Two Second Memory

I’m reading a book called H₂0: A biography of water by Phillip Ball (2000, Phoenix). I was in a book shop today and happened to see the author’s name and after having read and enjoyed Critical Mass: The Physics of Society by Philip Ball (2004, William Heinemann) I decided to buy it.

After reading a few pages I started to get annoyed with the use of the word billion. That’s a little harsh I hear you say! That’s as may be but the word has no meaning.

The original meaning of the word “… was purposely formed in the 16th c. to denote the second power of a million …” (OED (1989 Oxford University Press)). Wikipedia gives the date of 1475. The problem lies with those wily French mathematicians who changed the meaning of the word such that groups of figures were divided into groups of three not six. And thus we have now what is known as the long and short scales.

The net result of all this, as mentioned above, is that it really has no meaning. So if I say that some thing is a thousand billion, in the long scale it would be 10¹⁵ whereas using the short scale it would be 10¹² (which would be a billion in the long scale, but that’s only confusing the issue).

This becomes even more annoying when well respected magazines like Scientific American use a thousand billion which could be written as a million million (given that the US use the short scale). Scientific American should really now better as it is widely available in many countries using both the long and the short scale. It would only take a change to their style guide to ensure that it is written in an unambiguous way. What’s more given that Scientific American is a science journal so why on earth don’t they use the scientific scientific notation or even better the engineering notation?

Then there is the ISO standard of prefixes which is a fabulous thing. There are even guidelines on how to use them. So instead of me reading the sentence “… one million-billionth of a second.” How about using “… one atto second” (long scale) or “… on femto second”. Now you might not know what these mean but at least you can look them up.

Filed by rgh at 23:48 under Uncategorized
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I recently looked after a house for a friend while he was oversees. As a thank you he had his Sydney Morning Herald redirected to us. Now, if you don’t know, the SMH gets thrown into the garden wrapped in industrial strength glad wrap (cling film). One morning while going through the delicate process of trying to extricate the paper from the glad wrap I decided to do a little experiment; I measured the size of the glad wrap and it comes to 400mm x 500mm which is 0.2 square meters. This doesn’t seem very much but if you consider that the circulation of the SMH is 211 700 during the week and 365 000 on Saturday — I won’t include it’s sister paper, The Sun Herald in this.

Now lets assume that 20% of the circulation are delivered to people’s homes every day (I’ve got no idea if this number is correct but it serves as a conservative estimate, especially considering that you save 21% by having it delivered) this means that there are 42 340 papers during the week and 146 000 (the paper is split into two on Saturday and wrapped separately so I’ve double the number) on Saturday which equals 357 700 over the course of one week giving a resultant weekly total of 71 540 square meters of glad wrap. This is equivalent to 9.73 soccer pitches every week and is a lot of plastic. I fact per year it amounts 3.72 million square meters or 3.72 square kilometers ever year.

There are a few assumptions in the above analysis which some may question but I’ve tried to keep it conservative so it’s possible that the number may be higher. But all in all there is a huge amount of plastic being used to wrap a newspaper for all of a few hours. Whatever happened to the paper boy?

Filed by rgh at 14:28 under Environment, General
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Welcome to my first blog post. A number of people have asked why do you want to blog? Indeed I’ve asked myself the same question a number of times. The reasons are threefold: I want to use it as a mechanism to crystallise my thoughts; my partner has one and she has found it really useful and interesting and finally I want to start writing.

I’ve recently been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) which at the age of 38 is highly unusual — most people are diagnosed at age eight — and one of things ADD people do is have so many things on the go at once they never get anything done. TODO lists run to hundreds of items but none of them get done, there’s to many other things to do! So this blog is somewhat of an experiment to try and focus myself. As a work colleague says “Focus Richard, focus”.

I have many thoughts that just pop into my head whether it be when I’m cycling to work, reading, or on the bus. Most of them are lost. A lot of them almost certainly deserve to be lost but some, I think, would be quite nice to keep (or at least make an active decision to keep them or not). I can also be prone to ranting (I like to think this is quite entertaining but I suspect that it gets rather tedious after a while) so if I commit my rants to paper(?) then I will do more research into the subject of rant and thereby make them more informative and weed out the dross. A rant filter if you like.

The second reason for my blog is that my parner, Limes and Lycopene has recently started a blog and I’ve found the whole process extremely interesting. Our discussions in the pub about how she might go about doing it (I’m the geek and she’s the naturapath) and, later, all the people she interacts with. Her reasons are very different to mine but it’s given me an exposure that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

Finally I don’t get to write much at my current place of work and whilst I find writing a bit of a chore I actually quite enjoy it; it’s that whole thing about getting started (another classic ADD behaviour) once you start it’s good, but starting it is oh so hard.
So that in a nutshell is why I’m starting this blog. I hope it won’t be too turgid and hopefully there may be something that someone finds interesting/funny/controversial. Failing that I’ll just keep it as a diary.

Filed by rgh at 14:43 under General
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