Today, 31st October 2006, I went trick or treating for the first time. Digi had a great evening, knocking on doors and saying “ickor eet!”, before politely reaching into the bowl presented to him, and taking a single sweetie (normally a lollypop, but occasionally “ocklate”). He got quite into recognizing which houses were up to being terrorized by children (i.e. those with pumpkins outside) and would run from door to door with a fistful of sweets.
“Digi, shall I hold some of those for you?”
“No, Digi hold them”
When we got home, after two lollipops, some ocklate, and a marshmallow, Digi had his teeth brushed, and went to sleep. Mummy and Daddy then ate some of the left over ocklate. Sshh. Don't tell.
Everyone knows that the unit of measurement, the metre, is defined as the distance travelled by light (in a vacuum) in 1/299,792,458 of a second. So says the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (see their web site for more information.
They go on to tell you that “the second is the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom”.
From these “base units” there are a number of “derived units” that can be, er derived. For example, velocity, which is measured in metres per second. Or, if you are the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, you could presumably measure it in the distance travelled by light whilst a caesium 133 atom transits between its two hyperfine levels around 30.5 times. Or something.
Now, we didn't used to measure metres and seconds in terms of caesium decay and the speed of light. No, we used to do things based upon natural occurrences in the real world. For distance, we measured things in “feet”, which corresponded to the size of your feet. Or “hands” which corresponded to the size of your hands. Or “pouce” which was something to do with your fingers. Or “yards” (not sure about this one - perhaps people had very small gardens in those days?). For time, everything is measured in terms of the period of rotation of the earth (in other words, a day), or the duration of one full orbit of the sun (in other words, a year). The year was neatly divided up into 12 “months”, which were each (approximately) linked into the phases of the moon. And the number 12 sort of cropped up again when dividing the day into useful bitesized chunks (i.e. hours).
And it isn't just time and distance - it turns out that all sorts of units were originally based in everyday objects and observances made by our ancestors. For example, take degrees - a 90 degree angle (a “right angle”) was originally defined by the shape of a cow's posterior (interesting factoid : a cow's arse is the only naturally occurring right angle in nature - consequently our ancestors were fascinated by cow's arses, and there is widespread evidence that many cultures joined all of the stars in the northern hemisphere together to make an enormouse cow's arse, which they then worshipped).
The Pound (as in weight, denoted by the symbol 'lb', originally meaning Libra - a unit of Roman weight), was originally defined by a large blunt stone called a Pound, used for killing elderly relatives who had become a burden to society. It was found that the weight of the Pound was actually quite critical - too light, and you'd just knock them out, too heavy and the authorities may begin to suspect foul play. Note that in European countries, they had a similar device made of metal, called the kill-a-gran.
More next time….
People often say to me “Hey Nik, you're a happening dude (albeit one who blogs infrequently) with a largely excellent taste in music, as a busy working father, how do you get to hear great new music”. Actually, that's not entirely true - no-one has ever said that to me. But they should do. And if they did, this is what I'd say:-
Why, thank you for asking. I'd have to say there are three places where I've heard great new music over the past couple of years. Firstly, Word Magazine has introduced me to James Hunter, Midlake, Tungg, The Honeymoon, Imogen Heap, Seth Lakeman and many others, via its excellent cover mounted CD. Unlike most other covermount CDs I could mention, this is invariably crammed with excellent music that I haven't previously heard, with very few duff tracks of tedious R&B (aka mobile-phone-ringtone-flavoured-playground-chants).
Secondly, I'm a regular listener to Late Junction, evenings on Radio 3. This gets downloaded and popped onto my iPod. Verity Sharp and Fiona Talkington play an eclectic range of folk, modern classical, electronica, world, ancient, jazz, delta blues, avant-garde etc etc. Most of it defies categorisation, which is a good thing in my book. Amongst the albums I've bought from hearing the Late Junction are The Milk Eyed Monster by Joanna Newsom, and Alice by Tom Waits. One of the most appealing things about this programme is that even if you don't like what they are playing now, just wait a few minutes and something entirely different will come along. Another appealing thing is that you very rarely hear anything that you have heard previously. Check out the Late Junction Website where you can download the playlists of recent shows, and even download the shows themselves (in horrible RealAudio format).
My final plug would be for Rough Trade's Counter Culture series of CDs. which typically contain around 50 tracks (for a tenner!) ranging the full gamut of popular music. There are lots of “car crash” moments where quite bewildering tracks are juxtaposed against each other (e.g. Daniel Johnston's “The Beatles” segues into a version of Gary Numan's “Cars” played by a steel drum band (The Katzenjammers, no less), and then David Shrigley reading out a bunch of things not to do. Quite Astounding.
That's what I'd say, more or less. And I wonder why I don't have many friends…