Keep breathing, it's good for you

The village of Meriden is about as far as you can get from the sea in England. I lived about three miles from it (Meriden, not the sea) during most of my teenage years. Add to that that neither my mother nor my father ever learned the trick of how to swim, and that’s my excuse for not learning till past thirty.
Even then it was only enough to be able to say to my kids “look, Daddy’s doing it, so you can too!” Once they got better at it than I, like when they were about five, I felt my duty done and stopped. Other disincentives include inhaling enough water to drown a small army of rats, and watching Spielberg’s Jaws; all three of them; I even read the book.
Fast forward to nearly now and for reasons explained in an earlier blog, I’ve started to swim a couple of times a week. OK, so it’s good exercise and if you don’t count the pool, requires little in the way of equipment, at least compared to golf and motor racing. But it still feels like an experiment in controlled drowning and invokes sheer panic when the bottom gets too far away for my feet to reach.
Under such conditions there are only two alternatives, stop doing it or get help, so yesterday I had a swimming lesson from coach Ramzi.
It was a revelation. Apparently I’ve been breathing all wrong. Yes, I know not to do it underwater, but the all the childhood admonitions of “breathe through your nose, not through your mouth” had to be forgotten. Breathing is such a regular, not to mention important, habit that controlling it voluntarily requires a considerable effort of will.
And do you know what? As I concentrated on breathing air through the right orifices at the right moments and learning how to keep the water out, the panic started to evaporate too.
My reward was to be able to play with flippers, goggles and polystyrene floats, oh, and I’m going back for another one next week.
Google Meriden, and you’ll get the namesake in the USA, and hey, guess what, that one is a centre for swimming pool manufacture. No excuse for non-swimmers there then.

Structure is a fine thing

Atoms are pretty small things, but they can still get excited, albeit in a very controlled way.
What atoms do to show their excitement is to send out light, but light that is restricted to very particular colours. We all know the characteristic yellow of sodium lighting, try throwing a bit of salt on a gas ring and the same yellow briefly appears. Strictly speaking it isn’t just light that is emitted but radiation. Radiation in the microwave, infra-red and higher frequencies is there too, as well as ultra-violet and even x-rays, given sufficient energy to do the exciting.
Scientists got quite excited too when this phenomenon was first noticed, because each element, iron, hydrogen, carbon and so on all give out different frequencies, different colours if you like, so that each different atom has a unique signature. Suddenly they didn’t have to capture something, stick it in a test tube and torture it to find out what it was. They could just look for the signature when the stuff was heated, like in a star. When those scientists started looking at the sun, they found a signature they’d never seen before and decided it must be being given off by a new element, which was given the name Helium, since found in small amounts on Earth and used to make diving safer and to make your voice go all funny and high-pitched at parties.
Then someone started looking more closely at the “spectral lines”. The light from a load of excited atoms is split up and recorded on a long, thin photograph; the different colours appear as lines, hence the name. Anyway, it turns out that the lines have a width, and different lines had different widths, line by line and atom by atom; this phenomenon is called “fine structure”.
There is a lot of rivalry between experimental and theoretical scientists. The experimental ones like to find new things that the theory guys haven’t predicted and the theory people like to send the experimenters off to look for things that no-one has found yet. This time the experimenters were way ahead, with the theorists having a lot of catching up to do, but eventually they cracked it and worked out some mind-numbing formulae that predicted the behaviour of the spectral lines and in particular the fine structure. In doing so they made use of a constant, the fine structure constant.
Now that in itself isn’t very strange. There are lots of constants, things whose size have to measured rather than worked out theoretically, in our universe, the speed of light and the charge on an electron for example. The fine structure constant, however, is a bit special, it’s a number with no units attached. The speed of light, for example, needs centimeters per second to qualify the number, but the fine structure constant just is, well, a number.
The fact that scientific theories have lots of constants in them worries some people, they’d like to know why the constants are the size they are and maybe even derive them from other, deeper theoretical ideas. This has spawned an interesting set of discussions and researches into how much these different constants could vary, without the universe as we know it being affected much. When that is done, rather interesting conclusions get arrived at, specifically, some of them have to be pretty much the size they are, and the most crucial found so far is our new friend, the fine structure constant. Learned scientists claim that if it changed by as little as 4% our universe would just not work!
I can only think of two possible conclusions to that, one is that the chance of our universe happening by accident was very, very, small indeed and the other is that something designed it and set it going. I’m still trying to work out which is the more terrifying.

Lebanese Bridge Festival 2010

My grandmother used to call them the devil’s pasteboard. You’re right, good guess, she was referring to playing cards. She played a pretty mean hand of Napoleon (Nap for short) in spite of her apparent denigration of the cards.

For those who haven’t come across the game of Nap, it has two phases, bidding, where you announce the number of tricks that you are going to take in the play and then the play of the cards. A rather more complicated game, but with the same two phases, is Bridge.

Although the country sits firmly in Asia, according to my map, Lebanon’s Bridge Federation (LBF) was a founding member (one of eight countries I believe) of the European Bridge League. The LBF is holding its twenty eighth “annual” international festival; actually it’s been more sporadic than annual, the last one was in 2005. As the President euphemistically phrased it in his opening address, the festival has been suspended “due to the recent events in the country and the region”. He meant mayhem and war. So, the fact that the festival is being held again is a small measure of the increasing belief in stability here. Players from Italy, France, Poland, the UK, Greece, Syria and Egypt have come to participate with the local Lebanese players, lured by the hope of getting amongst the considerable prize moneys. Over three hundred turned up for the first session yesterday evening.

My wife and I decided to have a go too. This involves considerable personal risk for both of us, as down the years, we’ve had more spats over bridge hands than pretty well everything else put together. At the height of American fever over bridge in the thirties, one woman shot her husband in the middle of a game, claiming as her defence that he had misplayed a hand – amazingly she was acquitted. I checked my wife’s handbag for guns before we left home. We didn’t star, but it’s a three day event, so, ever the optimists, we are hoping for a better session today.

With all the games available on WIIs, Xboxes, Playstations and the internet, I’m pleased to see that a game based on thousand year old technology still has the power to attract a sufficient following to stage such an event.

More, I feel grandmother’s ghost at my shoulder exhorting me, as always, to “draw trumps”.

The Med from the Mountains

From 2,000 metres up in the Lebanese mountains, you can see the Mediterranean Sea – the Med.

A friend of mine has recently bought a chalet up there. It’s intended as the summer retreat away from the heat, humidity and pollution of Beirut. There’s also easy access onto the pistes of the biggest ski domain in the country, Faraya, so it’ll get great winter use too. Something of a perfectionist, he is putting the final touches to the recently created garden, with sun-deck, barbecue area, hammock and ready planted already half-grown trees, floodlit at night. The view is simply, sorry but no other word for it, fantastic.

Quite a place, yet the demand for such retreats is running strongly, with land prices jumping by a factor of about hundred in the last ten years. Concrete, stone, marble, tower cranes and all the paraphernalia of construction are discretely hidden from view but are all there if you care to look.

After banking and finance, Lebanon’s biggest business sector is construction. And that is putting demands on water (twenty-odd dams are proposed to be built), transport (improvements to the coastal, North-South motorway have been followed by extra, modern roads being laid to get up the mountains), electricity (there’s a five year plan to build more power stations and upgrade the distribution system) and the other utilities like telecommunications. Let’s hope all those plans come to fruition.

But perhaps the biggest demand is on the air. Looking down from the mountain, Beirut is often covered with what looks like a cloud of pollution and the biggest contributors are the rush hour traffic jams. Pictures of old Beirut show trams and buses which look well-appointed. The defunct railway station is still a land-mark, at least by name. The long term solution has to be to recreate that first class public transportation system and then market it strongly to wean the Lebanese off their cars.

That is going to take half a generation at least, but is essential to grasp and start work on now, otherwise our children and grand-children may well not be able to see the Med when they take the trip 2,000 metres up in the mountains.

Busy doing nothing

A good idea is promiscuous: it needs to be had and doesn’t care by whom.

A good friend reminded me of one of his mother’s favourite sayings and I promised to put it on my “plagiarize as soon as possible” pile. “Think before you decide to say something – and then don’t!” is as close as I can recall it. This is not really the spirit of blogging at all, but does explain why I haven’t written anything for a couple of weeks. When I thought about what I was going to write, I realized that I didn’t have anything particularly useful, interesting or even mildly amusing to say. Because I’d fallen victim to a nasty end of summer cold, one of the two mini-epidemics doing the rounds; the other is conjunctivitis.

Once upon a time, I would have purchased a box of panadol, some Strepsils and a packet of tissues, then gone out into the world, performing all tasks with less than usual enthusiasm and effect, probably infecting a good percentage of those with whom I came into contact as well. Not any more. The purchases are the same, but I retire with some books, countless cups of tea and some cough syrup to my favourite chair, where, mainly thanks to the codeine in the cough syrup, my best thing becomes falling asleep.

The result is a quicker recovery for me, less infection of others and no poorly performed tasks, err, yes, I know, no tasks performed at all actually. But I feel better for treating myself thus.

So what was the good idea that inspired this? Well sometimes the best course of action is just to do nothing.