Lavengro in Spain

Buying a Kindle

There has been quite a lot of fuss in the media here in the last week about the Amazon Kindle ebook reader. Oddly, amazon.co.uk doesn't seem to recognise its existence, while amazon.fr and amazon.de lead their home pages with a link to amazon.com, where it is available. There is no amazon.es.

Calypso

Spanish radio (RNE3) has taken it into its head to play (as I write) West Indian calypso music. Fine, great, but what will a Spanish audience make of this for example:

Ochroes sellin' five dollars for five
Six dollars for celery, four dollar for sive
Dey raise currants, and dey raise raisin
Egg is 12 and 14 dollars now a dozen
Eddoes is now five dollars my frien'
And is 10.25 a pound now for melongene
A lime long time was ol' talk and fun
But now a lime is 1.25 for one

Master and captain

We would hope that the Liverpool Daily Post could, even now, get its maritime terminology right, and I am pleased to say that it does.

The question of how to refer to the officer in command of a merchant vessel is a thorny one. My uncle, himself a master mariner with Cunard, used to get seriously cross when he heard people talk about the captain of a ship (he did admit that the Royal Navy could do what they damn well liked, but that was not expressed in a spirit of generosity and tolerance to his fellow seafarers). Yet, Wikipedia tells us that the Titanic left Southampton ‘with Captain Edward J. Smith in command’ and is right to do so. What is going on?

The clue is in the term ‘master mariner’. A merchant ship can only be commanded by an officer who has his master’s ticket, i.e. who has qualified as a master mariner (and in fact, for safety reasons, the first officer must also hold this qualification). Thus the officer in charge must be a master mariner and is the master of the vessel. Quite apart from that, the Merchant Navy has its hierarchical rank structure, which includes the rank of captain. So, Edward Smith, the master of the Titanic, had attained the rank of captain. We see this photo on Wikipedia, correctly captioned:

Unfortunately, the link from the picture leads us to this page, where Smith is described as the captain of the Titanic.

So what about the Liverpool Daily Post? Yesterday the Queen Mary 2 sailed into Liverpool, and the Post reports correctly (my emphasis):

QM2’s gross tonnage is 148,528 and her master, Commodore Bernard Warner, said: “You could fit Cunard’s very first ship, RMS Britannia, into our Britannia Restaurant onboard.”

So, a very big ship is commanded by an officer with a rank higher than captain. But he is still the master of the vessel.

The Post is also right to speak of gross tonnage. Wikipedia again:

Gross tonnage (often abbreviated as GT, G.T. or gt) is a unitless index related to a ship's overall internal volume. Gross Tonnage is different from Gross Register Tonnage. Neither Gross Tonnage nor Gross Register Tonnage are measures of the ship's displacement (mass) and should not be confused with terms such as deadweight tonnage, net tonnage, or displacement.

What the BBC means when it says

[Cunard’s] flagship vessel weighs 151,400 tonnes

is anybody’s guess. QM2’s mass (displacement) is 76,000 tonnes (Wikipedia). Now please excuse me while I go and weigh the anchor.

According to Commodore Warner in the Post (my emphasis):

“Although a new ship, QM2 is a traditional liner, not a cruise ship. A liner is a ship on a regular service across the ocean from point A to B. This ship is built for transatlantic service and we’ve done 25 return crossings this year. The other difference is this ship is designed to go faster. She has a very streamlined hull to slip gracefully and elegantly through the water, like her predecessor QE2 which was a ship in a million. Queen Mary 2 has 40% more steel in her hull than an equivalent-sized cruise liner, which means she is strengthened to cut through the Atlantic waves at speed, in all weathers all year. When you are crossing the oceans, you want to be on a proper liner. The ride and stability of this ship is amazing, even in a large ocean swell.”

What does the BBC have to say in its headline?

Huge cruise liner visiting city.

Brilliant!

I noticed this too:

Post: WITH repeated long blasts on her throaty whistle echoing off the Cunard Building, she boomed out notice of her Mersey debut.

BBC: One of the biggest passenger ships ever built - the Queen Mary 2 - has made its maiden visit to Liverpool.

but I’ll leave that one for another day.

A couple of bars

A bar I spotted in Barcelona the other day.

And a bar I didn’t go into in Sabadell in July.

Contactless payment functionality

I have just received a new Barclaycard. The covering letter tells me that it comes with ‘contactless payment functionality’. Now if I only knew what that meant, I’d be laughing!

Playing the trumpet

I have only just become aware that the Lesbian Teacher in Sex Scandal Shock Horror Sensation is a trumpet player. So pity poor old Dr Bowdler, who changed* Shakespeare's

Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the strumpet in my bed (Cymbeline III, IV)

to

Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the trumpet in my bed.

*OK, allegedly.

Roman Polanski

From Spiegel, a long and thoughtful piece well worth reading.

Victim or Perpetrator?

The Tragic Case of Roman Polanski

(…)

The truth is that the case is far too complicated to simply sign a petition in a moment of initial outrage or to rashly demand Polanski's release from prison. The legal procedures are confusing enough, but even more confusing is the bizarre and tragic life of a Holocaust survivor whose heavily pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered in 1969 by supporters of cult leader Charles Manson, a man with a swastika tattooed on his forehead.

The case revolves around many questions that do not lend themselves to quick answers, questions about the freedom of art and its limits, about the loss of perspective in the days of the sexual revolution and the drug culture, and about society's fascination with its stars, who are idolized and demonized at the same time. The case is about very important issues, issues of morality and law, atonement and justice and, most of all, about exactly how guilty Polanski is and whether his actions can even be excused.

(…)

Hairy Bikers: top TV chefs to tackle NHS food

If only. Traction man is a long-term patient in an NHS hospital. He has a blog on which he posts pictures of what he receives as food, and comments on it. For example:

The soup course never turned up... thank goodness for the main course. It's amazing what you can dredge up from the bottom of a septic tank. Bon appetit! Anyone know what it is?

He has been running an online vote for which celebrity chef should take over the NHS catering. The winners are The Hairy Bikers. Good luck to them. As Traction Man himself says, ‘Something has to be done because the NHS still serves up appalling food and the meals just aren't balanced or nutritious enough to help sick people recover.’

I once found myself in the hands of the NHS in 1982. I had a sprained ankle that left me totally immobilised, and I was put in a men’s surgical ward in Liverpool’s Walton hospital. I ate practically nothing that I was given and survived on care packages smuggled in by relatives, but I remember that the orderly who brought round the food exhorted me most powerfully to eat his suet pudding and custard. ‘It will build you up,’ he said. At the time I was 31 years old, reasonably fit, healthy, and totally immobilised. ‘Do I look as if I need building up?’ I asked. He had to admit that I could probably do without his pudding.

A few years ago I met a leading British cardiologist who had once worked in Papworth Hospital in Cambridge. He told me that he was horrified to find that everything ion the kitchen was fried in beef dripping. After much complaining and arguing and saying that things had to change, he finally found the truth: the hospital had signed a ten-year contract with the dripping supplier and was stuck with it. That precisely wouldn’t happen now, but from what I see the NHS still has a long way to go before it gives its patients decent food.

And, I wonder, would the medical and nursing staff put up with their canteens serving what the patients get? Of course they wouldn’t.

The trees in Spain

Zapatero’s government promised to plant 45 million trees in four years. What has happened? In fact, the average number of trees in Spain is increasing by an average of 284 million a year (sic). With 300,000 hectares of new trees a year, Spain is second only to China and doubles the achievement of the USA.

In 1939 the government planned to plant 6 million hectares in 100 years, reaching a total of 11.3 million hectares. Just seventy years later the total is 18.3 million hectares.

The increase in trees has been caused mainly by people abandoning the countryside to live in cities, and easily far outweighs the area lost to fires.

Source: El País.

Picture of cork oaks: Wikipedia

Bulgarian mathematics

The BBC reports (my emphasis, of crucial mathematical importance):

Bulgarian lottery repeat probed

The chance of the same numbers appearing were one in four million

The Bulgarian authorities have ordered an investigation after the same six numbers were drawn in two consecutive rounds of the national lottery. The numbers - 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42 - were chosen by a machine live on television on 6 and 10 September. An official of the Bulgarian lottery said manipulation was impossible. A mathematician said the chance of the same six numbers coming up twice in a row was one in four million. But he said coincidences do happen … The lottery organisers described it as a freak coincidence and pointed out that the numbers were drawn in a different order.

I don’t doubt that the Bulgarians are excited about this, but let's look at the figures. One in four million turns into a bit under 1 in 8,000 for a weekly draw over a year. Now let us suppose that there are 25 countries in Europe with similar weekly lotteries. That leaves us with a chance of slightly under 1 in 320 that this will happen somewhere in Europe in any given week. Well, 320 to 1 is no price for backing a horse. But if it comes up – well such things do happen.