Mesmerising for 90 Seconds

The pendulum motion pic.twitter.com/NLr6uPrlFc

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) May 16, 2019

The Podcasts

I’ve been a regular podcast junkie since 2006 when I connected up my new Sony Walkman[1] to the Internet and found I could sync quickly and easily with the BBC.  I’ve now upgraded to the excellent Podcast Addict which tells me that, so far in 2018, I’ve spent 24 days – yes, 24 whole days – listening to podcasts; that’s more even that last year’s 15 days and 5 hours.

To make some kind of sense of that, I thought it was time to blog what it is that I’m spending my commuting and exercise time actually listening to.  These aren’t my “recommendations” are don’t represent a comprehensive trawl of the vast number of podcasts out there.  Comment below if you have suggestions of your own.

News and Politics

It’s hard to beat The Economist: Editor's picks for a weekly review of the news.   And for a roundup of the week’s news in politics, it’s FT Politics.

I particularly like Talking Politics for a pure-politics play whose subject is not dictated solely by recent events.  It’s sometimes a discussion group, other times an interview and occasionally even a lecture or briefing.

For more detail on specific issues I like both The Briefing Room and The Inquiry. 

For an interview with active politicians that won’t make you scream at the radio, try Political Thinking with Nick Robinson.

Science

My favourite weekly magazine programme about science is Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea, which is just that bit more snarky than BBC Inside Science.  I also take Nature Podcast, which luckily overlaps with Futureproof only rarely.

Two podcasts that aren’t news-driven are Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe (a cartoonist and a physicist explain the “big-questions” of universe) and I’ve just begun with The End of The World with Josh Clark.

Finally, I always listen to Physics Frontiers every fortnight or so.  It features two very well informed physics guys who kick around a topic at the frontiers of modern physics.  Now, if I’m honest, there’s no doubting this is highbrow stuff that mostly sails right over my 1982 physics & astronomy BSc, but I can’t stop tuning in anyway.

Cricket

The Analyst Inside Cricket is either an incisive weekly summary of recent cricket played, team news and so on; or, during major England matches, it reports daily from the front.

I usually listen to some of Test Match Special, but the feed can become overloaded with post-match player-interviews (overrated), lunchtime guests and so on; and then nothing for weeks.

Switch Hit Podcast comes every few weeks and is worth listening to.

And finally, I would love to see a relaunch of The Drinks Break, mostly because it features the estimable Elizabeth Ammon.

Chess

OK, so this is niche, and there aren’t too many to choose from.  Joel Benjamin’s weekly video is excellent, but you’ll need a subscription if you want more than the 5-minute preview.

Perpetual Chess Podcast is an interview format, often quite long, and not always do I finish.  The best are by people who’ve done more in life than just play and teach chess for a living.

The excellent Chess: The Full English Breakfast is now only rarely available, but a must-listen when it does appear.

Society and Culture

The high-brow In Our Time is always worth listening to, although I don’t always get to the end of the more obscure arty subjects.

Making a recent re-appearance is Wireless Nights, a documentary on what some people get up to at night.  I also like Trending, which highlights a topical subject from social media.

Investment and Business

The 10-minute business-news podcast, FT News Briefing, is essential early morning listening and similarly Investors Chronicle each week.  The latter is especially good when John Hughman is in the chair. 

Although only rarely appearing these days, Stuff that Interests Me is Dominic Frisby’s mouthpiece for his off-beat views on gold, Bitcoin and libertarian politics.  Always interesting.

Others

I’ve just started with CYBER, a discussion programme about information-security that looks promising.

And a mention for Flintoff, Savage and the Ping Pong Guy, which is an unashamedly laddish discussion mostly about sport, cars and so on.  The first two series were excellent - surprisingly so - but it’s maybe reached the point where the opinions and anecdotes are now being recycled.

To chill for a while, I go to the Hypnagogue Podcast, of curated music.

---

[1] Amazing device, the Sony Walkman. A tiny screen and only several millimetres deep, it could also sync video with the iPlayer for a few years.  I still have it now.

I don't normally circulate videos but....

This is the best video ever pic.twitter.com/K065H6RJfQ

— Keith (@lad) July 20, 2017

Draw!

Playing through a games collection on this dreary Sunday afternoon in January, I came to this position.  White has an extra piece but black has a dangerous-looking mobile pawn centre with no less than three passers.  White to move.  Intrigued to see how it turned out, I turned the page and... "Agreed drawn!".  White offered, black accepted; and it all happened behind the scenes during the adjournment.

Had this happened today in a game between two top players, there would surely be protest from amongst the paying public.  Why would you not want to watch this lop-sided position play itself out?  The game itself had earlier been a disaster for black, who'd blundered a whole rook just out of the opening.  Surprisingly he played on and his persistence paid off.  White, who was the author of the games collection, reckoned he was in poor form; that's putting it lightly; even I usually win games against my peers with this kind of extra material.

In case you're interested, the game is Botvinnik - Bronstein, 9th match game, 1951; and I'm referring to  Botvinnik's Best Games, Volume 2: 1942 - 1956.  Botvinnik was +1 in the 24-game match at the time but the match ended drawn, so Botvinnik retained his title.

For what it's worth, when Komodo and Stockfish played the position, they made a draw.  Whether the punters' frustration was expressed in the media of the time, I don't know.  But probably not at the match venue itself, which was Moscow; protests by citizens at the time weren't well tolerated by the authorities.

There's a short, grainy video of the match venue here, and if you look a little further, you'll find another video where Yasser Seirawan lectures on this game; I'm just about to give it a go.

On Square Roots and the Number Line

I've recently been thinking that it's time I took another look at mathematics, which was a subject that occupied a lot my thoughts as a kid right up until my early twenties (when career took over all the available brain space).  With that in mind, I recently read Marcus du Sautoy's excellent book on the limits of our knowledge.  My attempt at a snack-sized review is here.

One of the nice proofs reproduced in the book was the one to show that the square root of 2 is not a rational number; that is, that that it can't be represented as a fraction (a/b).  The proof is short and easy to follow (find it on Wikipedia) and the result is satisfying because of its sheer scope.  Despite there being literally an infinite quantity of numbers, you will never find a number that is the exact square root of 2.  And you can do that with absolute certainty without even breaking into a mental jog, the proof is that simple.

Anyway, when I was reacquainted with this proof I remembered that many years ago I was really not that impressed by it.  There seemed to me to be an obvious intuitive argument that it had to be so.  It's all a question of there not being enough space on the number line to fit in all those square-roots.



Think about it: from 1 through 9, say, there are an infinite quantity of intermediate numbers; and if we map each of that infinite multitude to its square-root (or higher root, for that matter), the number line of the roots is squashed up relative to the number line from which is originates (it ranges only from 1 through 3 in the above example).  It seemed obvious to me that there simply couldn't be enough room on the number line for every number between 1 & 9 to map to its own unique root in the range 1 to 3.  After all, there may be an infinite quantity of numbers between 1 and 3, but the infinite quantity of numbers between 1 and 9 must be greater, mustn't it?

The standard proof that root-2 isn't rational is certainly more definitive than my (admittedly informal) argument; but mine seems to imply that there won't be cube roots, fifth roots and all the way up.  Or at least, it seems to be on first glance.

Another way of coming at this question is to consider what the decimal expansion would be of a number that is the square-root of any integer that is not a square number (1,4,9 etc.).  Clearly, the root has to end with a non-zero digit after the decimal point.  And when squared, the final digit would need to equal zero for the square to be an integer.  But when you square all the digits from 1 through 9 you don't find any that maps to zero; the square of any decimal number will in fact have more digits after the decimal point than the putative root itself has.  Hence, there are no integers other than square numbers that have a square-root that can be expressed as an exact decimal; and in fact, no number with a single digit after the decimal has its own root either.

Anyway, glad to have got this off my chest after all these years.  In writing it down, I suddenly thought about how we express numbers that aren't whole.  The whole numbers each have their own symbol(s) that are unique to themselves, whereas the non-whole numbers are expressed only as the output of a computation using whole numbers (a/b); they don't have their own unique symbolic representation and I'm not sure that it would ever be a useful thing to do.  Which makes me wonder about how real they really are, or as Leopold Kronecker, a 19th C. mathematician put it: God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man.

AH

Cut my nose to spite my face?

See the sell trade, around early October?  That's based on some fundamental analysis, believe it or not; no doubt the recent share price action biased my judgement.  But it seems I sold right at the bottom of the trend.

The buy at the end of the month is a reinvested dividend, done automatically and there to taunt me as the share price rose strongly over following weeks.  Until Friday.  And now, this morning the smug satisfaction as the buyer who took the shares off my hands finally gets their comeuppance.  Even though my dividend-in-shares has suffered equally, I feel so much better.

How daft is that?

Verona Joyce Bennett, RIP

Joyce Verona Bennett, 1917 - 2013

Today I was at the funeral of my grandmother, who checked out around Christmas time, a few days shy of her 97th birthday.  It was a short and unremarkable service, but interesting nevertheless and I'm glad I went.

I'd completely forgotten, for example, that her given name was not in fact Joyce (the name she always used), but was actually Verona.  And whilst I knew that she'd travelled fairly widely around the UK and Europe, I didn't know that she had taken her first and only journey by aeroplane - from Exeter to Bristol - aged 93.  She'd made the trip just for the experience, apparently.  I hope that I can also reach such an age and have new adventures of my own.

I'm not going to labour the point, but I'd guess that 1917 was not an auspicious time to be born as a female to a family of modest means in a small provincial English town.   Getting pregnant at 21 by a soldier who then dissappeared off to war (the offspring of this congress being my mother) hardly improved her prospects. Nevertheless, she did prosper.  No doubt the widespread upheaval within society that war with Germany precipitated was a good opportunity.

Mum was mostly brought up by her Grandmother, but not without difficulty.  Being an unmarried mother in 1940s Britain would have probably been a drab and colourless affair, not helped the inflexible attitudes of the local Christians.

Yet, despite all this, she managed to to steer a life-course that was sufficiently interesting to merit a feature article in the Sunday Independent (more news to me) and a couple of Channel 4 documentaries (which we had all watched, agog, wondering what she might disclose about our hitherto unknown blood relative).

I remember her as a feisty lady of strong opinions, and as my Dad once said, she would likely have made impressive use of the opportunities that being born into a later age would have given her.  Not that I think she was in any way dis-satisfied with her lot.

Farewell, Grandma.