London, 7:46 am

Our house is on the north bank of the Thames; Greenwich is just across the river.

The twin domes are of the Old Royal Naval College. Behind the college (though you can’t see it from the photo) is the Royal Observatory, designed – as architect Christopher Wren said with engaging honesty – “for the observator’s habitation and a little for pompe.”

The Royal Observatory is of course most famous for being the ‘home’ of the prime meridian. Our house is very close to the meridian – at 0°0'47"W, to be precise. I would have liked to say: I cross the prime meridian when I step out to buy milk, but that is not exactly true. The nearest convenience store is also in the Western Hemisphere. But only just.

Minimalism

I have finally fixed the dice. (This is a random post generator link on the sidebar; it had vanished after I switched to the new template.) My achievement of the weekend.

It is one month since v3.0 was unveiled. I am happy with the new look, though I can’t say the initial goal of minimalism has been realised. But for lovers of minimalism, here are three of my favourite anecdotes on the subject.

1. Spartans

The Spartans were renowned for being men of few words. Indeed, Spartan is almost a synonym for minimalist, and the word laconic derives from Laconia, the principal region of the Spartan state.

Herodotus (The Histories, Book 3.46) tells us that when the banished Samians reached Sparta, they came before the magistrates and, as was customary, made a long speech to show the greatness of their need. But the Spartans answered that they had forgotten the beginning of the speech and could make nothing of the remainder. After this the Samians came a second time with a sack, and said nothing but this: “The sack wants flour.” The Spartans replied that they need not have said “the sack”; however, they resolved to give them aid.

2. Physicists

Wikipedia informs us that British physicist Paul Dirac was notoriously taciturn. After a lecture he gave at the University of Toronto, a member of the audience remarked that he hadn’t understood part of a derivation. There followed a long and increasingly awkward silence. When the host finally prodded him to respond, Dirac said, “That was a statement, not a question.”

3. Mathematicians

My high-school book on number theory had the story of how Mersenne’s conjecture was demonstrated to be false. In 1644 the French monk Marin Mersenne stated that the numbers 2ⁿ – 1 were prime for n = 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, 19, 31, 67, 127 and 257, and were composite for all other positive integers n < 257. Mersenne admitted that he had not tested all the numbers, but owing to the notorious difficulty of integer factorisation, his conjecture went unverified for two and a half centuries.

In 1903 F. N. Cole made a presentation to the American Mathematical Society with the rather bland title, On the Factorisation of Large Numbers. Cole’s ‘lecture’ went thus. He approached the chalkboard and in complete silence proceeded to raise 2 to the power of 67. He then carefully subtracted 1, arriving at 147,573,952,589,676,412,927. Cole then moved to the other side of the board, wrote 193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287, and worked through the multiplication in longhand. The two results were equal. Cole returned to his seat, not having uttered a word during his hour-long presentation.

It is said that this is the only lecture in the history of the AMS where the audience applauded.

If I were Cole, I would have arranged for T-shirts to be sold outside the lecture venue:
M₆₇ is composite.

Sunshine Nonsense

Preserve us from Thy Wrath, O Ye Mighty, we prayed to the Celtic Gods of Thunder and Rain, as we booked our train tickets for Edinburgh. ’Tis fated that in December the Northerly and Tempestuous Land of Alba shalt be Cold and Blustery, but spare us from the Rain, for verily doth it Interfere with Sightseeing.

And the rain gods must have heard us, for indeed we had very little rain in our three days in Edinburgh.

But our quota of fair weather ran out on the bus trip to Loch Ness. Scarcely had we crossed Dunblane, when the clouds blotted out the sun and the rain came down in sheets. “Aye, that’s more like proper Scottish weather, that is,” cried our bus driver. “None o’yer silly sunshine nonsense.” And he pressed down on the accelerator and swerved to avoid a minivan.

Initially the rain seemed like a bit of a dampener. But I came round to the view that the Highlands are at their most awe-inspiring

under brooding skies

in falling rain

when the trees are bare

and the waters of the loch are storm-tossed and steely black.

My Brush with Vaishnavism

A Hare Krishna devotee waylaid me on Oxford Street the other day.

He had a stack of books with the title Bhagavad Gita. I was looking at these in passing and wondering how come they were so thick (the Bhagavad Gita is a slim volume), and this proved to be my undoing. Because he caught me eyeing the books, and before I knew it, I was in his power.

The conversation was a short one, for I prefer to give religious recruiters a wide berth.

Hare Krishna devotee: Can I ask you one question?
Me: Please excuse me. I am in a bit of a rush.

And I melted away into the crowd of shoppers.

I need not have said, “I am in a bit of a rush,” and in fact I wasn’t in any rush at all. Nevertheless, I thought if I’m rebuffing him out of hand, the least I should do is give him a reason to feel superior.

But for three days now I’ve been wondering what his one question was. The revenge of the Hare Krishna is truly insidious.

Three Languages

Thai

It was my supervisor who told me about a Thai tongue-twister which, when transliterated, reads mai mai mai mai mai, but which in fact consists of five distinct words pronounced in different tones. Apparently it means ‘New wood doesn’t burn, does it?’

And this naturally led us to consider the possibility of an entire language consisting of a single syllable spoken in an infinitude of tones and registers.

I think our conclusion was that whatever other attractions such a language may have, we wouldn’t fancy using it to draft an intercreditor agreement.

Finnish

I read a novel recently, with the improbable title of A New Finnish Grammar. I will now proceed to quote from it liberally, because it is not everyday that you find an author who writes so passionately about language.

On the noun:

In the Finnish language the noun is hard to lay hands on, hidden as it is behind the endless declensions of its fifteen cases and only rarely caught unawares in the nominative.

On memorising words:

With some difficulty, one by one, I was taking in Koskela’s words. In the pauses between them, I heard them die away. I watched them floating down into the landscape of the city around us, so as to note where they fell, so that I could go and collect them later: a belltower would remind me of a verb, I wasted a whole ship on an adjective and entrusted the all-important subject to a tram. The pastor’s thought was scattered throughout Helsinki, and I could reread it every time I pleased.

On obsessive practice:

I would shut myself in the sacristy and study every word I’d put down in the notebook, declining it in all possible cases, conjugating each verb in every voice I knew, down to the most tortuous forms of the passive, the conditional, even the past potential. [...] Those syntactical digests were my defence against an enemy who was attacking me from behind. I had no tanks, no bombardiers, and each day surprised me on a different front, drawing me into the open, far from reason’s hiding-places, towards a chasm of gloomy, giddy thoughts. It was then that I needed all fifteen Finnish grammatical cases, the four forms of the infinitive, not to mention the negative pluperfect to keep my mind engaged, to drag it clear of that carpet bombing.

Beautiful, no?

Japanese

I learnt the word naruhodo on a snorkelling trip in Japan.

I had taken an underwater photo of a Japanese colleague, and I was quite pleased with the result. Back on the beach I showed her the photo. She said, “Naruhodo.”

Now at the time I did not know what the expression meant, and I was too vain to ask her. But I assumed it meant, “This photograph overwhelms me. Your talent makes me go weak in the knees, and I love you with a passion that is inextinguishable.” For it really was a pretty good photo.

When I went home, I checked. Naruhodo means ‘I see.’

Windowsill

A long time ago, I had resolved that when I had my own flat, I would name the furniture.

For the last 16 months, I have had my own flat – or, to be more accurate, a shared flat, my own flat and a shared house, in that order – but I haven’t put my plan into action.

I could start with the windowsill, which I am rather fond of.

Will the Sill sounds somewhat uninspiring; considering the windowsill is my little corner of Japan, maybe I should call it Yūdai the Madodai.

v3.0

Thanks for all the makeover suggestions and sorry for having disappeared without warning – I briefly went private while I was tweaking the new look. “Like a changing room, curtains drawn,” as a friend put it. And what with one thing and another, this took longer than I anticipated.

v3.0 is not as minimalist as initially planned: I figured there were some page elements I like too much to get rid of. Moving some of it to a static page was an option, but that is just hiding clutter, not getting rid of it. And mysteriously, I can’t get the dice (a random post generator link) to work on v3.0, but I will try my best to fix this.

Hopefully you will like the new look. But if you don’t, feel free to stare wistfully at this.

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Edit, 8 January 2012: The dice are now back.

Makeover

Next week I plan to give this blog a makeover. The idea is to make it more minimalist. For instance it now has text in three colours (not counting black); I intend to get this down to one. We want to move away from purple prose and other youthful follies, and towards a layout more befitting of lists, aphorisms and proofs of Euclidean geometry. (Is there such a thing as an excess of minimalism? We may be about to find out.)

There is much to be said for minimalism, though for obvious reasons its greatest adherents – like Master Yun-Men (A.D. 949) – tend not to say much. Among other things, it imparts an aura of profundity – an effect I have been aiming for since early infancy.

Take for instance what is reportedly the first coherent sentence I ever spoke (to a visitor who called for my father): বাবা বাজার গেছে (Father has gone to the market.) Simple, beautiful, direct. And untrue (my father had not in fact gone to the market).

So in the meantime, if you have any suggestions – features that should go, features that should stay, new features, font suggestions – please do let me know. Minimalism has its place, but it should never extend to the comments section.