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OriginPro 8.5.1

Software publishers vary in their approach to version numbering and frequency of issue. Some only issue major, full digit upgrades, and then at longish intervals. Others go for small but frequent issues. With some products, a third digit increment (as here between OriginPro 8.5 and 8.5.1) would signal a minor maintenance issue of interest to particular users; with OriginLab it indicates a useful general development, which will reward the effort of updating. So what has changed since release 8.5?

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I'm just a molecule in a fullerene cage...

Call me a sad git, but I find myself entranced by this: that Kurotobi and Murata (at Kyoto University) report successfully opening large job lots of buckyballs, stuffing a single molecule of water into each, then clicking the traps shut again.

“Water normally exists in hydrogen-bonded environments, but a single molecule of H₂O without any hydrogen bonds can be completely isolated within the confined subnano space inside fullerene C60. We isolated bulk quantities of such a molecule by first synthesizing an open-cage C₆₀ derivative whose opening can be enlarged in situ at 120°C that quantitatively encapsulated one water molecule under the high-pressure conditions. The relatively simple method was developed to close the cage and encapsulate water.”

My associated mental image is of an manically overpopulated PacMan screen...

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• Kei Kurotobi & Yasujiro Murata, "A Single Molecule of Water Encapsulated in Fullerene C60", Science 29 July 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6042 pp. 613-616DOI: 10.1126/science.1206376

Superglued

I am standing in a shop, looking for superglue, when the ever present background music resolves itself into a song which I knew well when I was sixteen. As it happens, I recently saw the title in an internet jukebox listing sent to me by a friend, a couple of weeks ago; before that, I'd not thought of it for most of the 40 years since my teens ended.

I shall write more later, when I've time and space to think; for now, I'll just record the moment and then go back to finding that superglue.

[...time passes...]

And here we are again. It is later.

The song was by a group called Union Gap (which I always assumed, for no obvious reason that I can now justify, to be named after the place in Washington state, roughly equidistant from Seattle and Portland). Googling both song and group, now, I discover that memory is at fault: it was "The Union Gap, featuring Gary Puckett" (and, shortly after this one song which I remember, changed to "Gary Puckett and the Union Gap"). I have no memory whatsoever of Gary Puckett ... but then, I have rarely been good at knowing the names of individual members within a band.

Anyway ... to return to the subject ... the song itself was Young girl. In it, the first person voice is (to quote Wikipedia's delicately neutral wording) "a man distressed to find out his lover is under an acceptable age".

Perceptions change with time, age and experience. The reason I find it worthwhile to stop and think about this now is that, within the first few bars, I became aware of a sharp discontinuity in my own perceptions of this song between "then" and "now". What mix of time, age and experience, I am curious to know, accounts for that? What does it say about me, about the world, about the times?

When I was sixteen, we listened to Young girl often. In the youth club, on café jukeboxes, on the radio, on Dansette record players at home in our rooms... it wasn't in my usual line of musical preference (I was a folk rock sort of youngster) but it had a good, compelling tune and rhythm which got into my bloodstream and drove me along just as much as anyone else. The first two words, belted out loud but slow, guaranteed my attention ... and the next five, rattled off fast, held it:

YOUNG ... girl ... GetOutOfMyMind!

We (the teenagers around my age at the time ... or, more accurately, the teenaged boys around my age at the time), muttered to one another that the song was about Lindsey Cook*, a bubbly, vivacious and dramatically well developed fifteen year old in the class below me who spent all her free time with young soldiers (probably only a couple of years older than me) from the nearby military base. Looking back, I realise that this had less to do with moral judgment than with selfish envy: Lindsey, we felt, if truth be told, should be bestowing her attentions on us instead.

Now, four decades on, I find the song ... I can't think of a better word ... creepy.

Why is that?

Is it the result of working some of my time with vulnerable young people? Am I hearing echoes of two cases in which I saw young girls damaged by inappropriate relationships with older authority figures? Have I succumbed to that pernicious "bogeyman du jour", an obsession with fear of the pædophile behind every tree? Or have I just changed with the passing of time, become a boring old fart who has lost touch with his younger self?

Or all of the above, perhaps.

Whatever it is, I now feel my skin crawl when I hear the song (especially since discovering that Gary Puckett is still performing it today) – even as I find it impossible to eradicate the tune which, having been reheard, is now superglued into my neural pathways and won't ... “get out of my mind”.

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* Not, I should mention, her real name.

Hand ’is heye full hof harrer

Ray Girvan has just put up a JSBlog post entitled ’Arry and ’Arriet. It is, as always, fascinating (to me, anyway, since my interests and curiosities often run closely parallel to Ray's) ... but this post of mine has only the most tenuous connection with its substance. Instead, I found myself flicked back to childhood by the title itself.

My maternal grandfather played endless word games with me¹ and would often coach me through tongue twisters. One of my favourites, which he attributed to his friends ’Arry and ’Arriet (there you are – a connection at last!), was this evocation of an iconic moment from English mythology:

’Arold of Hengland
Sat hon ’is ’orse
With ’is ’awk hin ’is ’and
Hand ’is heye full hof harrer.

The specific memory which first slid into my mind when I read Ray's title was of walking along the lines of pea plants in my grandparents' huge garden², with my grandfather, when I was about four years old, trying to recite the whole thing with every deliberate error in place, whilst simultaneously scrumping peas straight from their pods...

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1. And probably, in doing so, played a very large part in making me the person I am. He teased me unmercifully (but always affectionately; I loved it and him) with things I couldn't understand. One strand was recounting to me conversations with, and the doings of, his friends ’Arry and ’Arriet. They always sounded wonderful people, who lived wonderful and joyous lives, and I wished that I could meet them ... I realise, now, of course, that they were imaginary ... and that they represented his own childhood, before a fluke of history and war shunted him into the military officer class where he adopted protective colouration with which he was never really comfortable.
2. The same garden which, on another occasion, saw me burying chocolate buttons under its boundary hedge...
   

Dear Diary...

The UK's BBC Radio 4 is currently airing a series in which various celebrities read from, and discuss, their teenage diaries. It's an amusing and sometimes insightful listen ... though my principal feeling is of astonishment at the fact of such teenaged journal keeping diligence.

I had a diary every year from as far back as I can remember, and was always very interested in the information which they contained, but contributed little to them of my own. None from my own teens survive, so far as I know, but if they did they would make for thin and unimpressive reading.

One diary, from a little earlier than my teens, did surface recently ... and illustrates the point. There are only four entries, all of them in the first two pages. Here is what one ten year old thought worth recording of his life, in early 1963, in the Pictorial Young Australian Chamber of Commerce Diary:

1st January : Stayed up to see new year in

2nd January : Overslept

6th January : Bad rash

8th January : Didn't feel well at first but OK now.

I don't, somehow, expect the BBC to call me any time soon...

A line back to my enemy

Chance connections...

Just over a year ago, I enthused over N D Wilson's fantasy novel 100 Cupboards. I then read the sequel, Dandelion fire, and was disappointed; it was well told, but somehow more ordinary than the first novel. Why do fantasy novels so often default to epic battles? I left it until now to read the third and final book, The chestnut king – which was better, though still less than the first. But, to get back to point: in this novel, a frequent image was the child protagonist following a grey fibre (invisible to others) which connected a wound in his cheek to the villainous witch who had caused it.

Now (this minute) I listen to Jesca Hoop (thank you, David) singing Enemy:

Beautiful
alone with my enemy
and share a bitter cup
of poisoning
my countenance
to see his face in mine
and follow every line
back to my enemy

The tenth anniversary of 9/11, as Jim Putnam posted on the day, has just passed. Seven years ago, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, I received an email from an Arab friend (which Jim, always perceptive and thoughtful, disseminated) reminding me that 9/11 itself was part of a violent cycle of tit for tat ... that there is always a “line back to my enemy”.

A shame that while we keep lines of that kind always alive (the child hero of The chestnut king, by the way, used his grey sickness line back to his enemy first to spy upon her and then to kill her ... she used hers in much the same way), we put much less time and effort into establishing lines of communication back to the same enemies.

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• N D Wilson,
  • 100 cupboards. 2007, New York: Random House. 9780375838828 (pbk.).
  • Dandelion fire. 2009, New York: Random House. 9780375838842.(pbk)
  • The Chestnut King. 2010, New York: Random House. 9780375838866 (pbk)
• Jesca Hoop, Kismet, "Enemy". 2007, New York: Red Int/Red Ink.

9/11 Thoughts

Guest posted by Jim Putnam

All of radio, news magazines and papers, and TV seem to be focusing on the ten year anniversary of 9/11. I’ve listened and read several, and no one has put their thoughts any way near what I have been thinking. So, here I go. It’s obviously true that 9/11 changed us all in many ways. I’m no different. I remember being at work in Raleigh when someone came in and said we needed to get to a TV. I watched and listened for a few minutes, and left the room before the second plane struck, very saddened. I knew that we would never be the same, individually or as a nation. I wasn’t, and am still not, smart enough to know how we would or still will change, but it seemed inevitable that we would. 9/11 stands foremost as a missed, a lost opportunity. I don’t think any of us could see the true opportunity available to stand atop a mountain and shine as a beacon of hope. Anger crowded reason aside, and we reacted, striking at those who hurt us. We struck at anyone who even looked like the image we built of a Muslim enemy. Because a few hundred, perhaps a thousand, Muslim extremists, perpetrated the terrible acts on 9/11, every one of a billion and a half Muslim people became our enemy. And no matter how much we say that they are not, our actions scream louder. We have become that which we feared the most.We have spent billions of dollars on our internal defenses, telling ourselves that we must be strong, and more billions on external war. I understand that we’ve spent well over a trillion dollars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A billion here, billion there, and pretty soon we have spent real money, to paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen. We’ve practically bankrupted ourselves with wars and fear. Hindsight is so much better than foresight. It’s not a good idea to play the “What if ..” game, and I don’t intend to do so now. What is, is, and no amount of what if can change it. But, perhaps it is good to consider what we could have done, along with those that we did. I’m not a political scientist, but it seems to me that there were certainly actions not taken that would have made an enormous, world changing difference. Perhaps we could have said to the world that we have been grievously hurt, but that we know we are strong enough as a nation that we don’t feel the need to respond to death with anger but with a firm resolve that we are better than that. Can we build on our strengths rather than try to build walls of isolation based on fear? It’s reasonably clear that there are those who wish us terrible harm. Yes, we must continue to protect ourselves, but isn’t it also clear that security needn’t be the enemy of freedom? To me it is. Very clear. We’ve always been a confident people, and yet we’ve allowed ourselves to relinquish our freedoms for what those who profit from “protecting” us. We’ve allowed our government to tell us that we need to be surrounded by walls, electronic and real. A million or so dollars spent to detect a bomb detection device could be better spent building bridges and infrastructure that make us stronger than any detection gizmo. I don’t have any idea what to do now about Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention Somalia, Libya, the Mideast, etc. I read that Afghanistan and Iraq would likely be failed countries two years after we would leave, and therefore we cannot leave. Supposedly, as failed countries they would be a training, or to us a more heinously loaded word, breeding ground for terrorists after we leave. Isn’t there a better way to preclude that than by occupying, fighting, and losing our troops? I believe there must be, and surely someone smarter than me has an idea how. I suppose the base question has to be, “What can be done now, after all these bodies, dollars, and mental, emotional, and physical strength of our country has already been committed?” What can we do NOW? I can’t answer that because I am not at all sure that there is anything that we can do. Nothing, nada, zilch, zero. But so long as words like these can still be written, in despair as well as hope, there may be time to do something, and there may be time for someone who is more capable than I to show us a plan.

Jim Putnam

Unscrambler X

Since Unscrambler last passed this way, then in version 9, its Norwegian publisher Camo Software has launched a 'new generation' image. At its heart is Unscrambler X (currently 10.1, the third sub-version in numerical release terms; some limitations in the original 10.0.0 have been resolved at this point), with additional products to extend its reach and power in particular directions. My review is based a month’s use of the 64-bit option, although a quick run through on a one gigabyte Windows XP system showed the 32-bit alternative to be completely happy there. I’ll combine a quick overview, for those who’ve not encountered Unscrambler in its previous incarnations, with a skim of what’s new. [more...]

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