The s?ien?e of spelling

I'm sitting in a café. At the next table a group of teenagers chatter cheerfully. I've just overheard:

“My chemistry teacher I swear you can't believe him like nuffin. He spell 'science' like it got a "c" in it, man!"

Military expenditure: a top ten snapshot

As background to several disparate bits of current research, I've been assembling tables of background data on national expenditures in different economic areas.

The figures have to be taken with a pinch of salt, since bases for classification vary from country to country and derived compound measures depend upon assumptions made by me or by others. Nevertheless, those shown below are sufficiently correct to give a feel for current overall pattern.

The tables show the top ten military spenders from three different perspectives:

1. crude national military expenditure in billions of US dollars, and as a percentage of the world total.
2. crude expenditure in US dollars per capita.
3. expenditure as a percentage of the country's gross domestic product.

Here comes the sun...

Mediocre chemist though I am, one of my earliest heart stopping scientific epiphanies came with introduction to an equation summarising photosynthesis of water and carbon dioxide into sugars. It was so beautiful in its economical depiction of life’s dependence on our neighbourhood star. The sun is, both literally and figuratively, the centre of almost everything we are and do: there is little, if anything, in our world or our view beyond, which is not affected by it in some way. Though small on many astronomical scales (Cristiano Sabiu, in relation to work NGS hosted work on galactic distribution, comments^[1] that he treats "billions of stars ... as a point source mass"), from a terrestrial viewpoint it dwarfs and dominates everything else in its immediate eight cubic parsec vicinity.

Little wonder, then, that science has always studied its idiosyncrasies and mood swings, its large gestures and its microscopic effects, its long term behaviour and short term tantrums. With the arrival of scientific computing, that study has become ever more comprehensive and precise – but it will, at least for the foreseeable future, be a statistically driven enterprise.

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1. See references list at [more...] link

Virtual books at the British Library

After recently giving a talk on the use of text within visual art, I followed up some suggestions (thank you, Maureen) and questions from the very lively and participatory audience. One place to which this process took me was the Virtual Books index at the British library.

There is an excellent online Lindisfarne Gospels, a Qur'an and a Hebrew Bible (these links take you to static text/image pages; there are also animated page-turning versions). But I recommend looking through the whole list, in all its representative variety from Alice through botanical illustration to Leonardo, maps and Mozart.

Bizarrest, bizarrer, and merely bizarre...

Within an interesting, as always, post yesterday (Bizarre notes, bizarre cheers), JSBlog commented that...

“... the more I read of US school/college traditions ... the gladder I am I went to British ones, where you can just attend, get your education, and leave. Ritual chants are just the tip of the iceberg of a set of effectively compulsory tribal systems...”

When I read it, I simply thought "hear, hear" (my limited observation of US academic life confirming my agreement) and read on. Having thought about it over the hours since, I still agree and just as strongly – but have also realised that British education is not itself free of bizarre undergrowth. While post-compulsory education in the United Kingdom (and more widely in western Europe) is certainly refreshingly different in that way from its US equivalents, there are oddities (I would personally say unhealthy oddities) further down the chain.

As a thirteen year old I moved from a coeducational Australian school where you sank or swam amongst your contemporaries according to the usual vagaries of children everywhere to a British single sex school. Here I had to be thrown into the fishpond. Teachers who would later send me home because I had forgotten my school cap showed no sign of noticing that green water running from my sodden uniform was forming a malodorous pool around my desk. The following day, I had to be stripped behind the fives court and then retrieve my clothes from the branches of various trees. Passing teachers again showed no surprise at seeing a slightly podgy boy climbing a tree in the nude to retrieve his underwear. I thought at first that this was dislike of me, personally; but as time and a half went by, I observed that it happened to all newcomers and staff even made jokes about it – except when a boy complained, in which case they made pompous remarks about the communal value of initiation ceremonies. Then there was the French teacher (reputedly an infantry colonel in the 1939 to 1945 war) who made us run around the grounds in our underwear, shooting each other with water pistols containing red ink ... and refused to teach us unless we took part. Let's not get into the strange behaviour (not, I hasten to add, paedophilic ... just ritualistically odd) of the games master during pre and post sports changing times.

Things have improved immeasurably in the decades since 1965 ... but I have heard of both the ducking and the stripping ceremonies in different schools within the past year, and while games masters are generally respected professionals, the occasional exception is not unknown.

Moving back in time, at ten years old I briefly attended a primary school on the Sussex coast. Daily assembly contained a number of mystifying rituals, including the singing (every day) of Sussex by the sea, then British grenadiers and finally Men of Harlech. (Each of these is available in different versions; the links are to the closest I can find to those we sang.) That sequence is interesting because, while all of them are of a martial cast, they become progressively more so. By the time we started the day's lessons we had imbibed enough blood and guts for a schlock movie. Furthermore, they become increasingly distant from we who sang them daily. Sussex, I concede, was relevant; but the clearly male voice, culminating in “the girls so kind that we left behind”, was odd for a school whose students were 50% girls. British grenadiers had no obvious relevance to anything at all. Harlech was the other side of the British isles and several centuries; not to mention the other side of the Saxon/Celt divide.

No ... I still prefer the British model to the US one; it has more flexibility, more freedom to choose ideas, less pressure to rigid conformity; the US system is at the "bizarrest" end of the spectrum, the British equivalents "merely bizarre" ... but we are not ideally housed for unlimited stone throwing.

Slaving over half a trillion words...

A number of emailed queries suggest that I may, in my (19 December last year) "Picking over half trillion words" post, have inadvertently made light of the task facing anyone who wants to do their own analysis of Google's raw data sets. Here is a quick run down on what to expect; I think it worth the effort myself, but not everyone shares my view of what constitutes light entertainment.