I don't “do” Poetry – but now I've written a Limerick.

Many scientists are illiterate and I am sure this is a result of their education. In my case bullying was an important factor. By the age of 13 I had been to six different school and had been bullied at three of them for a total of about six years. Much fiction concentrates on personal relationships and ends up happily ever after and I knew life was not really like that. Bullying meant my view of life as a young child was of misery was piled onto misery, apparently without end. Apart from some science fiction (mainly Azimov) and The Lord of the Rings, I don't think I have read a work of fiction in the last 60 years. This approach has also affected my choice of TV watching – and I avoid soaps and plays because they are a “waste of time”. As a result I have very little knowledge of the classical literature or modern fiction.

My attitude to poetry was undoubtedly influence by an incident when I was 8. During the winter of 1946/7 there was heavy snow in Devon and I was confined to bed with some childhood illness. So I started to write a poem – “I wish I'd seen the snow fall” which was terrible doggerel – with dozens of rhyming couplets interspersed with the theme line repeated again and again. I was caught writing an extra verse during school prayers by the headmaster and ridiculed in front of the class (which of course included the regular bullies). Clearly writing poetry was not a clever thing to do.

Two schools later a trainee teacher got into trouble. He had tried to get us to learn Wordsworth's “Daffodils” and had been singularly unsuccessful – at least with most of the boys in the class. So the next poem he set us to learn was Harry Graham's poem which starts “Broad is the gate, and wide the path, that lead man to his daily bath”. We all learnt it, clearly demonstrating that our problem was motivation and not stupidity. Of course the headmaster received a number of complaints from prim and proper parents who thought that their children should not be exposed to such unsuitable nonsense - so classes returned to uninspiring conventionality..

However in 1952 I moved to Dartington Hall School where things were very different. In particular Raymond O'Malley inspired me to think creatively about language but failed miserably in trying to get me to improve my dreadful handwriting. Chaucer's Prologue intrigued me and helped me to understand how language developed with time while an in-depth study of T. S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi and The Wasteland made me realise how powerful language could be if creatively used. I was also encouraged to write a limerick involving word play, triggered by Flaunder's and Swann's The Gnu Song and my amateur effort was published in the School's magazine, Chanticleer.

There was a young man at the zoo,

Who allowed penny rides on his gnu,

      But the gnu was too old,

     And at last caught a cold ,

And a new gnu was needed, he knew.

Needless to say I haven't written any more poetry since then, until a couple of week's ago. But over the intervening years O'Malley's inspired teaching has stood me in good stead. My first job was as an information scientist writing managerial research and development reports. Later I wrote various pieces for the New Scientist, such as Why Gebius is nipped in the bud. What I had learnt forty years early greatly helped when I came to write “The London Gunners come to Town.” The unusual structure of this book, in three parts telling the story from three different points of views, was probably inspired by my refusal to accept to establishment norms, an approach which I picked up at Dartington.

So why have I returned to writing limericks after so many years? I am currently trying to teach myself Windows 8 and I started to set up a diary for 2014 – and made a silly mistake. A few days later the computer reminded me to go to the Archaeology group meeting of our local U3A group and, because it was the wrong day, I walked into the Poetry group by mistake and decided to stay. Not only did I enjoy it but I discovered there was a limerick writing competition and decided to have a go.

Memories of how to do it came flooding back. I not only needed  to get the verse structure right. My limerick would need to tell a topically interesting story, and end with a suitable punch line. I also felt that if it was to be read out the way it was presented could convey added meaning without the need for extra words. The first line was given so I had a mere 28 syllables to play with. I was used to writing to a target – although with the New Scientist this was usually 400 or 1000 words – so it was going to be a challenge. The following was the result

"Dedicated to the losers in this limerick competition"

Narrator: Normal voice	A member of Tring U3A Expected to win here today
Poet: Excitedly with pride and flamboyant gestures expecting to win	“With a limerick fine      The prize should be mine.
Poet: Descent into bathos on discovering he had not won.	But the judge must have thrown it away”

In planning this I decided to look online to see what I could find about writing limericks. After looking at two or three sites I decided that writing limericks should be fun and while the pages I saw included examples of interesting and amusing limericks the connecting text was boring. Perhaps there are better sites – but I decided that what was needed was a limerick to tell you how to write limericks – and this is the result:-

A limerick's distinctive metre

Means you do have to know where the feet are

     And of course the fourth line

     With the third line must rhyme

While the last line can be a repeater.

I feel I ought to have been able to come up with a better last line – but of course Edward Lear's limericks, and others in the same style, do use repetition. Of course some purists will complain that I have added an unstressed syllable at the end of lines 1, 2 and 5, and that “line” and “rhyme” don't rhyme. But many poets, and anyone who has benefited from a Dartington education, knows that the appropriate breaking down of establishment boundaries is a very effective tool in getting a message across.

Wednesday Science Limerick: Buckminsterfullerene

Buckmasterfullerene

A bucky-ball has to be seen
It's called buckminster (dash) fullerene
It is like a football
It's a cage, that's not all
It traps atoms in ways unforeseen.

When I studied Chemistry at university there were three known forms of the element carbon, diamond, graphite and amorphous carbon (such as charcoal). I became very interested in carbon atoms which contained unsaturated hexagonal rings and ended up doing a Ph.D. linking theoretical calculations with their measured properties. It was over 25 years later, in 1985, that the first "Buckyballs" were discovered.

Buckmasterfullerene (chemical formula C60) consists of a sphere of 60 carbon atoms arranged as 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons forming a truncated icosahedron. The pattern is same as the leather faces on an association football and the name was given because an architect Buckminster Fuller designed buildings with spherical domes called geodesic domes. It opens up an exciting new field of carbon chemistry including materials with very interesting properties. Metal atoms can be trapped inside the cage, and bucky-balls laced with potassium are superconductors up to a temperature of 18 degrees Kelvin. In addition the discovery has lead to many other fullerenes being discovered - the most important being nanotubes which can be likened to sheets of graphite being rolled up into a tube.

Note about the limerick below the fold.  

Wednesday Science Limerick: Helium

They say one degree Kelvin is cold
Liquid Helium’s quite uncontrolled
When put in a jar
It’s behaviour’s bizarre
It climbs out – that’s a sight to behold

Helium is a most interesting element. It is the lightest of the chemically inert noble gases and the second commonest element in the universe. It was first discovered because of its spectrum in sunlight – which is why it is called Helium – after the Greek word for the sun ἥλιος (helios). The nucleus, the alpha particle, is also a product of radioactive decay.

It has the lowest boiling point of any substance (4.22 degrees Kelvin) and it is still a liquid at absolute zero, although a solid can be formed at high pressure. Below 2.1768 degrees Kelvin it become superfluid. This is a strange property where a thin film spreads out over all surfaces connected to the liquid and the liquid flows through the film from higher to lower levels. In the diagram the film covers all surfaces of the sealed container and from the outer to the inner bowl until the levels are equal. If the container was not sealed the liquid helium would escape.

In fact there are two isotopes of helium, He4 (2 protons and 2 neutrons) – as described, and He3 (2 protons and 1 neutron) which does not become superfluid until a much lower temperature. These strange properties are hard to understand without some knowledge of quantum physics and the meaning of words like "Boson" and "Fermion" – but should you want to know more the articles on Wikipedia are well written.

For more about the background to these Wednesday Science Limericks, and this one in particular, see below the fold.

Wednesday Science Limerick: POST

At Westminster you'll find a POST

Which in science is deeply engrossed

For our average M.P.

Knows no science you see

And the right facts are what they need most

You never know what you will discover when you are on the web. I often submit a limerick or two in a weekly limerick competition - and this week the first line had to end with post. Perhaps because I went to Dartington I like to think outside the box and find a slant that others will miss.

So I decided to see what organisations are referred to as P.O.S.T. and came up with the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. This  body provides in-house advice on current issues parliamentarians, few of whom have any significant training in science. I probed further and discovered that the organisation publishes what are called POST Notes which are available online. There are far too many to assess them all but I decided to look at a few that interest me. They are normally 4 pages long - and explain the issues without suggesting policy decisions.

• POST Note 454 Risks from Climate Feedbacks. As readers of this blog will know I have an interest in climate change and I considered this was a very well balanced repost on how feedback worked. 
• POST Note 468 Big Data: An Overview is one of a number on what is known on big data - such as POST Note 469 Big Data in Business. There are some contentious issues here and I felt the information about what is happening was well presented. 
• POST Note 465 Ancient Woodlands interested me, because some of my "Rural Relaxation" walks run through ancient woodlands

My reaction is that POST is providing good support information to our Members of Parliament on science matters - but whether they actually read  it is another matter. If I have reason to write to my M.P. on any science related issue I will be checking the list of POST Notes to remind him which one he should read.

Time to relax with a Limerick

The Boat Inn Public House at Jackfield, near Ironbridge in Shropshire, flooded by the River Severn

A man shouted "Take down de sign"
For the floods have begun to decline
"You can get to my pub
In a car, not a tub
And I do serve some excellent wine."

The above limerick was inspired by the recent extensive flooding in England, with some places in Somerset having been flooded for over two months, together with extensive flooding along the Thames.

However the extraordinary levels of rain here (hopefully the worst is over) coupled with the extremely cold weather in North America, and the extreme heatwave in Australia a year ago, all suggest that we all need to take global warming very seriously. Many people will find that the boxes in which they live and work are no longer suitable due the increasing number of extreme weather events which are predicted.

Two Limericks for the price of One!

Bow

Bow

I have somewhat neglected this blog recently - in part because of some problems with my asthma - but I still have had fun writing limericks for an online competition.  My latest entry (slightly modified here to remove an explicit reference to the competition organizer) is given below. 

It  takes the form of two different limericks which - in writing - are identical apart from the last two syllables. In order to be able to read it you need to look at the end of the final line to get the right pronunciation for the ends of lines 1 through 4, noting that the limerick only makes sense if lines 3 and 4 do not rhyme with lines 1, 2 and 5.

The example's first line ends in "bow"
And the poet had rhymed it with "row"
'Cause if he rhymed "row"
Or misused the word "sow"
The judge would reject it and how.

The example's first line ends in "bow"
And the poet had rhymed it with "row"
'Cause if he rhymed "row"
Or misused the word "sow"
The judge would reject it also.

Wednesday Science Limerick - Comet 67P

There’s a comet named 6 7 P

That Rosetta has wanted to see

And it looks like a duck

Though with plenty of luck

They’ll find water among the debris

Comets are astronomical objects consisting of a mixture of rocks, dust, water ice and frozen gases which orbit the sun in an extended orbit. When they approach the sun they heat up and some of the water and frozen gases evaporate, releasing some of the dust. The escaping material  is blown by the solar wind (caused by plasma escaping from the sun) to form a tail which can sometimes be visible to the naked eye - although the central rocky body is too small to see. Every time it comes close to the sun it loses more material and may break up into fragments. Meteor showers can be associated with some comets - representing small fragment which have become detached and spread out along the orbit over millions of years.

In recent years robotic space craft have approached and photographed comets and at the present time the spacecraft Rosetta is in orbit round the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. (Sorry for the long name - and the fact that I didn't include the full name in my limerick - but comets are named after their discoverers.) It has proved to be most interesting in that it is anything but spherical - and its shape has been likened to that of a rubber duck. Before 1959 it didn't approach the sun closer than about 400 million kilometers but a "close" approach to the planet Jupiter altered its orbit so that it now comes to within 190 million kilometers. Obviously the closer it comes the hotter it gets and the more material it looses each orbit. Some of the smoothest areas appear to be in the "neck" and if the comet consists of two large rocky masses cemented together with water ice it may not be that far from splitting into two. 

There will be much more active research over the next couple of years, with much more detailed photographs plus other scientific measurements of the material escaping from the surface. In addition there will be an attempt to land a probe and sample the surface. I will be following the discoveries with interest and I note that the Wikipedia page is being kept well up-to-date - the last amendment being yesterday.

Wednesday Science Limerick: Ethyl Acetate

Ethyl acetate has a nice taste
And pear drops are with it well laced.
This allows us to savour
Its chemical flavour
As into our mouths they are placed.

Just a limerick, without a discussion of the background science this week, as various other activities are keeping me from spending so much time at the keyboard.

Wednesday Science Limerick

Running two blogs and a web site takes time, and Hertfordshire Genealogy News and the associate genealogy web site have recently been so busy that this one has been neglected. I have decided to get this one buzzing again and one of the new features will be to post a science oriented limerick every Wednesday. So here goes:

Image from The Starburst Foundation

Galileo, convinced he was right,
Looked at stars through his scope every night,
But the Church said "Oh No"
Sun round Earth has to go
And forced him to say he was contrite.

Wednesday Science Limerick: Political Climate Deniers

In New York a great crowd in the city

Said that more climate change was a pity

While some congressmen fools,

Just as stubborn as mules,

Formed a "climate deniers" committee.

The most important box, in which we are all trapped, is the planet on which we live - and climate change is a very serious long term threat. I first got seriously interested in the subject in 1990 (see Global Warming - To Australia in a Box) and every year I get more worried as the signs of change become more and more obvious, and so little is being done.

This weeks limerick was inspired by Donald Prothero's article Signs of Hope—and Despair—on Climate Change which starts with the news that a quarter of a million people demonstrated on the streets of New York urging that action was needed at the United Nations level. Clearly a lot of people are worried - but is it too late to avoid very dramatic changes that will effect us all?

His article goes onto despair about the many scientifically illiterate politicians who sit on the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. If you have missed out on the kinds of nonsense arguments they are using to try and push climate change issues into the long grass you should read DOnald's article - and realise that as long as the public (everywhere and not just the USA) continues to vote for eloquent fools there is no hope of appropriate action being taken.

However there was one other interesting bit of news from the USA which may be a good sign. The Pentagon has issued a report 2014 Climate Change - Adaptation Road Map (pdf) which takes a serious look at the way that climate change could affect the U.S. military policy. IN addition to obvious matters (such as rising sea levels affecting coastal installations) it considers the potentially serious destabilization effects on governmens and economies around the world and suggests that climate change could be a "threat multiplier" which could make make increased terrorism more likely. While I do not support all aspects of US military policies I am delighted that a major organisation in the US is beginning to realise that the most important medium term threat is social disintegration of the most effected countries.

Climate change gives us all cause to fret

And the future look grim, I would bet.

There'll be more CO2,

With the seas rising too,

And so hot we’ll all end in a sweat.

Brain - The Last Frontier

Brain - The Last Frontier by Matteo Farinella

Regular visitors to my blog know that I believe that thinking creatively "outside the box" is an important part of science. Recently I have been introducing many of my science posts with a short summary of the issue in the form of a limerick - because it is a challenge to get the essence of a scientific idea into a few human-friendly words. I also like photography and I am creating a record of the area where I live with occasional posts on my Remembering Tring blog - but like to include some of the more creative shots on this blog under the heading "Captured by the Camera."

However there is no point in giving me a pen or paintbrush  because any attempt to produce an attractive picture using such tools would be a complete waste of time - and I admire those who can combine artistry with science. I was therefore delighted to learn of Matteo Farinella's blog.

Matteo is a scientist who did a Ph.D. in computational neuroscientist - and then decided to become a freelance cartoonist. He has just become a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University with the goal of creating "a new paradigm for interdisciplinary university-sponsored research to advance understanding of mind, brain, and behavior, and the social foundations and consequences of new neuroscientific findings."

I wish Matteo well in his endeavours and will certainly be following his blog with interest.  My feelings are that much existing research in computational studies of the brain are so deeply involved in"fine science" and "sophisticated mathematics" that the human side is forgotten. Matteo's cartoons could bring in a welcome breath of fresh air.

Environmental Limerick: Methane Gas in Siberia

In the permafrost ground is a crater,
Methane gas is the sole excavator.
As the temperature rises
There'll be more surprises
As threats to the climate gets greater.

Permafrost is found widely within on high latitudes in places like Siberia - the term indication that the ground is permanently frozen. In many areas the ground contains large quantities of methane, in the form a solid methane hydrate. If the climate warms the ground starts to thaw and the methane hydrate breaks up, releasing methane gas in the process. As methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide the effect could be to accelerate global warming and the fact that temperatures are rising in the arctic is a cause for concern.

The above picture shows a crater, photographed shortly after it formed in 2014, situated on the Yamal Peninsula of Northern Siberia. Subsequently more craters have been discovered. What is happening is that as the ground warms (but is still frozen) the methane hydrate decomposes and releases methane gas which cannot immediately escape. The pressure increases until it reaches a point where it causes an explosive outburst - producing a large crater.

For more information see: The Siberian crate saga is more widespread - and more scarier - than anyone thought.

Limericks & An Interruption to Normal Services

The dove saw the hawk as a threat

But its plans to escape were upset

When a window it hit

So I wrote this obit

And the hawk ate a feathered bagette

This morning I was interrupted by a large thump on our sitting room window, and I realized at once that a bird must have flown into it at speed. However I wasn't the first to get to the Collared Dove ...which had almost certainly flown into the window trying to escape from the Sparrow Hawk!

However this is a good opportunity to explain why I missed this week's Wednesday Limerick and why posts of all kinds may be a bit erratic at least until Christmas.

I am not expecting to go as dramatically as the collared dove but my wife and I have reached an age where parts are beginning to wear out and we need to think about our future living requirements. These will almost certainly include a ground floor bedroom with en-suite facilities. We prefer to remain in the small town where we have lived for the last 50 years and having looked at property availability the most sensible option would be to convert our integral garage to provide the extra space we need. However the garage is currently full almost to the roof with junk accumulated over the years - so we have set ourselves the target of downsizing the clutter ...

Bonobo Midwives

They have noticed the bonobo's girth
And they know what a friendship is worth
So the midwives come round
Good advice they expound
And they help, with great care, at the birth

 

My research means I am always interested in the social life of animals and how it relates to how our own species behaves.  This week's limerick is based on the behaviour of bonobos when one of them is giving birth. Birth is clearly a social event where female attendants provide protection and support for the mother-to-be, including manual gestures directed at holding the infant as it is born.

 

I was alerted to this in an article in this week's New Scientist based on the paper "Is birth attendance a uniquely human feature? New evidence suggests that Bonobo females protect and support the parturient" by Elisa Demumu et al in Evolution & Human Behaviour.

Wednesday Science Limerick: Nightmares

The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli (1781)

When you wake, with a shock, in dispair,
With a monster that looks like a bear
It is not what it seems
Its a beast in your dreams
So don't panic its just a nightmare

Earlier this year I attended a very interesting talk "The Psychology of Ghosts and Hauntings" by Professor Chris French, at a meeting of the Chiltern Humanists. Prior to the talk I was aware of most of the different types of human mental failings he mentioned and I was delighted with his well chosen examples and references to the kinds of research projects that have been carried out.

One thing which particularly excited me was the discussion of sleep paralysis, which provides an explanation of why, when you dream you are running down the street, your legs don't move. I had not come across this condition before and it is relevant to the model of the brain's internal language I am developing, by demonstrating that there is a well known blocking mechanism.

This lead to my reading up topics such as sleep, rapid eye movement, parasomnia, nightmares and sleepwalking on Wikipedia and I get the impression that, like other areas of brain studies there are a lot of ideas as to what is involved - nut a lot more needs to be done. What is clear is that many species of animals sleep and that the brain is clearly very active for at least part of the time were are sleeping. As such there must be a good evolutionary advantage in sleeping which involves the brain, which appears to be refreshing and rehearsing the information it has accumulated when it was awake. However it would not help if the sleeper physically re-enacted the actions of the day and the brain has a mechanism to switch off brain activity which would lead to concious awareness of the dream, and the associated bodily movements.  Sleep problems, such as night terrors and sleepwalking, can be related to these switches failing to work correctly and on one hand you imaging your brains rehearsal as real but cannot move, or that your body moves but you are not aware of what is happening.

www.vector.rs

His thoughts were so far from the floor
That he dreamed that in clouds he did soar
Till he tripped on a boulder
And so tumbled over 
And won't walk in his sleep anymore.

Relaxing with another Limerick

The boastful old man was aware

That the top of his head was quite bare
"It should be quite plain
That the size of my brain
Means that no room is left for my hair."

My Limericks aren't as dead as a dodo

The poor Dodos extinct so goodbye
For of course the poor birds couldn’t fly
And the men in their boats
Preferred fresh meat to oats
All that’s left are some bones, very dry

A recent email has reminded me that a year or so ago I regularly posted a limerick illustrating a scientific topic - in part because it encouraged me to think outside the box.

Wikipedia: Dodo

Tides will get bigger over the next 10 million years

This week's New Scientist has an article "Tides will rise for the next million years" and I was moved to write another science-oriented limerick.

The Altantic's three thousand miles wide
And America westward will slide
And I have to divulge
That the size of the bulge
Will result in a much higher tide.

Several very different things are involved.

The science of continental drift tells us that the North Atlantic is getting wider by just over a centimetre a year.
The tides are caused as a result of the gravitational pull of the moon. This means that the part of the sea nearest to the moon is attracted by the moon to form a bulge. One the other side of the Earth the Earth is pulled away from sea, creating a matching bulge.

Because the Earth rotates the bulges move round the world once a day, causing the tides. This bulge can be considered to be a wave moving across the Atlantic and it has a particular wave length.

Resonance then comes into play - rather like a huge musical instrument whene the there is a relationship between the wavelength of the note and the length of the string or pipe generating the sound. The tidle bulge has a wave length and the size of the tides (equivalent to the loudness of the note) depends on the size of the boxslowly gets wider tha amplicifcation of the tides due to resonance will get bigger. However when the Atlantic gets even wider the resonance will decrease and the height of the tide will fall.

Wednesday Science Limerick: Comet Siding Spring

The comet was named Siding Spring

It came as if thrown from a sling

From the distant Oort cloud

Passing Mars as it ploughed

Round the Sun, then it left with a swing.

The Comet Siding Spring, which originated in the Oort Cloud, passed close to Mars on 19th October and while it was photographed from the Mars Opportunity Rover and Mars Renaissance Orbiter (above) we will probably have to wait for the most interesting findings until a conference to be held in December. In the mean time the best places to find the latest news is on Wikipedia under the comet's official name C/2013 A1.

Wednesday Science Limerick: Smallpox

We had thought we were safe from smallpox

And that samples were safe behind locks

But a store had some vials

Left over from trials

Insecure and just placed in a box.

Edward Jenner (1749–1823)

Smallpox was a very serious contagious disease which was estimated to kill 400,000 Europeans a year in the latter part of the 18th century. It had been observed that dairymaids, who had had cow pox appeared to be immune from smallpox and Edward Jenner discovered by using cow pox it was possible to be protected against the disease by vaccination.  Following a worldwide campaign the World Health Organisation finally declared that smallpox had been eradicated in December 1979. It is the only infectious disease where this has happened.