There Is Hope*
I was climbing through eight hundred years and forty-six thousand miles of church history this evening, which is the system for gaining access to Forza’s ringing chamber, and thinking, you could want to join this tower for its scenic approach alone. Or possibly as an exciting addition to your fitness programme. I dragged myself through the last arrow slit, which is at the top of a spiral staircase so tight that even the outsides of the steps are only long enough for Flower Fairy feet, and collapsed fainting on the floor . . . next to Charlotte, who, by her gasping breaths, had clearly only just arrived before me—and who is also a visitor. Maybe you get used to it. Maybe the members have a secret lift.
I had spent a good bit of today telling myself briskly that I was going to Forza tonight** and that it was just another tower and the years, the miles, the thirty-seven bells and the Rhode-Island-sized ringing chamber*** are all incidental. Then I got there. I suppose the fact that your first view of it, every time, is from the floor with a red haze of oxygen deprivation and lactic acid build-up clouding your vision, may have a demoralising effect. I lay there tonight thinking, well, I did bring my knitting . . . †
And I did not get off to at all good start with a bell rope in my hands. Which is to say I once again made a drooling foozle of Grandsire Triples. ARRRRGH. It was so drooling a foozle that even standing behind someone ringing it accurately I still couldn’t see what was frelling going on. I’m going to develop a complex. I can ring it perfectly well †† in other towers. But put me in an 800-year-old abbey with a ringing chamber you need satnav to negotiate and I lose my mind.††† ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH. If there had been a sword I’d’ve fallen on it. You’d think in a ringing chamber the size of Rhode Island there would be at least one sword hanging on the wall somewhere, wouldn’t you? But nooooooo. Just peal boards,‡ notices,‡‡ and handbells.§ So I crawled away and hid in a dark corner.‡‡
I was hauled back out again by a call for plain frelling hunt on ten. I can’t do ANYTHING on ten. Ten is too many, even when it’s just plain hunt. The thing about ten is that you have to hold up and wait, every frelling blow, because there are so many other bells in the row to ring before it’s your turn again. So it’s bong and then you stand there with your arms over your head thinking you could have got half a row of knitting done while you’re waiting§§, and then it’s bong again. Also there’s always a bit of necessary speed control adjustment—not only do you ring more slowly going out than going in, you also ring closer over smaller bells and with more of a gap over bigger bells.§§§ When there are ten of the frellers all of this is very exaggerated, which makes it additionally difficult for notable foozlers like me.
And then . . . it wasn’t too bad. I was actually getting the hang of the holding-up-and-WAAAAAAAITING thing. I tied up my rope at the end without having a last despairing look round the walls for a sword.
I hung around watching people ringing things I should to be able to ring, but probably can’t at Forza.# And then finally, at the very end, I was offered a rope of my very own again, to ring bob minor. Dear miserable gods of ringing and disgrace, I OUGHT to be able to ring bob minor. I ought to be able to ring bob minor dead, drunk, asleep, and suffering severe lactic acid overload.##
And, indeed, I did ring it, despite being alive, sober, awake and maybe a little lactically acidulated. I also did despite the fact that someone else was going wrong, this being the true sign of knowing a method, being able to hold your line when other people are failing to hold theirs. I was not ringing it beautifully, but I was ringing it—and I was ringing it in one of Forza’s horrible queues, and since I was on the four I had several### people on each side, which means you need 358.5° vision like a horse (or a robin).
So. Yaay. There is hope. I will go back next week. Note that I am announcing that here in public. I am going back to Forza for next Wednesday’s bell practise.
And tomorrow I start the third draft of SHADOWS.
* * *
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand . . . look what arrived in the post today:
- I think I may have heard a rumour somewhere that it was published yesterday
* * *
* Maybe.
** After all I had told the blog I was going to Forza tonight.
*** Sure it’s a small state.^ It’s a VERY LARGE ringing chamber.
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhode_Island
† I have half a leg warmer on my needles. Maybe even two thirds of a leg warmer.
†† sometimes
††† Maybe I have lactic acid build-up in my brain.
‡ My situation was made somewhat more precarious by the fact that the Scary Man was in charge tonight. They have a kind of rotating ringing mastership and you don’t know till you get there on the night who’s going to be beating you with the knotted rope . . . I mean, who’s going to decide what methods to ring and who’s going to ring them, and whapping you up longside the head when you . . . I mean, who tries to wrest a modicum of order out of campanological chaos. I confess to feeling a little fragile about ringing admins at the moment but he hasn’t done anything to me yet . . . except give me bells to ring and say I’m welcome to come again.
‡‡ Full peals are these ghastly feats of ringing endurance, and significant ones frequently get painted on a varnished plank—the names of the method and the ringers, the date, and sometimes the time it took, which is usually around three and a half hours—and hung on the wall of the ringing chamber involved.
‡‡‡ ‘On 18 February there will be a sale of all the umbrellas, bicycles, spectacles, spectacle cases, mobile phones and small children left in the abbey grounds, proceeds to the after-service cake fund, the canons have been complaining about the shop biscuits’
§ I have no idea. If I keep going, I’ll ask.
§§ It’s almost as bad as that frelling stoplight on the way to Nadia.
§§§ Yes. It’s horrible physics. And I don’t think you can even get any of the fun quantum stuff out of it. It’s all that unpleasant fellow Newton.
# I’ve told you on previous devastatingly humiliating evenings I’ve spent there: in the first place because there are SO MANY FREAKING BELLS if you’re only ringing six or eight of them, they’re in a queue, not a circle, which is maddeningly confusing for those of us who are easily confused and are used to ringing in a CIRCLE,^ and also, I assume again because of the frelling SIZE of the ringing chamber there’s something peculiar about the acoustics. Which in my case is to say I can’t hear a thing but a kind of smudgy blast of noise.
^ Remember that you’re always looking frantically around for the next bell to follow. Your sheer frelling depth perception is off if you’re suddenly looking along a line instead of across and around a circle.
## Gemma was there tonight and said to me after, of course we can ring bob minor. It’s ringing it on only one bell that is challenging.
### All right, my definition of several is a little loose.
Mostly coherent. And with lots of footnotes.
b_twin_1
Eeek. I’m so conflicted. I want the rest of the week to go sloooooow for you but I want it to go fast for Jodi.
It was less than a fortnight ago that I finally really noticed that Jodi’s frelling* novel** is coming out on the SAME GLAMFARBING DAY THAT SHADOWS IS DUE. How frigglegobblasting unfair is THAT?
http://ya-sisterhood.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-reveal-incarnate-by-jodi.html ***
* * *
I rang handbells tonight—rather to my own astonishment. What’s worse is that the other three ringers are getting steady enough that It Was Decided—not by me—that it was time for some evil fiend or other to start calling bobs—you remember bobs (and singles)? It’s not bad enough you have to learn the frelling method line in the first place, or rather, in handbells, lines, plural, and each pair has a different set of lines with a different relationship between the two bells so in a minor method with six bells it’s like learning three different methods and in a major method with eight bells it’s like learning four different methods, at the point when you’re beginning to get through a plain course more often than you aren’t, someone starts calling bobs. Bobs mix up the order of the bells so that what bell two or three was doing is now being done by (say) bell five or six—which also changes the tune, which is a clue you’ve come to depend on without realising you’re doing it. Bell methods are all basically canons, you know? Everybody rings the same pattern, it’s just each bell starts at a different place in the pattern.† But how you swap places when some ratbag calls ‘bob’ ALSO VARIES. Ohmigods, he just called a bob, do I run in, make the freller, run out, am I unaffected, can I just burst into tears and dash out of the room?††
I won’t say we did it well.††† But we were doing it.‡ And I noticed something. The big boys, which is to say Colin and Niall, are always handing us peons great steaming heaps of . . . twaddle, for example that it’s actually easier to ring on eight bells than it is on six. Don’t make me frelling laugh. Counting to six is sordid enough. Eight bells means two more chances to go wrong. Except . . . if you live long enough to be ringing on eight at all, to have (more or less) learnt all four of the plain courses on the four different pairs of bells for your method, in this case bob major . . . they have a point. Things don’t happen quite as fast on eight bells as they do on six, because eight bells have to ring in each line before anything else can happen in the next line. Calling it ‘more time to think’ is a bit extreme‡‡ but . . . well . . . we did stagger through a short touch.
I find it pretty funny that bell ringing is one of the things keeping me sane right now. But with the counter-computer effect there’s also the feeling that I need to go on believing in myself as a bell ringer while I get used to this no-home-bell-tower thing. So I scrape myself off the seat of my chair and go ring. Last night was one of Wild Robert’s wandering monthly spectaculars‡‡‡, this month, crucially, at a tower I could find in the dark, so I went. And it was okay. It was good.§ And maybe my new footloose status is an opportunity to ring for Wild Robert more often. . . .
ENOUGH WITH THE CHAT. BACK TO SHADOWS.
* * *
* . . . says the author who HATES ALL AUTHORS who have books coming out till she gets her frelling manuscript FINISHED AND TURNED IN.
** FIRST novel! For anyone coming to the party late, this is Jodi’s FIRST EVER PUBLISHED NOVEL!!!! A brand new shiny fresh just-published book is always a major chocolate, champagne, velvet, rhinestones^, heavenly choirs and beautiful young man/woman driving the Rolls event, but your first book . . . well. Despite the ghastly ravages of Menopause Brain I totally remember the whole run up to BEAUTY’s publication.
^ Really good rhinestones. Possibly attached to All Stars.
*** I think it’s a really good trailer too. Mostly I don’t like trailers. I know they’re all the rage and anyone who is anyone has trailers^ but mostly I don’t like them. I like this one.
^ I don’t have trailers
† While you’re singing ‘row, row, row, your boat’ the person ahead of you is singing ‘gently down the stream’
†† This is fairly easy to do with handbells. It’s a little harder to perform effectively in the tower.
††† Some of us did it better than others.
‡ And I kept thinking of things I have to go back and do to SHADOWS in the next five days while we were ringing plain courses, so maybe bobs were a good idea. WHA’? WHA’ YOU SAY? What are you doing in my sitting room? Why am I holding the leather strap-handles of two little bronze bells?
The problem with turning a book in unfinished is that it’s . . . unfinished. I know it’s unfinished, Merrilee knows it’s unfinished, my editor knows it’s unfinished, the janitor’s boyfriend’s dog knows it’s unfinished. But I want the storyline to read roughly the way it’s supposed to even if I use ‘ecphonesis’ three times in the same paragraph^ and the scene with the eggplant and the philosopher really should come out altogether. So I keep making notes of the things I need to stick a temporary storyline patch on, to get it through (I hope) its exam next week.
^ I don’t think I do use ecphonesis three times in the same paragraph. Maybe twice.+
+ I mean, I use ecphonesis, usually rude, frequently. But I don’t often hang around to label it as such.
‡‡ If you’re bungie jumping off the Chrysler Building instead of the Empire State, the 200 feet it’s shorter isn’t really going to matter if your bungies break: you’re still going to die.
‡‡‡ Where several people said to me, hi, Robin, how’s it going at New Arcadia?, and I said, ah, hmmm.
§ And I was still holding my line when everyone else went horribly wrong in the Cambridge. Wild Robert was, of course, mad to be trying to ring Cambridge at all with the people he had available, but this is Wild Robert’s way: and you will probably find you can ring all kinds of ridiculous stuff with Wild Robert’s beady eye on you. I was, for example, ringing Cambridge despite havoc in other areas of the ringing chamber—and I’m pretty sure the woman who was the most out of her depth went home saying, you know, I got through three leads of Cambridge, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but that’s Wild Robert. . . .
Lurgy Update*
It was such a gorgeous day today that hellhounds and I had a proper hurtle, despite my feeling about as lively as that mess in the bottom of your gutters, thanks to another of those ten-hours-in-bed, two-hours-of-broken-sleep nights.** I’m catching up on back issues of magazines. I’ve thrown a few more books against the wall.*** I finally downloaded BEJEWELED from the iTunes store because I’m keep hearing that it’s the original and still the best of those line-up-the-same-shape/colour-things-they-go-bang-and-you-get-points games. It’s okay, although I could do without the Fu Manchu voiceover. It’s not as good as MONTEZUMA.
But when I finally crawled permanently out of bed† it was a beautiful blue sunny day and the frelling birds were frelling singing and the hellhounds were all over me†† and I, drowning in guilt as I am because all things considered they’ve been very good about my less than impeccable maintaining of standards the last week and some†††, decided, okay, countryside is in order, and we went out to seek same. And it really was pretty fabulous. We didn’t even meet any unusually savage off-lead dogs.‡
katinseattle
I want more Mongo. I want a whole book of Mongo.
No pressure.
Certainly not. I’m very relieved, since I’ve been working to this plan since the last time we had this conversation. Mongo did, in fact, break training in a big way today . . . noooooooo you moron you were told to [mmrgllrrrmph]. This is not how this scene went last time. Yelp! Arrrgh! Yaaaah! —It’s going to go a lot differently with Mongo in it. I so need sleep.
blondviolinist
You know how there’s Team Gale and Team Peeta for the HUNGER GAMES trilogy? And Jodi Meadows wants Team Sylph and Team Dragon for her INCARNATE trilogy?‡
I’m on team Mongo.
::Beams::
* * *
* Does anyone else keep having their eye caught by the ‘12’ of our new year and have brief dazzled moments of thinking that means it’s still last month? Or is that just someone with a lurgy and a deadline the end of the month that unfortunately it is?
** Colin and I have been emailing lethargically back and forth today, ostensibly about tower ringing tomorrow night, but a certain amount of reciprocal whining has crept into the conversation. I admit I’m a bit relieved that not everybody else that has this lurgy is all shiny and new after three days. Uuuuuuungh. And unless I’ve developed bubonic plague by tomorrow I probably will go ringing. I may not be able to do much but ring rounds for beginners, but Colin has beginners who need rounds rung for them, and it would at least mean pulling on a bell rope. Maybe Colin and I can cough in harmony.
*** I’m an even nastier reader when I’m ill and short of sleep.
† Having wept through the sound of my bells ringing.
†† I was talking to a friend today who’d been ill in the night too. She has cats. And while she was sitting in the bathroom at a totally untoward hour having a small private self-absorbed moan, as one does under these circumstances, the cats were of course all over her. Hey! You’re up! Great! Aren’t you glad to see us? Aren’t you going to feed us? Barring the ‘feed us’ part, hellhounds have a similar reaction. Hey! You’re up! Hey! All these critters that sleep about twenty hours a day and don’t care which four they’re awake for are very disorienting . . . when you’re pretty disoriented anyway. But last night I kept coming downstairs for more (filtered) water and fetching more magazines, and then back upstairs again getting up for a pee because I’m drinking all this flaming water, and by the time I officially let hellhounds out of their crate they were all it took you long enough. So, we’re going out NOW, right? I wonder if they could learn the concept of ‘dressing gown’?^
^ Mongo could. The problem with the Mongos of the world is that they do not sleep twenty hours a day, and they need stuff to do. If you don’t give them stuff to do, they will find stuff to do.
††† Here four bright beady little eyes roll significantly toward the sofa. You just keep giving us extra sofa time, beloved hellgoddess, they say, and much may be forgiven.^
^ I’m also practising using the argleblarging new TV set up with the new freeview, non-satellite box and the forty-seven new remotes.+ I’m practising in case the Nice TV Man turns out to have more little stories he would like professional writers’ opinions on. Why don’t people do their homework. His manuscript starts with an elaborate description of what the first illustration should be. Two seconds—okay, maybe twelve seconds—on any reputable how-to-write-for-kids site will tell you this is not what you do.
I realise the line about what is acceptable advice-seeking and what isn’t may be blurry in some areas. I try to double-check before I ask Gemma any medical questions, for example, that I’m asking out of my natural, not to say pathological, inquisitiveness, and not out of a desire for free advice.++ And she’s also a friend, and I give friends a whole lot of slack because I think if you actually know someone who does something it’s reasonable to ask them first, and if she started asking me about illustrations in kids’ books I’d just tell her what I know. Which is not, in fact, much, and she’d be better off researching some good how-to-write-for-children web sites.
And if this joker had said, the first time he was here, oh, hey, wow, you’re professional writers? Say, I’m writing a children’s book, and I wanted to know how detailed I should make the descriptions of the illustrations, maybe you can tell me?, I would have. There wouldn’t even have been any blood loss (probably). But he shows up on our (Peter’s) doorstep without warning one afternoon with his frelling story in his frelling hand? No. Not on.+++
So I don’t want to have to ask him any more questions about the TV. So I’m practising. I’m not watching TV, mind you, but when I’m going to be lying on the sofa for a while, I turn it on.
Ajlr
I’m so sorry to hear that The Cough is still unwilling to leave, Robin. I hate that feeling one gets where it seems as if one’s brain is going to be shaken out through one’s forehead at the very next convulsion.
I tend to specialise in the brains-leaking-out-your ears cough. Whatever that is that is causing intolerable pressure on my forehead is unlikely to be brains.
Yesterday while I was not watching television there was something so clearly bizarre on the screen that I found myself distracted from the book I was going to throw across the room in a minute anyway#. Eventually I figured out how to call up ‘information’ and was apprised that this was a film called ‘The Trail of the Screaming Forehead’ in which a small harmless American town is taken over by . . . alien foreheads. Ahem. I think whoever came up with this idea was having a really bad case of flu-with-pounding-headache at the time and had been hitting the cough medicine a lot harder than is safe.
+ They breed. Like coathangers and odd socks.
++ Even over here, where we do have the NHS, so the absolute question of money is not acute, doctors in their off-duty hours are off duty.
+++ I am a curmudgeon. But we knew that. And I haven’t read it—that’s Peter’s self-immolation. But Peter mentioned the illustration thing, and I picked the ms up off the table and . . . yup.
# Carefully missing the Christmas tree. I’m not even feeling shame about its continued upness yet. Hey, I’m sick.
‡ Although the herd of pygmy rhinoceros was a surprise.
‡‡ Team Sylph and Team Dragon? Ewwwwww. I’m on Team Sam.
Flu, hellhounds, SHADOWS and Jodi Meadows
Okay, that’s not your average mixture. Let’s have the good news first:
http://www.jodimeadows.com/?p=525
YAAAAAAAAAAAY. It’s alive!
* * *
. . . We are now, I fear, about to plunge down a steep slope. I was feeling a little odd last night but in my current state of whatever it’s always easy to put oddness down to a surfeit of quantum physics.* Unfortunately not so in this case. I nearly didn’t get out of bed this morning, except that there are hellhounds. And SHADOWS. Which is still due the end of the month. I can’t frelling believe I’m ILL again. I was ill in October, for pity’s sake**. I’m not sure yet whether this is merely (!!!!) a sick cold or whether it’s going to insist on the full panoply of flu. At the moment the jury is still out. But I feel like stale death on toast. AND CRANKY.
So I got out of bed at about . . . noon. I barely fell down at all. There are hardly any bruises from caroming off the four-poster on the way to the bathroom, which had mysteriously moved to a new location overnight.
I got dressed. I don’t guarantee that my tee shirt is on the right way around (who cares? It’s covered up by six woolly jumpers) but I got the shoes on the right feet.*** I hurtled hounds. Yes. I did.† Twice.††
And I worked on SHADOWS. I did.
. . . And this is as much blog entry as I can hold myself together for.††† Good night. May you sleep better than I’m likely to.
* * *
* Brief, according to my present state of non-brain, update on ABSOLUTELY SMALL: It’s all maths. I don’t know how even a crazed mathematician/physicist can have had the effrontery to look Average Reader in the face in the introduction and claim that understanding quantum mechanics does not require mathematics. You are so lying, Professor Award-Winning Scientist Bloke. It’s all maths.^
What is true is something else he said in the introduction however: that in most physics books the author says something like, blah blah blah blah, and here are the equations to prove it. And you’re supposed to read the equations. What’s different about ABSOLUTELY SMALL is that he then tells you the equations over in words. The equations are still there. You still have to deal with equations. They may not look like a lot of equations to Mr/Ms Science Brain but they are totally equations. But once he gets away from those poor cats waiting trembling in boxes for the Killing Look, he explains stuff pretty well.^^
If you’re up for it . . . it’s pretty fascinating. It’s so insane. It’s so not Newtonian.^^^ I also just love that most of it you can’t know exactly. HA HA HA HA ALL YOU CREEPY OVERBEARING SCIENCE BRAINS WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL. HA HA HA HA HA. Granted I still don’t get it, but I’m a lot happier with the concept of a world that cannot be known/measured exactly—can’t be nailed down. This sounds a lot more plausible to me—more like my experience of the daily life this book is supposed to let me fit quantum theory into. ^^^^ And as he says, approximate doesn’t mean wrong: it means . . . approximate.
Anyway. It’s fascinating. But it’s probably not a book you want to strain to your bosom when you stagger off to lie on the sofa with hellhounds and minister to your brain-destroying illness.
^ Now that I’m committed, which is to say I’ve bought the thing, twice, audio and hard copy,+ I notice with a jaundiced eye that the three encomiums on the back cover about how This Is The Book We’ve Been Waiting for to Explain Quantum Mechanics in Daily Life are all by hard liners. There are two scientists and a lawyer. I’m sure he’s a very hard-line lawyer. And probably the author’s best friend since childhood. I want a hat check girl/boy or a brewer or ballroom dancing coach to tell me it changed their concept of life.
+ I cannot believe that anyone would survive the experience by audio only. If audio helps you focus, as it does help me, then the audio is worthwhile, and audible’s reader gets a medal. But you’re still going to have to have the hard copy. For the equations. If it takes the reader too long to say one of the frellers, you’ll have forgotten the beginning by the time he gets to the end. Lambda squared of the hypotenuse of the lobotomy . . . um. . . .
^^ I do wish he’d stay away from real-world examples. Even I know that a baseball is not a free particle, even when it’s left the field and is busy arcing over the stands. Speaking of the physics of gliding, however, is anyone playing Tiny Wings? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0 I don’t know what I think of the game, but I love the graphics.
^^^ I have a new theory about why Newton was such an ugly piece of work as a human being. It’s because in his secret heart he knew he was wrong.
^^^^ Look at human nature. Look at hellhound nature.
** I think it was October. Autumn anyway. A few months ago. And my stupid throat hasn’t recovered from the last assault which is why the Muddlehamptons are forgetting my name. ARRRRRRRGH. And here I am again with an inflamed throat, a throbbing head, and that interesting kind of fever that makes you feel like you’re made of boiling aluminium. I RARELY GET THESE MALADIES. RARELY. Except lately ARRRRRRRRRGH.
*** One right foot. One left foot.
† I also deserve a medal. But so do they. At the ripe old age of five and a half, although generally speaking the advent of maturity is a little thin on the ground, they are very good about waiting till I get my crap together, even when I seem to be having unreasonably more trouble than usual with said crap, and of hurtling slowly, with pauses, once we get outside. I know the location of every public dustbin in this town . . . I also know the location of every bench, not that kerbs won’t do in a pinch. They probably just think I’m having a bad ME day. Multi-application hellhound training.
†† And the dog minder is going to take them out tomorrow. Another medal.
††† I told an American friend that what I really needed, Peter having made some excellent turkey stock for the bodily nutrition side, was someone to tell me Really Bad American Jokes. So she’s taken it upon herself to send me Really Bad American Jokes all day at intervals—for the support of my suffering soul. Here’s my favourite:
It’s the old west, and a newcomer to town sees there’s a big crowd gathered in the town square. So he spots the local newspaperman, and asks him what’s going on.
”It’s a hanging,” says the newsman. “They’re hanging Brown Paper Pete today.”
“Brown Paper Pete? Why do they call him that?” asks the visitor.
“Because he always wears brown paper pants, a brown paper shirt, a brown paper hat, and carries a brown paper satchel,” says the newsman.
“Wow,” says the visitor, “What are they hanging him for?”
“Rustling.”
She’s just sent me this one, but she says that I’m sick enough to worry her if I think these are funny.
Guy walks into a bar, sits down and orders a beer. While he’s drinking, he hears a tiny voice say, “Hey mister! I like your tie!” He looks around, but doesn’t see anybody. A few minutes later, the same tiny voice says, “Hey mister! Nice shirt!” Again, he looks around, but there’s no one around except him and the bartender. A little while later, the voice says, “Hey mister! You look like you’ve lost some weight!” So the guy calls the bartender over and asks him what’s going on. The bartender says, “Oh, that’s the peanuts. They’re complimentary.”
Absolutely clueless
Okay I’m having some trouble with Mr Fayer and his ABSOLUTELY SMALL. Has anyone else read it? In the first place. His Schrodinger’s cats. He suggests 1000 boxes with 1000 cats in them, one each. The cats—ALL the cats, each and EVERY ONE of the cats—are a mixture of 50% alive and 50% dead. Already I’m confused. What do you MEAN 50% alive and 50% dead? What? How? Why? By what MEASUREMENT (which of course is The Question*) are they 50% alive and 50% dead? What does this mean to the CATS? And then, having shut up all these possibly ailing and distressed cats in boxes, which cannot be a positive reinforcement of whatever their level of well-being might have been before you did shut them up in the boxes**, you start . . . opening the boxes. And by the fact of your opening the box and peering inside the cat magically—yes, I said magically—mutates into a pure state of either 100% aliveness or 100% deadness. WHY? THIS IS NOT HOW A CAT IN A BOX BEHAVES.*** Unless of course it DIES of a HEART ATTACK the moment it sees you. And after the first few hundred boxes you have a nervous breakdown as a result of your sense of responsibility for the deaths of (approximately) 500 out of 1000 cats. Not to mention the prospect of trying to support the liveness of 500 frelling cats until you can convince the RSPCA to come and take them away . . . and also try to convince the RSPCA that they shouldn’t sue the crap out of you for animal abuse, although, supposing they arrive before you run out of cat food, the vibrant, 100% healthiness of the 500 live cats should at least confuse the issue.
I don’t think I’m getting out of this example what I’m supposed to be getting out of it.†
And then there’s the whole ‘absolute’ size thing. He goes through the business of how we interpret size as relative. Something is large or small as soon as we have something to compare it to. A photograph of two rocks with a blank background tells us nothing about the size of the rocks till the background is adjusted to have a piece of human being in it for scale. I don’t myself see how this is a difference in kind with his ‘absolutes’ of ‘large’ being something you can set up an experiment to observe with a negligible alteration to the thing observed compared with ‘small’ being something you cannot set up an experiment to observe with negligible alterations—‘small’ means all experiments create non-negligible, which is to say substantial, alterations, no matter how clever you think you are, which pretty well futzes your experiment. How is this not relative? It’s relative to your ability to create an experiment with this or that outcome. It’s relative to your size and galumphingness. If we were the size of photons, we could create a sufficiently sub-photonic experiment to measure photons,†† photons being one of those absolutely-small things. I get it (I think I get it) that large means you can straightforwardly create useful experiments and small means you can’t, but—to this English lit major—this just means some science bozo is inventing new definitions for ‘small’ and ‘large’. That’s fine. The small and large part works. It’s the stuff around it I’m having some trouble with.
And then . . . back to reality . . . He says, ‘Imagine that a small boy weighing 50 pounds runs into you going 20 miles per hour.’ WHAT? How is this small boy weighing 50 pounds managing to run into you going 20 miles per hour? Turbo-charged roller skates?††† His parents should be had up for criminal negligence. Then he says, ‘Now imagine that a 200-pound man runs into you going 5 miles per hour. . . . The small boy is light and moving fast. The man is heavy and moving slow.’ EDITOR’S NOTE: that should be slowly. ‘Both have the same momentum. . . . In some sense, both would have the same impact when they collide with you. Of course, this example should not be taken too literally. The boy might hit you in the legs while the man would hit you in the chest. . . .’ Emphasis mine. He never does mention the boy’s propulsion system. I’m still worried about the chances of a small boy with negligent parents and turbo-charged roller skates living long enough to grow up and become a famous Olympic sprinter.
And finally . . . the maths question. On the VERY FIRST PAGE of the preface Fayer says that all we have to do is develop our ‘quantum mechanics intuition’ which is what this book is for. He says: ‘This lack of a picture of how [certain quantum-challenged] things work arises from a seemingly insurmountable barrier to understanding. Usually that barrier is mathematics.’ To understand these things not immediately obvious to the unenhanced human eye ‘ . . . requires an understanding of quantum theory BUT IT ACTUALLY DOESN’T REQUIRE MATHEMATICS.’ Emphasis again mine. ‘ . . . the presentation in this book is descriptive. Diagrams replace the many equations with the exception of SOME SMALL ALGEBRAIC EQUATIONS—AND THESE SIMPLE EQUATIONS ARE EXPLAINED IN DETAIL.’
THIS IS MATHS! THIS IS TOTALLY MATHS!
I don’t think it’s merely an excess of figgy pudding pressing on my brain here.‡
* * *
* See: absolutely small, which means that you can’t create a means to observe it without also creating non-negligible change to what you’re trying to observe. This is also a working definition of ‘spitchered’.
** Speaking of altering what you were trying to observe.
*** This is much more my experience of cats in boxes: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+womens_dark_tshirt,137590640
† He says demurely ‘I have to admit to simplifying a little bit here. . . .’ Um. But it turns out all he’s referring to is the number of live and dead cats. You probably would not get exactly 500 of the one and 500 of the other. Oh. Okay. Like that addresses any of my problems with this parable.
†† And if he gets his totally-ignoring-reality Schrodinger’s cat metaphor then I get this totally-ignoring-reality itty-bitty extremely molecularly dense human metaphor.
††† Aren’t there some physics, speaking of physics, about how fast it’s literally possible for a substantially shorter rather than a substantially taller person to run, aside from talent and fitness and so on? Which means a small boy—fifty pounds is little—is even more unlikely to be going 20 mph. Without turbo-charged roller skates.
‡ EMoon:
Where is the digestion I had in my 20s, when immense amounts of anything I liked could be ingested without discomfort or weight gain or…whatever?
The one . . . the one thing to be said for having spent the last forty frelling years fighting my own personal daily battle with my waistline is that when I hit menopause and the diet wars became dirty, scorched-earth and take-no-prisoners, I was to some degree ready. I mean, I wasn’t ready, I’m appalled at how little I get to eat^ and how much I pay for it when I stray a spoonful of brandy butter over the line. But I am used to the mindset of Calories Are the Enemy, and most of my menopausal friends weren’t, aren’t and won’t be. I’m not utterly without, you should forgive the term, form in the matter of assuming all food is guilty until proved innocent.^^ This is not to say I won’t eventually get old and tired and say THE HELL WITH IT. I WANT TO EAT TOAST AGAIN. WITH BUTTER. AND MARMALADE. But at the moment—and this is a conversation I have had with myself at least every winter solstice holiday period for several years now, and at various less predictable times dotted about the calendar, and the situation is getting relentlessly more extreme—I’m still thinking about my rather ramshackle skeletal system, its weight-bearing capacity, and the hurtling of hellhounds, and I figure I can live like this a while longer. Which is, I repeat, not to say there will not come a day when I decide on toast.^^^ But preferably after SHADOWS—or the PEGASUS trilogy—has made me a multi-zillionaire and I can afford to replace my entire wardrobe.
^ And how much less than that I do in fact eat, so I can keep my CHOCOLATE and sugar in my tea.
^^ And in this courtroom, it won’t be proved innocent.
^^^ One might almost say ‘plump for’.