DOLLY PARTON AND THE TREADMILL

Thoughts this week have included: Hmm. I’m not as clever as I used to be; yes, that post-gym buzz is amazing but look out for 3pm, and, did Dolly Parton diddle her employers out of thirty minutes’ work every day and still have the audacity to complain about it?

Anyway, while I work my own 9 to 5:30 (admittedly it would never have made quite as good a song) and sit here at the end of it, I’m wondering about a whole load of things.

I watched a video on a thing called Euler’s Identity. It’s a mathematical thing that brushed me by the first time I saw it. This week I was kind of amazed at the fact that it uses two very different numbers that just appear everywhere in nature, a strange concept number that doesn’t really exist, a 1 and a zero, and makes an actual equation out of them.

I quickly realised that I wasn’t clever enough to understand the proof, though I sort of get the idea that: compound interest eventually does tend to a limit (e), that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is always the same (pi), and that if you express an ever decreasing value that tends towards e using imaginary numbers spinning around an Argand diagram, you do see how eventually it just draws a circle.

Well. I’m afraid I’m not clever enough to explain it more simply - and as Einstein once noted, if you can’t do that, you don’t understand it properly.

So there was that.

Then I went back to the gym for the first time in ages. I thought it might pep me up a bit, get me feeling brighter and happier in the mornings. I ran 2km in 15 minutes (leisurely) and wobbled off the treadmill.

Later, I noted a friend of mine, Russell, had just run 5km in 18 minutes on his latest park run! I tried to imagine what that would have felt like on the treadmill and realised that had I attempted pushing it all the way up to the requisite speed of 16 km/h, I would have been summarily projected backwards into the cycling machines, like a sweaty sack of potatoes.

I suppose Dolly might have been contracted to only work 35 hours a week (9-to-5 x 5) in which case, fair enough. She could, of course, have restricted herself to just thirty minute lunch breaks, in which she would have had ample time to think up ways to deal with Jolene. Anyway, either way, her employer was apparently ‘using her mind’ and not giving her any credit for it, so it’s a case of swings and roundabouts. And for someone who probably never really worked a day of her life in an actual office, she sure has a handle on the thing.

Someone asked me about the difference between a simile and a metaphor today. I told them a simile was like a comparison, but a metaphor was the real deal. They didn’t even crack a smile.

POSSESSORS

This poem went in a really unexpected direction. It's funny how that happens. Maybe there's a reason.

Possessors

How come it’s yours

And it’s hers and it’s his

And it’s ours and it’s theirs

And that’s fine…

But when talking of me

A possessor must be

Not ‘mines’ with an S

But just mine?

And how come it’s its

And not it’s or it’s its’

And it’s very much whose

And not who’s?

Seems never in doubt

The British set out

To make all of their neighbours

Confused…

Confused about who’s

The possessor, and whose

Are the treasures and where they can see ‘em

So how come it’s yours

When it’s ours but it’s there

In a Bloomsbury marbled museum?

THE DAY AN ACTOR WENT TO SPACE

I’m currently watching (well it’s on while I work) the live stream of William Shatner going into space on Jeff Bezos’s rocket. They’ve locked themselves into the capsule, the countdown clock is ticking and the Blue Origin New Shepard space rocket is quietly waiting on the launch pad.

How about that. The boss of a parcel delivery company is sending an actor into space in a giant pencil.

“Somewhere out there,” said one of the presenters, “Leondard Nimoy is watching.”

Maybe. But I was under the impression they didn’t get on, on the set of Star Trek. If anything, Leonard Nimoy’s probably watching George Takei grow more and more furious about the whole thing.

Space travel still amazes me. Only six decades separate the Wright Brothers and the Apollo 11 mission, and here, just over a hundred years after someone figured out how to fly a bicycle, there are a few people (admittedly billionaires) making it commercially possible for us to float above the Karman line.

“That up there, is the future,” says Shatner on video, “Taking the pollution out of the Earth and putting it up there, that has got to be the future.”

Close your ears if you’re not a fan of capitalism, I thought. It all sounds good, but polluting the big pond to detoxify the little one is probably just as terrible as it sounds.

The gantry retracted. I’m guessing that’s the point of no return for the astronauts. The aft fins get checked next, then the rocket ignites and off they go. The plan is that the rocket separates from the capsule, then slowly, the capsule tumbles back from weightlessness to Earth.

-

“I hope I never recover from this,” he said, standing in the dust of the West Texan desert. Shatner was overwhelmed by the speed, at the vastness and quickness of the blue sky, and the moment he saw how vulnerable we are in this skin-like atmosphere.

“It’s so thin! And then you’re moving at two thousand miles an hour, and in instant you’re in the black of space, and it’s death. It’s nothingness, it’s death," he marvelled, "Everybody in the world should do this.”

Jeff Bezos listened carefully, watching Shatner from behind his sunglasses. The actor tried to compose himself but was clearly overwhelmed by his experience.

“What you’ve done,” he said, laying a big hand on Bezos’s shoulder, “...is incredible.”

There is an irony isn’t there, that the fragility of our planet was witnessed by a millionaire, blasted into space by a billionaire. Fragility, yes, only visible because of itself; the poverty, the pain, the inequality, the dirt of a world that’s boiling into oblivion, while pushing a handful of people into the obscenity of riches - yet without that inequality, Amazon could not exist, and we’d not know how ‘Captain Kirk’ really feels about space travel. Jeff Bezos, who could probably solve poverty and still have his bus fare home, clearly has a plan that’s more about tomorrow than it is today.

I’m not getting political about Amazon by the way, nor Branson, nor Musk. I think the world is far more complicated than I understand it to be, and the responsibility of the super wealthy is probably a tougher calling for them than anyone really knows.

I’m not criticising Shatner either. It was touching to see him express such vulnerability in the face of a humbling experience. Around him in that early morning sunlight, crew members and company executives were popping corks, whooping and spraying each other with expensive champagne to celebrate a successful flight. Bezos, the boss, just ignored all that and listened as a 90 year old man poetically explained something he knew to be almost indescribable about life, about death and about humanity, all from the view of 100,000 feet.

I thought that scene, in the shadow of a space capsule, touched down in the desert, was quite moving.

SPEEDY SCIENCE

As a treat, Sammy pulled out a bag of Starburst from her shopping, and beamed at me.

“Science experiment!” she said, happily. After she had miraculously found a bag of Opal Fruits the other day, I knew where she was going, and I was all in.

I was super-excited. My head set to designing all manner of controlled experiments with blindfolds and palate cleansers, with rulers, and the kitchen scales, and of course a series of taste-tests to ascertain our various hypotheses about Opal Fruits versus Starbursts. It was exhilarating.

“I’ll document it!” I said, grabbing my phone for photographs and my notebook for data. Everything needed to be meticulously done, carefully prepared so that there was as little room for bias as possible. I would, I thought, line up similar colours - red, green, orange from both bags and start with a visual test. Then, with postulates forming about the smell, size and flavour of each colour compared to its counterpart, I’d design some way of working out whether Opal Fruits were indeed sweeter, juicier, more flavoursome than their watered-down descendants.

I looked around, suddenly snapping out of my daydream.

“Yeah,” she said, munching, “Definitely prefer Opal Fruits. They’re um…” a hand rustled into the bag, “Just nicer.”

It was then that I concluded that Sammy and I have very different approaches to science. She had come up with a hypothesis (Opal Fruits are better), an experiment (actually just eating sweets), her own data (taste), and a conclusion (Opal Fruits are better) in the time it had taken her to unwrap a Starburst and pop it in. That’s some speedy science - empirical, uncontrolled, based on personal observation, and entirely unrepeatable or subject to peer review, but speedy science nonetheless.

I smiled and put down my notebook.

I think what I should do is sneakily take a selection of both types of sweet and then give them to her when she’s not expecting it. During the washing up, maybe while driving. In fact, if I hold out a Starburst and tell her it’s an Opal Fruit, I wonder whether she’d know… Perhaps two can play at speedy science? I'll keep you posted.

AERIAL ACROBATICS

I saw a plane doing acrobatics today. I checked it on FlightRadar; I’m pretty sure it was a little Piper type PA aircraft. Though, from a distance, it looked a bit like an old biplane.

I don’t know what those manoeuvres are called. I had a friend once who was really into aviation, and he knew his victory rolls from his hammerheads, but honestly, I recognised a loop-the-loop, and that was about it.

At one point, the little plane soared vertically up into the air, twisting against the clouds, and then it hung there for a half-second. I think the pilot turned off the engine.

Gravity took over. The tiny plane started plummeting at speed. At the last minute, the engine spluttered into life, the plane levelled out, and they were off for another loop. I had no doubt the pilot knew exactly what they were doing, but nevertheless, it is a bit of a heart-stopping moment.

Like when your friend announces they’re suddenly going to try left-foot braking while you’re a passenger. Or a no-hands-wheelie with you perched on the handlebars. That kind of youthful adrenaline I don’t think I need.

That being said, there was something very exciting about watching it from down below: the deliberate act of shutting down your engines and trusting yourself to gravity for a few seconds; the utter faith in your plane starting up while you dive, and then the similar faith in yourself being able to pull out of it, lest you be dashed to smithereens and ending up as the second headline on the BBC News.

The more I stood there watching, the more I thought about it - that mix of trusting you and trusting something outside of you is a great picture of faith. It’s not relying on God to do everything for you, and it’s not leaning on just your ability either: it’s a delicate balance of plane and pilot, engine and training, gifting and wisdom.

I stood out there for a while, watching FlightRadar and listening out for other passenger planes on their way to Rome, Dublin, Bermuda, and a few other far-flung locations. A Honda HA-420 flew over at what the site told me was 9,000 ft: a private jet no doubt - a little tube of comfort and stress. I sighed.

I’d much rather be doing the loop-the-loop, I think. 

OPAL FRUITS

Sammy bought a packet of Opal Fruits yesterday. I’m not even joking. Pre-Starburst, classic 1980s, full-flavour, bona fide Opal Fruits.

“Where did you get those from?” I asked, open-eyed, as though I were eight years old.

“Waitrose,” she munched, casually.

You should taste them! Thirty years of history melted away in my mouth. Orange, lemon, strawberry! What a succulent treat!

Is this the ‘sunlit upland’ of Brexit they keep going on about? A sort of return to the good old days before the bureaucrats of Brussels shook all the E numbers out of sweets, and banned the bendy banana? Are Opal Fruits back because we’re not subject to EU regulations any more?

I’m verging on politics here, even if a little sarcastically. I don’t want to do that. I don’t have some dreamy-eyed idea that the 1980s were full of magical rainbows; we were children - of course the world looked sweeter, just as the 50s does to the Boomers. As hard as it might be to believe, the Zs will probably also look back at these years with the same rose-tinted whimsy one day, too.

Speaking of Zs, Ys, Millennials, etc… what do you think of the name Opal Fruits as opposed to Starburst? There was uproar when it changed in the mid 90s. As a physics student, I used to riff about how ‘starburst’ ought to be a stream of high energy photons and gamma rays. You might find it hard to believe but nobody found it funny at the time.

But is ‘Opal Fruits’ really a better name? I mean Opal is a mineral, no more suited to fruit-bearing than a lump of carbon. And do you find it equally interesting how the name shift went from describing the thing (the fruit) to the effect of the thing (the taste)?

Anyway, I could only have one or two OFs from Sammy’s packet before I started going dizzy with sugar and nostalgia. Heaven only knows what would have happened if she’d brought in a Marathon.