Another Pandemic Scare

Don't Panic in a Pandemic

‘Baby Doc’ Vowel, the Mayor of the svelte (surely some mistake) supine town of Tipton, has declared a ‘State of Apathy’ after a further case of Big Fat Arse disease was discovered nestling in the nether regions of the principality. Vowel immediately closed the borders to prevent incipient spread of the disease to the neighbouring boroughs. Although Dr Fearmonger, Chief Medical Officer and Chanteuse of renown, fears that Vowel’s measures are too little too late. In a statement, Dr Fearmugumbo (steady Flaxen) had this to say: “We are in the grips of an epidemic of unprecedented portions and big fat arses are erupting everywhere. You have only got to walk along Tipton High Street to see the expansive waistlines. This is the first symptom after the wretches become infected with a big fat arse. This is a terrible affliction for which there is no known cure. This condition is easily passed on between families and is exacerbated by sloth and extreme fuckwittedness. This disease is much worse than the previous epidemic of ‘Mad Ferret Disease’ and the ‘Black Breath’. In the first instance, the Tipton ferret population was only mildly livid and the ‘Black Breath’ was occasioned by the injudicious and copious consumption of pickled eggs. Mr Vowel reckons that the only way to control and isolate the condition is by applying a severe and punitive tax on ‘fat stupid bastards’.

However, it is not all gloom and doom and many pundits predict that this epidemic, like others, will have little impact on the overall health of the population. Professor Mugumbojumbo of the Epidemiology dept. at Tipton Technical College pontificated sagely upon this very issue: “We have always had a vast reservoir of fat arsed bastards in this pert borough of ours and I suspect this won't end due to proclamations and rapacious revenue garnering by the Civic authorities. The World Health Organisation (WHO?) are forever waxing lyrical about the next apocalyptic pandemic calamity which will lay humanity low and produce a population of sub-human brain eating Zomboids. However, recent evidence suggests that these creatures have always existed amongst us. Luckily, and as always, the virulence of these conditions is directly proportional to the poverty and stupidity of the disease addled/riddled recipients".

When the Lord doth taketh away he does so with a very large bucket

I have to say Arse, three times

I have been contemplating many things of late; especially late. You know the dark ponderings that make you wake at exactly 4 am in the morning lathered in a cold sweat. Sometimes I lie there naked trying to control my breathing. Did I turn off the oven? Of course I did, I always turn off the oven. But what if I forgot on this one occasion. I never forget and I always check twice. This is not exactly the case is it Flaxen? You always check at least three times. The third time is after you have left the room for 30 seconds. So that's settled then, I did turn it off.

Then truly a dark thought: What if on this one occasion I forgot. After all, life is governed by chance. Turning off the oven, or engaging in any activity for that matter, is subject to probability. And just because you have performed a particular routine a 1,000 times is no guarantee the sequence will continue. There is only one sure way to tell. Yep, but I'm cosy warm, especially now as the sweat has dissipated into the sheets. I could ask my sleeping partner to check. But even I know that would be selfish. And of course, I know what her response would be. So, I just need to remove the dark thought from my head and get back to sleep. Easy, just need to wash away thoughts of hot ovens from my weary brain with an infinite series of irrational numbers- that usually does it. And anyhow, I'm getting up at 6 am. What harm would it be if I left it on for another two hours? Now you are being sensible Flaxen that befits your self-perception as a rational being. Good, I can get back to sleep. One thing, though. You are aware how hectic things are in the morning? Rush, rush, rush. No time for breakfast; no time for fripperies. All is time organised and in sequence. This is the one time in my life I don't have time to check if I've turned everything off. That is because I don't turn anything on, not even the lights. Luckily I know the layout of my home down to a fine degree and navigate all potential obstacles and toe bruisers with veritable aplomb. A finely choreographed performance executed at speed. Exactly 12.5 minutes from leaving my bed I'm ready to drive to work.

No guarantee that I'd check that the oven was off then. Also, I would have to factor in a further 3 minutes to be absolutely sure. That would disrupt my schedule and we can't be having that, can we?

At this stage, even my befuddled 4 am brain has worked out that the only way to be absolutely certain is to get out of bed and check. And so I slip out of bed, bollock naked and stumble out of the bedroom, down the corridor, in the dark, toward the kitchen. "Yelp". Bloody dog! He is supposed to be in the laundry room. "Loki, go on, get back into your basket". Like all good dogs, he ignores his master and follows me into the kitchen. And there it stands like a shrine resplendent in ceramic and chrome. A beacon of hope shining out to restore my fragile, but fragrant, sanity. Except there was no light. If the oven had been left on there would have been light cascading through the oven glass door, but there was none. So I hadn't left it on then.......unless the bulb has fizzled out. Better check the knobs. Everything completely turned off. Close eyes, count to three: still off. And back to bed. "Loki into your basket". Loki looks at me with big soulful brown eyes, which I can't see, and promptly jumps onto, then into, my bed.

Lying in the dark at 4.20am, quietly satisfied and ready to drift off to sleep to sleep the sleep of the just, it suddenly occurrs to me. We had a takeaway last night. Arse, Arse, Arse.  

Ode

  Old scientists don't die they sublimate

An old colleague retires this Friday. He has been with the department for 36 years and has enjoyed a distinguished career. As is the custom on these occasions there will be a round of speeches from his esteemed colleagues. I have been honoured to take part and I would like to share with you a little Limerick I penned for the event. I will spare you the 'sensible' part of the 'eulogy'. I use the word eulogy because I suspect that he is the 'type' who will descend into a terminal tail-spin once he no longer works in a job which has consumed his life. Sad but true.

Just some background: Richard (for it is he) consumes a lot of vegetable matter...... Paaaarrp!

There was an old geneticist called Dickie,

who's diet was notoriously pernickety,

The beetroot consumed resulted in a gaseous boom

And Dickie was propelled backwards into eternity.

Old Dickie spent time in the FISH room,

Consuming copious amounts of legume,

The fermenting mass was ever so crass

Releasing a nauseous fart plume

A diet of pulse is not to recommend,

As a legion of co-workers can contend,

The resulting concoction results in eruption

And poor Dickie's colon it does distend.

So if in confined space with Dickie,

Maintaining composure can be tricky,

Don't linger too long in the resulting pong

Or eventually you'll feel rather sickly.

So it's time to farewell our friend,

Who's flatus proclivities do offend,

No longer a song or the occasional pong

Escaping from Dickie's front and rear end

Now you have got to admit that is a dreadful piece of doggerel.

Quantum Entanglement Akimbo

Action from a distance? 

I consider myself highly rational and have no time for loose thinking when it comes to irrational bollocks in all its manifold manifestations. This, of course, is mainly due to my extensive scientific training. Science works; irrational stuff does not. What advances to mankind have been made by religious beliefs or a contemplation of the supernatural? I rest my case.

Science and rational thought describes our world exceedingly well. It provides a self-correcting mechanism which has proved accurate and useful for understanding a highly complex universe. It has wrenched certainty from religious authority and has allowed men to think unfettered by stultifying dogma. We in the West are highly privileged to think this way. To do so came after centuries of struggle with orthodox religious doctrine, and more importantly, religious power. We in the West forget, ensconced in our secular bubble, how powerful and all pervasive the influence of the Catholic religion had on all strands of society just a few centuries ago. The reformation and the burgeoning 'enlightenment' changed all this. The Catholic church is but a shadow of its former self and can only cast a baleful influence on the most primitive and impoverished of its brethren. Not all religions have been ground into the dust, yet. Mohammedism has not changed from its seventh-century credentials. At least, Christianity made an effort and acquired an intellectual gloss. Not so much Islam. We in the West should be justifiably worried.      

Anyway, this post is not about religion (perhaps) but quantum physics. As I said, science explains our world very well, but strangely falls down when we ponder the very large and the very small. The universe may well be infinite. How can our minds wrestle with this concept with all its implications? And when we recede to the quantum world, causation starts to unravel, at least from a rational perspective.

It doesn't come weirder than the phenomenon of 'Quantum Entanglement'. Consider a sub-atomic particle which decays into two particles with spin. According to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, these particles can exist in a variety of states as predicted by a consideration of 'quantum (im)probability'. Once you measure the state of a particle, that quantum state becomes fixed. Therefore, if one of our particles is found to have an 'anti-clockwise spin', then the separated partner will always have the contrary state, in this case, a 'clockwise spin'. It seems that once the particle's quantum state has been determined, by measurement, it somehow communicates this information to the separated partner, which acts accordingly. What is really interesting is that particles can be separated by very large distances and communicate  faster than the speed of light, indeed, it happens, 'at once'. When this phenomenon was first observed in the earlier part of the 20th century it caused a great deal of controversy and consternation amongst physicists, for obvious reasons.         

Einstein acknowledged, but never liked the phenomenon, as it was contrary to his theory of 'special relativity'. And let's face it, Einstein's relativity theories are strange enough without introducing this kind of madness into our 'reality'. The ultimate maximum speed limit of the universe is the speed of light (C). Nothing can travel faster than this velocity, well at least according to Einstein. As a digression, it is wrong to consider the speed of light as a velocity vector. 'Light speed' is best conceived as a limit to causality, a condition interwoven into the very fabric of the universe. This is why the measurement 'C' crops up in equations which supposedly have nothing to do with velocity. For instance, consider the famous equation of Einstein which equates energy and mass: E=MC². Anyway, as mentioned above, quantum entanglement implies the transmission of information 'instantaneously' between two entangled particles, irrespective of spatial separation. Experiments have found that this 'transfer' must, at least, exceed the speed of light by several orders of magnitude.

Einstein and colleagues thought that information deciding a quantum state was fixed in the initial particle prior to disassociation, although a coherent mechanism was never proposed. Subsequent experimentation supports the causal connection or quantum entanglement hypothesis; poor Einstein was wrong. 

This paradoxical aspect of quantum entanglement is highly perplexing to a rationalist. A scientist trained in the way of causality can only scratch his/her head in wonderment at phenomena which appear to defy the 'rules' of established nature and introduces notions akin to the paranormal. I haven't given up on science just yet. I place 'quantum physics' in a drawer within my head, marked: 'Awaiting further enlightenment'. It is my hope that very clever minds will come up with a plausible explanation. However, there is always the possibility that no explanation is forthcoming. Mayhap our puny intellects are not up to solving this most vexed and impenetrable of questions. If this be the case my 'mind drawer' will gather much dust before disappearing into dust.

Strange, but true. As I was writing this post and as a means of torpid distraction, I quickly checked out my blog. One of my regular readers left a comment about 'Quantum Entanglement'. How spooky is that? Arse.

I don't think we are there, just yet

"Is there life on Tipton"

                                            

                                         The early years

The music industry awoke aghast today at the tragic news that: Barry 'Battered' Fritter died yesterday due to complications following a rather poor hair perm. Barry's manager and publicist, Mr Big Cigar, had this to say: "I am at a complete loss for words. Today we have lost a god amongst men, a truly wonderful human being and a veritable rock leg end". Mr Big Nose continued to drone on in this vein for the next two hours....... Mr Big Belly's biography of Barry, entitled: 'Fritter, the wretched, vile excuse for a man', appears in all good bookstores, tomorrow. All proceeds will be forwarded to Big 

Ego's expansive off shore bank account.

Spot

Born Star Moondust, to Stock Broker parents, Barry, at the tender age of 43, changed his name to 'Barry Fritter' one beer-encrusted night after reading the menu in his local fish 'n' chip shop. His first clutch of stardom came when he joined the band, 'Spot the Poodle' in 1972. At that stage, the 'Glam Rock' scene was becoming  rampant and Barry decided to change his persona and embark on a solo career. His first album: 'The man who fell in the canal' received critical acclaim from all the regulars in Barry's local pub, 'The Feltching Ferret', in Tipton. Indeed, it is claimed that Barry gained inspiration for the album after a jaunt along the Birmingham to Dudley canal towpath following a heavy midnight 'jam' session at the 'Ferret'.

But Barry's career was marked with controversy and he was once 'outed' as a 'notorious heterosexual' by the tabloid papers. His established sexuality caused derision amongst the avant garde music fraternity, especially as he once publically announced, that he liked sleeping with older women.

Forever the chameleon, Barry effortlessly changed his hairstyle according to directions from his manager and stylist. During the 1970s, he coiffured his barnet into a frenzied extravaganza of lurid bangs. As the 80s burst onto the scene, Barry changed hair stylist once again and adopted a subdued pink bouffant. The 90s heralded a change of pace and the softer style was discarded for a more understated feathered mullet. And who can forget the waxed pompadour of the late 90s. The sad irony, of course, is that Barry's search for trichophillic perfection led to his downfall. For twas during a rather difficult coif teasing session that Barry inhaled deep of the heady fumes of the ammonia paste, gasped and exhaled, no more.....Arse.     

Spontaneous out pouring of grief has occurred in his home town of Tipton. Within hours of the hair cut, banners appeared in the grime weathered streets expressing heart felt comments by a community in mourning. Here are just a few of the poignant sentiments: "Get ya hair cut ya dozy wazack"; "Good riddance yahm dozy soft twat"; "We love you, battered"; etc.   

Denizens of the music industry gushed and waxed lyrical about a star that is no longer with us but has returned to the firmament to cast a guttering dancing light upon the upturned faces of the rest of us poor proles with second rate hair cuts. 

Barry's death comes just a week after release of his album 'Hairspray'

                                                       Take it away Bazza

                                       'Spot the Poodle' in their heyday

Angel, Dance for me



Must be lunchtime

How many angels can you fit on the head of a pin? Don't laugh, this was a hot topic for debate amongst Clerics, c1332. This is a surprisingly subtle question and raises further questions about the fundamental nature of our existence. Anyway, if angels are not made of matter and are pure 'spiritual energy', whatever that means, then they are without dimension and form and occupy no space. Having said that however, ultimately all matter can be reduced to waves and therefore solid matter is but an illusion, although a very persistent one. What is perceived as matter is really ‘a whizz’ of wave radiation bound by forces which are poorly understood.

But contemplation of angels as 'energy' is not as simple as envisioning angels as photons. Angels are sentient and therefore their 'energy' is not an energy we are familiar with. Angels are supernatural entities and therefore reside outside the natural world and by extension are not subject to causality. Even if we could persuade a host of angels to gravitate toward the vicinity of a pin head they would defy measurement. This is but one aspect of the discourse.

This raises the question of how sentient supernatural beings can interact with us at all. In the distant past angels apparently communed with man; tis in the bible- look it up........

According to the Bible, angels can connect with the natural world and therefore, during this interactive interlude, they must be subject to natural law and hence causation. So, let us take a different tack for sophistry's sake.

"The medieval doctors of divinity who did not pretend to settle how many angels could dance on the point of a needle cut a very poor figure as far as romantic credulity is concerned beside the modern physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimetre every movement and position in the dance of the electrons."

According to Thomas Aquinas, the ultimate Catholic scholar and medieval ‘Angelic Doctor’, no two angels can occupy the same space. This is in accord with quantum physics and abides with the Pauli Exclusion Principle. The next point concerns the size of the pin head under question: to wit, the size of a standard pin head. In order to move this argument along it is necessary to make an assumption. For our purposes, said size will be a sphere of 1 Angstrom diameter with an associated mass of 9.5 x 10^-29 kg. Also we need to note that space is not infinitely divisible. This limit is denoted as the Planck length, or 1.6 x 10^-35 m. Next we need to decide the information carried by a standard angel. Note: I have made no allusion to mass. In fact in this simple case, I'm assuming mass-less angels. The introduction of mass into the equation will result in 'reductio ad absurdum- which would make the whole argument just silly. So for our purposes I will assume that angels comprise of 'one bit' of information. They cannot be less than this information limit and logically remain within our reality. There is one last concept to be introduced before we begin our calculation. The Bekenstein bound (k) or universal entropy bound is a limit on the entropy that can be contained in a physical system or object with given size and total energy. It follows: In a system of diameter D and mass M, less than kDM distinguishable bits can exist, where k=2.57686x10⁴³ bits/metre kg. From this we can derive an upper limit of 2.448x10⁵ angels on our pin head.

There are some clever bastards who demand that the angels should be a dancing. This introduces a whole new set of thermodynamic and velocity parameters into our hypothetical situation which will undoubtedly alter the upper limit of angels gyrating on the pin head- basically these bastards can fuck off.

 

A hot, lazy, Sunday afternoon.....

Ouch, dat must chafe somethink awfull.

Why do men have nipples? From an evolutionary context, this is an interesting question. In the female mammal nipples have an adaptive function, but in the male, they function, not at all. In fact, why do people, both men and women, have extra nipples? This question interests me as I'm endowed with an extra nipple like appendage.

Early embryonic development is a universal template and until the 6th week of gestation, the embryo is a blank tableau. Hormones at that stage kick in and the foetus will either develop along the female or male pathway. Divergence is in our chromosomes. The presence of the SRY gene on the male Y chromosome is the key. Without the expression of SRY at a critical stage in development, the default pathway is female. Therefore, men have nipples because the original design plan incorporates nipples. For nipples to disappear from the male anatomy there would have to be a selection process against male nipples. Evolution is lazy. If the appendage is not an impediment to reproductive fitness it will linger like a fart on an airless day. Male nipples confer no adaptive advantage or disadvantage for that matter. Not so much as a vestige but a slight impediment. The same argument applies to why women have orgasms. What interests me as a biologist and a man, is why women's orgasms are so hard to achieve, in comparison to the male variety, and when they do cum why it seems more exquisite than mine- I know, it is all about me.

So coming back to the extra nipple. Of course, there is the possibility of other extra body parts; extra toes; fingers; even whole reproductive organs are possible, though rare. Actually, extra nipples are not that rare and occurs in 1 in 500 of the population and interestingly, there is a male bias.  Some perturbation during early embryonic development is to blame. Perhaps a variation on the design plan is at fault and interrelated to our evolutionary past when our ancestors were equipped with eight teats? Tis nothing to get worked up about, although past girlfriends have found it fascinating. Believe me, when you are living with said extra appendage, 24/7, the novelty tends to wear off.

For those that care: my supernumerary nipple is identical to that of the regular nipple, including hyperpigmentation, slight hyperkeratosis with epidermal thickening, pilosebaceous structure of Montgomery areolar tubercles, smooth muscle bundles typical of the areola.

So my variety of extra nipple is inert just like the other two, however, in women, the extra pleasure knob can be functional. To be totally gratuitous I'm going to slide off topic and consider gynaecomastia. This is a very common condition in males, especially overweight males and is often linked to hormone imbalance. These individuals are subject to 'female like'  breast growth and it can be very distressing for those affected. To be honest, if I had this condition, I wouldn't get out of bed in the mornings.......         

Yuk