I am off to see PG's this morning. I will do his shopping and drop it off, and then ferry him along to his COVID shot and back.
Ages ago he identified Kate Bingham is the only bright spot in the Government's response to the virus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Bingham
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p093gs4k
How does he do stuff like that? I've never previously given much truck to intuition but I can't really see any other explanation.
Frankie sent me a message last Sunday morning so I could tell Peter it was Helen's birthday today. Unfortunately I didn't read it until I had left but I remember that he had mentioned that very day that he thought she would like Balzac so I emailed him and he recommended either "Lost Illusions" or "Splendeurs Et Miseres Des Courtisanes" as a gift from the two of us.
"Lost Illusions" has been delivered. The English title of "Splendeurs Et Miseres Des Courtisanes" is "A Harlot High and Low." I can't speak for everyone, but the latter doesn't scream light-hearted, surprise token birthday present to me, though I have been chuckling to myself imagining it dropping unexpectedly through the letter box.
The conventional view holds that girih (geometric star-and-polygon, or strapwork) patterns in medieval Islamic architecture were conceived by their designers as a network of zigzagging lines, where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass. We show that by 1200 C.E. a conceptual breakthrough occurred in which girih patterns were reconceived as tessellations of a special set of equilateral polygons (“girih tiles”) decorated with lines. These tiles enabled the creation of increasingly complex periodic girih patterns, and by the 15th century, the tessellation approach was combined with self-similar transformations to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before their discovery in the West.
Marshall McLuhan (Hat tip Marina Warner)
Electric circuitry is Orientalizing the West. The contained, the distinct, the separate—our Western legacy—are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused.
Girih (Persian: گره, "knot", also written gereh) are decorative Islamic geometric patterns used in architecture and handicraft objects, consisting of angled lines that form an interlaced strapwork pattern. I wonder if there is a connection between them and the Penrose tiling I was burbling on about yesterday?
 |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girih_tiles |
.svg/1920px-Penrose_Tiling_(Rhombi).svg.png)
If you’re doing algebra, you just write down the answer. But for geometric or visual work, you have to translate it into words. That takes time. Often the visual people literally don’t finish the papers. The result is that algebraic people do better in exams, so you find more of them at universities.
Unless I miss my guess, the Bomber and I are going to be all over the golden ratio and local pentagonal symmetry like a cheap suit. Keeping it real, I have ordered a magnet pack "Gee thanks Dad!" so that we can investigate it - drum roll please - by attaching things to the fridge.
After the Decameron, at the rate of one story a day, and then Don Quixote, at the rate of one chapter today, we are now working through the Arabian Nights. I leave it up to you to guess the rate.
The Hunchback's Tale, comes quite early on.
In China a tailor and his wife meet a cheerful, drunk hunchback playing the tambourine. They're entertained and invite the hunchback over for dinner. When the tailor playfully stuffs the hunchback's mouth with fish, the hunchback chokes and dies. The tailor panics.
His wife convinces him to leave the body at the home of a Jewish physician. The physician believes the hunchback fell down his stairs and died; his wife tells him to leave the body with their neighbor, the king's Muslim kitchen steward.
The steward sees the body on the doorstep and starts beating it, convinced it's the unknown thief who's been stealing his food. Fearing he killed the hunchback by accident, the steward leaves the body at a shop door.
A Christian tradesman who works as the king's broker wanders by, drunk. The broker worries the hunchback will steal his turban and beats the body. A watchman stops and accuses a Christian of killing a Muslim.
Ultimately his execution is ordered. Before this can happen, however, the steward confesses to the murder. He doesn't want to burden his conscience with the death of a Muslim and a Christian. The steward takes the broker's place until the Jewish physician admits to the crime, fearing he'll cause the death of two Muslims. He takes the steward's place. Then the tailor confesses and takes the physician's place. It is almost funny as the executioner tires of the rapidly changing victims.
What we actually have here is a charming parable about religious tolerance and honour.
I was watching Prof Wen-chin Ouyang's lecture "The Curious Life of Objects in the Arabian Nights" on YouTube last night. About three quarters of an hour in (https://youtu.be/mTtN69oL34E?t=2785) she identifies where in China this story is set. It is Kashgar. Population 85% Uyghur.
Ironic doesn't begin to describe it.
Inspired in Piss Alley street food market (Tokyo) and Latin American’s (Mexico & Venezuela) street food stalls, we are taking and fusion the best of the Latin and Japanese, traditions, culture and flavors to get a new hardcore street food concept: Noritacos.
The Hong Kong flu, also known as the 1968 flu pandemic,[1] was a flu pandemic whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated 1–4 million people globally. It is among the deadliest pandemics in history, and was caused by an H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus, which is descended from H2N2 (caused the Asian flu pandemic in 1957-1958) through antigenic shift—a genetic process in which genes from multiple subtypes are reassorted to form a new virus.
....
Four months into the Hong Kong flu pandemic, American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman and his team had created a vaccine and more than 9 million doses had been manufactured. The same team also played a key role in developing a vaccine during the 1957-58 Asian flu pandemic.
The H3N2 virus returned during the following 1969–70 flu season, which resulted in a second, deadlier wave of deaths in Europe, Japan, and Australia. It remains in circulation today as a strain of seasonal flu.
The more things change the more they stay the same. As I have remarked before (Icons passim) 1968-69 resonates with 2020-21. Why do we remember the Summer of Love and Woodstock over and above the Hong Kong flu pandemic I wonder?
Also - while we are all patting ourselves on the back about Pfizer/BioNTech and Oxford/AstraZeneca let's revisit a sentence above: "Four months into the Hong Kong flu pandemic, American microbiologist Maurice Hilleman and his team had created a vaccine and more than 9 million doses had been manufactured. "
Red Dust, takes its name from the cloud of Iron Oxide, emitted when the Steelworks were in production. In times now long gone, there were red clouds of the dust that would hang over the town, settling on cars and washing hung out to dry! The air in Consett maybe somewhat cleaner now, but the memory remains for many, and lives on in this beer!
PG's Small Change talks about the red dust from the steelworks when he was growing up. It came up on Sunday when I was telling him about watching On the Waterfront with Ben. I must try and get him a bottle of this Consett Ale.
