was doing a few hours later. After a short while, I became aware that the same wasp—or another of its species—seemed to be occupied on the same part of the balcony rail that I mentioned earlier. It was about 1.5 metres away, so it was a while before it dawned on me.

“The cheeky bugger!” I thought. “It’s building a nest.”

It took me a while to decide what to do, but eventually I went back indoors to fetch my camera. The wasp was still there, so I took a couple of photographs:

I didn’t notice the small round ball to the right in the first photo until I examined the photos, but I concluded that it must be part of the wasp’s enterprise. However, it hasn’t been back. Perhaps it couldn’t find its way back, because in wasp terms, it would have had to fly a considerable distance to obtain the mud that it had used in its construction project. Anyway, I had wondered whether I would have to destroy the nest, but if that’s it—it isn’t going to get any bigger—then I shall leave it and await developments.

pavement maffematics

You’re probably puzzled by the title of this post, so perhaps I should point out that it’s another of the excruciatingly awful puns that I sometimes use in titles. In this case, maff is a dialect word that I heard—and used—when I was growing up in Penrith, although I haven’t heard it spoken for decades. A maff is a major mistake, a cock-up—it can also be used as a verb—and given that I wrote an analysis of brick paving in Fanling under the title ‘pavement mathematics’ in 2017, you should now be able to guess that I’ve spotted an egregious error in a newly laid area of brick paving.

In fact, I took some photographs of this area because there were examples of single and double basket-weave layouts close together, and it was only when I examined the photos that I noticed what is, in fact, a glaringly obvious maff. I returned, therefore, specifically to take a photo to highlight the error:

The course between the two yellow pointers has been laid wrongly. It’s such a silly error, easily corrected, that I must conclude that this paving was laid by amateurs. All that is required is for the brick indicated by the yellow asterisk to be removed. The bricks to the left of the space created can then be slid to the right, and the brick that has been removed can then be inserted in the space thus created.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

penrith picture quiz

I’ve been looking for distinctive architectural features around Penrith that I could take photographs of and compile them into a quiz. Obviously, this will only be of interest to residents of or visitors to Penrith, but if you fall into either category you may find this quiz amusing. All locations are within a 250-metre radius of the Musgrave Monument, which most people would regard as the centre of town.

I’ll start with two stone arches that no longer serve any practical purpose:

There are probably other projecting windows on the upper floors of buildings, but where is the one seen in the next photo?

This stone recess was once a source of drinking water:

This may be the only example of a clerestory window in Penrith, although the whole structure is decidedly ramshackle:

A studded oak door:

This façade should be easy to place:

More arches that no longer have a purpose:

Is the next photo of a door or a window?

Where is the entrance leading to a short flight of steps in the next photo?

Finally, where are these two windows with wrought iron balconies? The ‘roof’ above suggests some kind of industrial use originally:

leaving a mark

Albert Street, which connects the town hall and the bus station, is a quiet thoroughfare despite being close to the centre of Penrith. One reason for this is the restricted access, as seen in the following photo:

This photo was taken from the bus station end. Although the street is now entirely residential, the first building on the right used to be a foundry operated by Thomas Altham & Son, while the building on the left was probably a warehouse. Both have since been converted.

And this is what the street looks like from the opposite end (it’s the one on the left of the white house):

Notice that there is a footpath only on the left. This would once have been constructed from cobbles, but whether the cobbles were removed or simply covered in tarmac I cannot say. However, the kerbs appear to be original sandstone, given the degree of weathering that they show—modern kerbs are invariably concrete.

I mention this because I happened to notice recently that there are initials carved into three of the stones:

It seems likely that these are initials of men who laid the kerbs, and if my conjecture that the kerbs are original is correct, it would mean that the initials were carved sometime in the mid-nineteenth century. I reach this conclusion because it is reasonable to assume that the street was named after Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who died in 1861. There are no twentieth-century buildings on Albert Street.

Incidentally, the diagonal line across the third photo is probably a thin vein of silica with quite a high content of ferric oxide, hence the dark red colour. If you look closely, you can see other silica veins in the block that forms the gutter (bottom of the photo).

Not many old sandstone kerbs remain in Penrith, but the discovery of these initials here immediately reminded me of the stonemasons of the Middle Ages, who frequently left their marks on the buildings—notably churches and cathedrals—that they constructed. I know of only one such mark in Penrith, and it is probably from a much later date:

Mediæval masons’ marks usually reflected the tools they used, and this mark appears to represent a compass. I should add that I suspect the block of stone bearing this mark was originally part of another building, because it is now in an inconsequential boundary wall. I also think the mark is upside down.

A final point: I’ve written this to remind readers that the more you look around as you walk around, rather than stare at the screen of a smartphone, the more you are likely to see. Of course, you probably wouldn’t be bothered if you missed the marks that I’ve been discussing here, but next time you might miss something important.

saying the same thing twice

Most of us, when speaking or writing, use more words than are necessary to convey our intended meaning. Sometimes this is done deliberately, for emphasis or dramatic effect, but far more often it is simply a blunder, the kind of repetition that suggests the writer or speaker hasn’t thought carefully about their choice of words. The technical term for such repetition is pleonasm, and there are several types.

Perhaps the most common form of pleonasm involves abbreviations and acronyms, and the mistake lies in tacking on the word represented by the last letter of the abbreviation to the end of that abbreviation. The following are examples of the most commonly heard constructions of this kind (in boldface type; the meaning of each abbreviation is spelled out to emphasize the repetition):

ABS (anti-lock braking system) system.
ATM (automatic teller machine) machine.
HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) virus.
LCD (liquid crystal display) display.
PIN (personal identification number) number.
SAM (surface-to-air missile) missile.
SAT (standard attainment test) test.

Perhaps because it has been pointed out so frequently, I find that nowadays I’m more likely to be asked to key in my PIN rather than my PIN number, but overall the errors I’ve listed here remain depressingly common.

Another technical term, closely related to pleonasm, is tautology. The difference is that instead of being the exact repetition of a word or phrase, tautology involves saying the same thing in a different way. Once again, there are examples that are so common as to have become part of the language, to be used unthinkingly by most people:

end result a result can only come at the end!
free gift if it isn’t free, then it’s not a gift, so ‘free’ is redundant in this expression.
join together ‘together’ is redundant in this expression.
safe haven a haven is a place of safety, so ‘safe’ shouldn’t be repeated.
sum total two synonyms that are often found together.

There are many similar phrases, including ‘surrounded on all sides’ and ‘veering off course’, but the next type of pleonasm involves words or short phrases that have been imported into English from other languages with their original meaning obscured or forgotten. Here are three of the most common:

head honcho this phrase is derived from the Japanese hancho, meaning group leader. It was picked up in conversation by the GIs who occupied Japan after the Second World War. They clearly failed to grasp its actual meaning.

the hoi polloi Hoi polloi means ‘the many’ in ancient Greek, and its most famous recorded use is in a funeral oration by Pericles, in which he talked approvingly of hoi polloi, as opposed to hoi oligoi (‘the few’), from which we derive our modern word ‘oligarchy’.

tomato ketchup ketchup comes from the Cantonese kei tsup, meaning ‘tomato sauce’. Say no more.

The most intriguing pleonasms that involve overlapping languages are place names. Here are some well-known examples:

Lake Chad Chad comes from the Bornu word tsade, which means ‘lake’.
Mississippi River Mississippi comes from the French rendition of the Algonquin word for ‘Great River’.
River Avon Avon comes from the Welsh word afon, which means ‘river’.
River Ouse Ouse derives from a Brythonic word that means ‘river’.
Sahara Desert Sahara is Arabic for ‘desert’.
Wastwater This is a combination of Old Norse vatns dalr, Wasdale or ‘water valley’, and Old English wæter, ‘water’.

The reductio ad absurdum of place-name pleonasms is a village in my home county of Cumbria: Torpenhow. Tor is Old English for ‘hill’; pen is Cumbric for ‘hill’; and how is Old Norse for ‘hill’. All three languages were once spoken in the county. There is, allegedly, a hill outside the village that has been named Torpenhow Hill.

This is now getting rather silly, so I will conclude with a few expressions that derive from mediæval times in England, when the general population spoke Old English and members of the court spoke French. When legal edicts were being issued, no one could be sure who would be reading them, which led to a series of expressions, in use to this day, that combined the same word in each of the languages.

Some of these doublets remain the legal jargon to describe criminal offences: aid and abet; breaking and entering; (driving without due) care and attention. Other legal phrases that most readers will recognize include cease and desist, null and void; terms and conditions; and (last) will and testament. And we shouldn’t overlook the generic phrase ‘law and order’ when compiling our list.

Other such doublets have escaped their original legal environment and are now part and parcel of everyday speech. They can be said to be performing functions over and above their original purpose. Obviously, this post isn’t meant to be taken seriously, so it can be read for amusement by all and sundry without fear or favour.

size matters

It is often said that primitive societies do not have any words for large numbers; their counting systems go something like this: ‘one, two, three, many’. Such a list clearly implies that such a society would neither have encountered nor devised a system of money, because in a society with money few people would have been happy with knowing only that they possessed ‘a lot’ of it; they would have wanted to know rather more precisely how much they had, and this requires that words for larger numbers be devised.

By the time of the Roman Empire, the concepts of ‘hundreds’ and of ‘thousands’ would have been understood by merchants, bankers and bureaucrats, because there was a practical need for numbers this big in both commercial and military affairs. The concept of ‘a million’, on the other hand, may have been imagined by a few philosophers and mathematicians, but it would have remained unnamed for centuries because without any practical applications it was in effect the new ‘…many’.

However, in the fourteenth century, Middle English acquired the word ‘million’ from French, although it probably took until the advent of modern science in the seventeenth century for the word to acquire the precise meaning it has today in both French and English. And, nowadays, most people will have an instinctive grasp of how many items make ‘a million’, of how big it is: a very large but not an unimaginable number.

If you can imagine ‘a million’, then you should also be able to imagine ‘a million million’. Your only difficulty would be in deciding what to call the new number. I always called it ‘a billion’, but if you read my blog regularly you will have noted my occasional use of ‘a billion’ to mean one thousand million. I bow to necessity, because the American version, that one billion equals one thousand million, is now universally accepted. However, I deplore this kind of inflation, which forces you to run out of words for exceptionally large numbers twice as fast as if you’d stuck to the British way. On the other hand, I can see some merit in the system: regarding ‘a trillion’ as ‘a thousand thousand million’ goes some way towards explaining the apparent equanimity with which politicians in Washington view their country’s national debt of more than $15 trillion. But I do wonder if any of them now ask themselves whether it would have been wiser to stick with the British system, in which they could have been able to claim that the deficit was ‘only’ $15 billion.

Here is a question to which few outside the specialized world of mathematics will know the answer: what is the largest named number? It certainly isn’t measured in the trillions, as you will have probably already guessed. Quadrillions and subsequent words with similar prefixes are also very small in the context of this question, while ‘a zillion’, which I take to mean the largest number I can possibly imagine, isn’t a genuine number anyway.

So what of numbers with many more digits than those that have been discussed so far? In 1939, a nine-year-old boy in a New York kindergarten wrote a ‘1’ on the blackboard, followed by one hundred zeroes, and called this ‘a googol’. Because the boy’s uncle was a leading mathematician, the name stuck. However, we are still not in the numbers big league with the googol.

‘A googolplex’, a name devised by the aforementioned uncle, is ‘10’ multiplied by itself googol times. Now we really are up in the stratosphere. A goolgolplex is almost unimaginably large: it’s larger than the number of subatomic particles in the entire observable universe, yet it too pales into insignificance compared with the current record holder, which goes by the prosaic title ‘Graham’s number’.

Graham’s number, usually shortened to G, is so large that it is impossible to write using our conventional notation. Indeed, were the entire universe to be converted into paper and ink, there would not be enough of either to write it down. So how can such a gargantuan number be described? There follows an attempt at a non-technical summary.

We start with the convention that 3á3 = 3 × 3 × 3. In other words, the up-arrow tells you that the number to its left is to be multiplied by itself a number of times indicated by the number to the right of the arrow. Therefore, 3áá3 = 3á(3á3) = 3 multiplied by itself 27 times, or 7,625,597,484,987. So what about 3ááá3? This expression can be expanded to 3áá(3áá3), which is 3áá7,625,597,484,987. This, in turn, can be expanded to 3á(7,625,597,484,987á7,625,597,484,987), which would take a lifetime to calculate without the aid of a supercomputer.

With the next expression in the series, 3áááá3, we are contemplating a number of such mind-boggling size that it would not register in any meaningful way with the non-mathematical mind. Yet Graham’s number only starts here. Imagine the expression 3á…á3, in which the number of up-arrows is 3áááá3. Once this value has been computed, it becomes the number of arrows in the next iteration of the calculation. This process is continued through 63 iterations before we arrive at Graham’s number.

The first question to present itself is why there should be precisely 63 iterations. It does seem to be an arbitrary number. However, an even more obvious question is this: what is the use of such a number? It turns out to be useful in calculating the number of possible permutations in certain types of complex combinatorial problem, where it is seen as an upper limit to the range of possible answers. Well, yes, it probably is an upper limit to anything you can think of, but does that really make it useful? It’s like saying you have between none and ‘hundreds’ of parents, which is self-evidently silly. I’m just relieved that I’ve managed to keep infinity out of the discussion. Transfinite numbers, which record the number of items in infinite sets, must be larger than Graham’s number, but their values cannot be calculated. Thankfully. And the important numbers in everyday life can still be reckoned on the fingers of one hand. Thankfully.

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?

incomplete lists

On one level, I hate to be provided with incomplete information, but on another I view it as a challenge to come up with the missing data. An example will explain what I mean: a few years ago, I read that seven metals were known in antiquity, but the author neglected to enumerate what these metals were. Consequently, I set about working out the list for myself (using the internet is too easy and is certainly no challenge).

Gold was probably known to prehistoric societies, because it occurs in its native form (i.e., as pure metal) in streams and rivers; copper also occurs in native form and with tin is used to make the alloy bronze; silver is referred to in the biblical book of Genesis; lead was produced in Egypt as early as 3500 BC; and without iron there would have been no Iron Age. But that is only six metals. What was the seventh? Cinnabar (mercury sulphide) has also been known since the Stone Age, although it was probably used principally as a colouring agent in pottery, but mercury is easily extracted by heating, and it also occasionally occurs in native form. However, brass (an alloy of copper and zinc) was produced by the Romans for use in coinage and jewellery, having been produced accidentally, like bronze, at least two millennia earlier. Unfortunately, that brings the total to eight, so it is likely that the now forgotten author got it wrong. Alternatively, perhaps mercury was discounted because it is liquid under normal conditions and is therefore not a ‘real’ metal.

At this point, you may be wondering what all this has to do with my recent visit to Beijing. Here is the explanation: while checking out possible eating options in the neighbourhood of our hotel, we came across a Szechuanese restaurant. We were looking for somewhere to sample traditional Pekingese dumplings, so I picked up a promotional leaflet for future reference. Inside, I came across the following statement: “Sichuan cookery is one of the eight well-known Chinese cuisines”.

Now you see the problem. What are the other seven? The leaflet didn’t say. As with the metals of antiquity, it is easy to add the first few to the list: Cantonese, Shanghainese, Pekingese; but then it becomes harder. The four listed so far are distinct in style and ingredients, and other regional cuisines are too similar to these main archetypes to be considered completely separate. For example, there are many Chiu Chow restaurants in Hong Kong, but this style, which originates in the city of Shantou (formerly known as Swatow) in eastern Guangdong province, is only subtly different to Cantonese. I’ve eaten in a Hunanese restaurant in Hong Kong, but from that brief impression the food is similar to that of Sichuan. The Mongolian hot pot is a popular winter dish in Hong Kong, but I’ve no idea what else originates in that region, and Hainan chicken is the only dish I’ve sampled that comes from the large island off China’s south coast.

Anyway, I’ve managed to come up with eight, although whether I’ve listed the eight that the anonymous author of the Szechuanese restaurant’s leaflet had in mind is unlikely. Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of Chinese food than mine can come up with a more authoritative list.

we’ve always done things this way

You will probably be familiar with the phrase ‘in a horse’s arse’, which although uncouth expresses disbelief or outright incredulity to great effect. For example, if I were to suggest that the Roman Empire had a negative influence on twentieth-century space exploration, you might reply in just this manner.

But before you do, consider this apparently trivial question: why is the standard US railroad gauge 4 feet 8½ inches? This does seem an arbitrary value. Or, to put it more colloquially, which horse’s arse came up with precisely that figure (quite a versatile metaphor, this one)?

If you’ve ever asked someone why they do something in a particular way that to you appears to be illogical, if not downright ridiculous, you’ll probably be familiar with the age-old excuse: “we’ve always done things this way.” And American railroads have always been built to this gauge. But why should this be the case? You should not be surprised to learn that the first American railroads were built by a handful of English expatriates, and that’s the way they’d always built railways in England.

So why did the English build their railways like that? It turns out that the first railway lines in England were built by the same people who built the pre-railway wagonways, and that was the gauge they used.

Which begs another question: why did the people who built the first wagonways use this gauge? Because they used the same jigs and tools that they used to build conventional road-going wagons, which had always used that particular wheel spacing.

Then why did wagons have this specific, and very odd, wheel spacing? Well, if they’d tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would have been broken by the wheel ruts on the many old and not well-maintained long-distance roads in England, because 4 feet 8½ inches was the spacing of those ruts.

At this point, you may be wondering who built these old roads in the first place. Imperial Rome built the first long-distance roads in Europe, including England, to enable its legions to move quickly to wherever they were needed. These same roads were still in use long after the Romans had departed. And the ruts in these roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or risk destroying their wagon wheels. The chariots were produced for an empire with a well-organized military capability, which meant that they were built to a fixed standard, which included the small matter of the wheel spacing. According to the original specifications for a Roman war chariot, they were to be made just wide enough to span the rear ends of two war horses, which turns out to have been exactly 4 feet 8½ inches, according to later Imperial measurements.

Which is where space exploration comes into the picture. When a Space Shuttle is sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters (SRBs), which are made by a company called Thiokol in a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed these SRBs would have preferred to make them bigger, but after they are manufactured they need to be transported by train from factory to launch site. And the line from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs need to be able to pass through this tunnel, which is only slightly wider than the railroad track. And this track, as you now know, is as wide as two horses’ backsides. In other words, a major design feature of what is one of the world’s most advanced transportation systems was determined over 2000 years ago by a simple multiple of the width of a horse’s behind.

And you probably thought a horse’s arse was something insignificant.

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a noise annoys an oyster?