The Limiting Factor is battery technology!

According to Lenin  "Socialism is the Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country."  So we now have  another socialist revolution.  (The first relied on the dynamic provision of electricity from the Power Stations.)  The current one is based on the battery which powers our newly mobile lifestyle - pacemakers - hearing aids - watches -  mobile phones - computers - cars!

However, aren't we are always told that the limiting factor is battery technology? Our cars will will need to be recharged every night. Our laptops and cellphones run out of juice just when we need them. So for  how long can a battery run? a day, a month, a year?

So here's a reminder from Willem Hackmann concerning the longevity of batteries which I heard in a lecture about  "Science in Oxford".
170 years! and still going strong.   "The collection of the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford possesses a remarkable instrument that has been ringing almost continuously since it was purchased fromWatkins & Hill of London in 1840."

Taken out of Context!

I have always felt rather sceptical when a politician who has been criticized for something that he has said has responded by saying that his words have presented 'out of context'.
However, last week I had the opportunity of a couple of days work transcribing Hebrew into English for a TV documentary. It was the first time I had seen how a TV film was created - the editing - translating - transcribing - commenting etc.
It was an eye-opener for me and removed much of the scepticism alluded to above. I had never been involved in anything like this before and had no idea about what goes into the making of a newsworthy television documentary.
This was the setup. The Reporter did not speak the language of the country from which he was reporting. So he was provided with an interpreter who provided him with a real-time translation. The Reporter then 'summarized' the interpreter's words for the benefit of the television audience. So there were two transformations of the original into the audio which would be broadcast.

The Editor had at his disposal both the original words, the Interpreter's words, and the Reporter's words. However, the Editor not speaking the source language, had no way of evaluating the accuracy of the Reporter's words. So here I, the Translator, was brought in to provide an independent translation of the original words, so that the accuracy of the Reporter's work could be evaluated. It was hard but fascinating work. The Video Editor had at his disposal multiple data streams which he could manipulate at will, cutting and pasting, so that he could 'mix and match' audio and video. He could put anything into anybody's mouth! This was what I meant when I said that I could now imagine a justified complaint of 'words being taken out of context'.
However, in fact I was most impressed by the Editor's search for accuracy and truth. In each case my translation was referred to in order to see how well it matched the real-time Interpreter's words, and how well the Reporter had summarized the Interpreter's words. Where I thought that the Reporter's summary was not wholly warranted by the original the Editor was willing to make changes.
It was an enlightening experience which provided me with a lot of respect for the creators of News Reports. Let's hope that they all work to the high standards to which I can testify in this case.

Nicholas Winton

I was present at a gathering in celebration of  Nicholas Winton's hundredth birthday at the Chabad House in Oxford. I won't tell the story of Nicholas Winton here. It is well known and there is a link above to the Wikipedia entry about him. It was remarkable to see someone of his age who was so articulate and able to interact easily with his  audience. But astonishingly the most interesting thing about him was his ordinariness.
An ordinary man who achieved the extraordinary. Here was someone who at a a time when others were were wringing their hands in despair just acted and saved the lives of  669 children! How did he do it?
To quote him:  "If in 1938 I had taken the advice of most of the people who were seeing exactly the same as what I was seeing in Czechoslovakia. There were limits to the number of families that could move and that meant that the children also couldn’t move. Could the children be moved without the families? Everybody knew that it was a problem. Everybody I talked to was quite certain it’s hopeless - you won’t ever be able to get the permission to do that, but nobody had asked." 
So he asked the British Foreign Office and gained the permissions!
The moral was he said "Above all, believe that nothing is impossible. If it is not impossible there must be a way of doing it. Don’t be content to think what other people say that you can’t do it."
He also expressed it in this way. "If it's not impossible then it's possible. So do it."
Such a simple idea but what leverage it provided.
Of course there may always be incredulity at the disparity between man and his achievements but to witness it as I did when one of the elderly kindertransport children said to to him "thank you father"  enabled me to feel the magnitude of his achievement. 

Why did I wait so long?

Why did I wait so long before getting to know the Bodleian?

Well, I used to have a card for the Taylorian library which I utilised for their Yiddish collection but when I came to renew it recently I was told that it had been taken under the wing of OULS (Oxford University Library Services) and I should now replace my Taylorian card with a Bodleian card.
The number of libraries  made available by the Bodleian readers card was a big surprise. And the upper reading room is absolutely stunning!

I have always wanted to go into the Radcliffe Camera so I expect that it will be one the first buildings I visit on my exploratory tour.

CEIIINOSSSTTUV

CEIIINOSSSTTUV- Hooke's Law (more commonly expressed as  F = -kx) as I learned in this year's annual Charles Simonyi Lecture delivered by Timothy Gowers! (Incidentally Timothy Gowers claimed that he was the first mathematician to  deliver a Simonyi lecture.) The subject of his lecture was Open Source Mathematics and CEIIINOSSSTTUV was his example for Closed Source Mathematics! He explained that when Robert Hooke, who appears in the picture, had formulated his Law he did not want to  make it public immediately. 

But, wanting to lay a claim to the intellectual copyright before anyone else did, he created the anagram CEIIINOSSSTTUV  - Ut tensio, sic vis (as the extension, so the force) which he would be able to use were the primacy of his work to be disputed!

The thrust of Gowers's lecture was that the Web can now transform mathematical research from being a private cerebral activity to a collaborative activity of many minds. He described this in action working on the density Hales-Jewett theorem (DHJ). He led into the mathematics very gently starting with noughts and crosses so that anyone could follow. But   what struck me personally, not being a mathematician, over and above the efficacy of the collaborative method, were the following effects.

The first was the ethical effect, both personal and social, of this way of working, and the second the illuminating effect both  for the future researcher and for the historian of mathematics.

He began by discussing the concept of CREDIT.
He said that in order to obtain the credit for an intellectual achievement considerable importance was attached to finding the first correct solution and so work was carried out privately.

Striking examples of the above were the example of Robert Hooke quoted above, 

and more recently of Andrew Wiles (famous for proving Fermat's Last Theorem) who worked in secret for seven years, before announcing his solution at a conference in Cambridge.

Moreover the theorem when presented publicly in its polished form gave no insight into the thoughts, and the many paths that led nowhere on the way on the way to the solution. He considered that an account of the many tergiversations was extremely valuable for other researchers working in similar fields.

This was he claims the first time the full working record of the solution of a hard mathematical research problem has been made available. 

He published his work under the name of Polymath1 and not as by a single person or several people. Evaluation of the work for CREDIT could be carried out by referring to the blog accompanying the article which documented  everybody's contributions, whether fruitful or otherwise.

From the notes which he kindly sent  to me:

At the moment, if you have a good idea in connection with an unsolved problem, there is a strong incentive not to share it (unless you have completely solved the problem).

But what if a problem was tackled by many people, all collaborating, and working \out in the open"? The incentive structure completely changes:

now one should share one's ideas as quickly as possible.

February 1st: project launched. Proof outline suggested, modelled on proof of a related result.

February 6th: already 200 comments and well over a thousand \lurkers".

February 8th (approx): first idea emerged that clearly represented a signicant advance in understanding of the problem.

February 9th: technical simplication proposed that made calculations much easier.

February 12th: wiki set up as somewhere to put background material and more detailed explanations of ideas that arose in the blog discussion.

February 21st: dierent proof outline suggested, modelled on a dierent proof
 of the related result.

February 25th: major lemma proved, analogous to major step of proof of the related result.

February 28th: second major lemma proved.

March 6th: serious diculty emerges.

March 8th: proof of related result modied to make it an easier model to use.

March 9th: complete sketch of a solution to the problem written.

Solution generalizes straightforwardly to proof of the full DHJ theorem and not just the special case we started out trying to solve.

Open Doors Day

Last weekend was Heritage Day Open Doors. Doors usually closed

are briefly opened. In Oxford this mainly means the college gates. In addition there are guided tours over and above those which are normally available to the visiting public.

For me this was not only Open Doors but Open Eyes. For many years I had been sitting at a PC in a room overlooking the 001 Taxi office. Little did I know that I was looking at in part possibly the oldest mediaeval building in Oxford and that the true name of the lane was not New Inn Yard but Kepeharm’s Lane! This I learned on Victoria Azaz’s excellent tour of Oxford's Jewish mediaeval Heritage. And as much of what is popularly known rests on the work of the Oxford historian Cecil Roth I have headed the blog with a sketch of him on the website. The map below is taken from his book ‘The Jews of medieval Oxford’.

There is also newer map, the work of Pam Manix.

To coincide with Open Doors Day the Oxford Jewish Community has launched its excellent website containing a wealth of information and valuable links to resources.

Being ‘town’ and not 'gown', entering the college gates is as if entering a parallel universe. From the extension and din of the street to the quiet enfolding quadrangle shocks the spirit into a surprised tranquillity.

Another surprise was the Reredos in All Souls Chapel , so massive, covering the entire wall. I was taken unawares.

On the 'town' side I heard an interesting lecture by Mark Davies in the Bangkok House about 'The Boatmen's Floating Chapel' . (The Bangkok House was itself a chapel for a while replacing the 'Floating Chapel' in the 1860s.)
From Wikipedia: John Jones's most unusual innovation was a houseboat – the "Boatman's Floating Chapel" – acquired in 1839, for use as a chapel serving the families working on the river and the canals. This boat was St Thomas' first chapel of ease; it was donated by H. Ward, a local coal merchant, and used until it sank in 1868. It was replaced by a chapel dedicated to St Nicholas, which remained in use until 1892.

Chrome

My son suggested that I try using Google's new browser called Chrome. He found it very fast. I have not long moved over from Internet Explorer to Firefox, and now he wants me to try yet another browser! I suppose though that I ought to. The browser is probably the most heavily used piece of software on the computer, so that improvements here are very significant.

I have only just downloaded it and my first impression is that its GUI is very different to that of Internet Explorer or Firefox, and it will take me quite a while to get used to it! The most striking and immediately noticed difference is the appearance of the empty Chrome window. It is extremely uncluttered and gives an impression of simplicity just like the traditional google.com search page - just one box to enter your data. And, what is new is that the data can be the sort of data that you would put into a search box or the sort of data that you would put into a browser address bar. Chrome guesses what you want as you type, and as most requests are repetitions of requests previously made, it guesses right pretty quickly.

The second thing noticed almost immediately is that when you request a new tab, the tabbed window opens with thumbnails of the most recently visited pages and with bookmarks rather than being empty. So you don't need to go to history or bookmarks to find the page you want. However, despite the deceptive simplicity of Chrome's GUI I now have to get down to actually learning how to use it!

There are a number of videos which describe various interesting features about Chrome. There is also a long introductory video giving the background to the development of Chrome and explaining the technology behind the scene. Most impressive is the multi process structure of Chrome making each tabbed window a separate process so that if one locks up the others are not affected. This would appear to be my most immediate benefit.