Category Archives: Autobiographical

A caricature of my father done as a birthday card on his 71st birthday by my stepmother Rosemarie Simmons. He would die the following year of emphysema, hence the “Secretly indulges in oxygen” in the text. The original is approximately 3×2 feet.

Click to enlarge ©️ Rosemarie Simmons

This is one of my occasional autobiographical posts and has nothing to do with the history of science so, if you come here just for that you can skip this post. I also chronicles the heavy use of psychedelic drugs so, if you have problems with that, once again you can skip this post. 

On Saturday 7 March, the singer, songwriter, musician, and political activist, Joseph Allen McDonald, better known as Country Joe, died of complications from Parkinson’s in Berkeley California. Country Joe and his music wove their way through my life over many years and left strong traces in my development.

As I have documented elsewhere, my mother died under tragic circumstances of a heart attack at Christmas in 1966. My brother had already left home and was in fact already married and father of my eldest nephew. My two sisters, both older than me, left home in the summer of 1967 to begin their careers, leaving just me and my father in the family home. We left the village in northeast Essex, where I grew up, and moved to London where my father worked. He decided it would be better if my education was not interrupted and so I entered the boarding  house of the grammar school in Colchester, where I had spent the first four years of my secondary education, in the autumn of 1967.  To say that I was not a happy bunny would be an understatement and I slowly drifted ever more into a malaise, which ended with me getting expelled at the end of the academic year 68/69. 

My father now got me admitted to Holland Park Comprehensive School the flag ship of the Labour Government’s comprehensive education policy. It counted both Stephen and Hilary Benn, the sons of Anthony Benn the notorious Labour politician, and the step children of Roy Jenkins, the future President of the European Commission, amongst its pupils. Also attending were Damien and Nico Korner the sons of blues musician Alexis Korner, who served as chairman of the PTA. The school was huge but had a comparatively small sixth form, of which I was now a member. Like myself many of the sixth formers had been expelled from other schools, many of them from notable public schools.

At this point in my life, I was living with my father and first step mother in Colville Place, which is just off Tottenham Court Road in the West End. Not long after I started at Holand Park one of my fellow students introduced me to DSK a crazy white Rhodesian Jew, his description, who had been expelled from both Westminster Public School and Holland Park, who lived not far away from where I lived, in Grape Stret, which is behind the Shaftsbury Theatre, long time home of the musical Hair. I had already started smoking dope shortly before getting expelled in Colchester and DSK introduced me to LSD, or as we called it Acid. 

We became best friends and I spent most of my free time together with him, smoking vast quantities of dope and dropping acid about once a week. DSK was a minor dealer so my drug consume didn’t cost me anything. We would wander around the streets of Soho at night tripping out of our heads, stopping at the all night Whimpey Bar for sustenance. We attended concerts, I saw Sly and the Family Stone high as a kite at the Lyceum Theatre, a truly mind blowing experience but very often we just stayed in DSK’s room listening to albums whilst exploring the psychedelic stratosphere. Much Pink Floyd  and Sid Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs found their way regularly onto the turntable but two albums had the biggest impact on me and my future development. Firstly, the Grateful Dead’s Live Dead, which made me a lifelong Dead Head and which remains my all time favourite album and secondly Country Joe and the Fish, Electric Music for the Mind and Body, the start of a lifelong love affair with the music of Country Joe.

 This was the age of the big rock festivals and in the summer of 1970, the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music was announced with a stellar line up including Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Flock, It’s a Beautiful Day, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and many others but I wanted to go because Country Joe was on the bill. To earn the money for a ticket and the coach fare  to Bath I worked for a time in the Fitzroy Taverne legendary watering hole of the Bloomsbury Set, Dylan Thomas, Augustus John and many others. At the appointed time I duly took a coach to Bath and then a bus out to the festival site in Shepton Mallet. 

From the beginning the festival fulfilled all expectations, with one superb set following another. On Saturday evening, Led Zeppelin took to the stage and delivered up three hours of pure dynamite. The people who care about such things rate it as possibly their best ever live performance. I grew increasingly worried because I knew that Country Joe was due to follow them onto the stage with just an acoustic guitar and I feared he would die a death.

To add to my fears, by the time Country Joe finally took to the stage after midnight it was raining quite heavily. With his acoustic guitar strapped to his chest Country Joe walked up to the solitary microphone in the middle of the stage. “Is this microphone working?” It obviously  was. “Sorry about the rain.” “GIVE US AN F!” 150, 000 people gave him an F and we were off with Fixin’ to Die Rag. In a masterful demonstration of charisma Country Joe captured the audience completely and delivered up a wonderful set of his songs finishing up with Fixin’ to Die Rag twice as encores. The audience wanted more. Country Joe explained that he was currently recording an album of poems about WWI and he would now play one of them but it was a long, quiet song and the audience would have to be very still. He then played Jean Desprez a ballad about a young boy who tried to save a wounded French soldier, its almost ten minutes long. It was still pissing down but you could have heard a pin drop. As he finished I think more than half the audience had tears in their eyes. The album War War War is superb. 

After the festival was over I travelled down to South Wales and my second summer season working on the archaeological excavation of a Roman fort in Usk, run by University College Cardiff. Whilst there I got presented with an end of first year Cardiff student, who had absolutely no digging experience, and told to teach him how to dig. We soon discovered that we had both just come from the Bath Festival and went on to become best friends and are still in contact fifty five years later. 

In autumn 1970, I went up to University College Cardiff to study archaeology despite having royally screwed up my A-levels, too much dope and acid! Through the people I had already got to know at Usk I immediately became a Student’s Union insider and, amongst other things began to work for the Union Events, the group that ran the concerts, as a stagehand, on the door, fly poster and whatever. I continued to do so long after I dropped out in 1971 at the end of my first year.

In 1973, Country Joe released his excellent Paris Sessions album of largely feminist songs recorded with a largely female band. He took this on the road and they played a gig at Cardiff Students Union. A friend of mine was Events secretary in that year and I asked him if I could manage to concert on that evening, he said yes. So, I came to meet Country Joe in person. As they were setting up I got into conversation with Pete Albin, the bass player from Big Brother and the Holding Company, who played base in the Paris Sessions band. And he told me a lot about the history of Country Joe’s music and political career. Later I found myself with the man himself and his road manager in the artists dressing room. We were smoking dope and drinking Newcastle Brown Ale. I told him that I had seen him at Bath and he responded, “ Hundred thousand of you fuckers sitting in the pouring rain and you could have heard a pin drop!” I then asked him if he would perform a solo set before the band set for me and sing Jean Desprez. He said he would and then turned to his road manager, “Do you know why I stopped doing solo concerts?” “No.” “I’m scared shitless of the audience!” This is a man who berated 300,000 at Woodstock for not singing loud enough! 

Later I was stood out in the concert hall with his very cute lady drummer wrapped up in my arms, don’t ask,  listening to him sing Jean Desprez for me. The lady turned to me and said, “I sit behind him every evening but you know I’ve never seen him perform. He’s good isn’t he?”

Sometime later, I can’t remember the exact year, I attended a superb duo concert of Country Joe and Barry Melton, the original fish guitarist, in the then new students union building in Cardiff.

The next highpoint came in 1976, when I finally got to hear the original Country Joe and the Fish lineup live. There was a Bob Marley and the Wailers open air in the football stadium in Cardiff. Country Joe and the Fish were one of the support acts on their reunion tour. I would have attended for Bob Marley but Country Joe and the Fish sealed to deal. On the day of the concert it was pissing down but we had tickets so we went in anyway. We spent the day in the roofed over stands , whilst the field, which was slowly turning into a swamp, where the audience would usually have stood remained empty. Because of the downpour les than 2000 people attended and the promoter went bankrupt. Despite the weather the concert was great and Country Joe and the Fish were the final act on before Marley. The local Rastas, who had come for the Wailers and didn’t want to hear some sixties San Fran hippie band, were restless  and basically jeered when they took the stage. Barry Melton looked out into the rain and said, “In California we call this liquid sunshine,” and they took off. It was pure magic and by the end the Rastas were loudly calling for encores. Ironically it was the last day that it rained before the drought of 76!

There is one final strange episode to my Country Joe odessey. In 2015, I got invited to participate in SciFoo the major unconference, which took place at Google in Mountain View. I flew in in advance to San Francisco and went to Oakland to visit the National Council for Science Education because I knew one of the prominent workers from the Internet. At some point I got introduced to the then Executive Director Eugenie Scott. She lives in Berkley and I can’t remember how the conversation took the turn but it turned out that her next door neighbour was Country Joe!

I still own Electric Music for Mind and Body. In fact, I own four copies the original mono album from 1967 that I bought in 1969, the stereo remix from 1969 that I acquired sometime later and the double CD, one disc is the original mono mix and the other is the stereo mix. Now Country Joe has departed from us, which has stirred up a lot of memories leading to this very personal post. 

Over my lifetime the wheelie bin has become the standard receptacle for the disposal of household rubbish. The are usually fairly large capacity, easy to clean so, reasonably  hygienic and their collection by municipal services is comparatively simply and cost effective. It require just one garbage truck and one driver.

On collection day they are placed out on the side of the road, on the sidewalk and the garbage truck drives passed halting briefly for its mechanical arm to pick up the bin and empty it into its interior, before replacing back on the side walk and therein lies the rub.

I have suffered from a degenerative spinal and pelvic girdle orthopaedic/neurological condition for more than thirty years. Since about fifteen years this has resulted in increasing difficulty in walking. By the beginning of last year, I was down to about five hundred metres with hiking poles before I needed to take a substantial break. In the autumn I suffered another major decline in my ability to walk. On a good day, I can now manage ten metres without aids, but those are very uncertain and with a high risk that I will fall. I have little or no stability. With my hiking poles or my rollator, I can manage about fifty metres, probably less. In my flat I use my rollator more than ninety percent of the time, although my flat is very small. For longer distances I am now dependent on my trusty electric wheelchair. Although not so extreme as my legs I suffer from similar problems with my arms so, I lack the strength necessary for a normal wheelchair.

My Mathematicus Mobile is very zippy, has a top speed of 6 kph and can literally turn on a dime. I’m very happy with the boost in mobility that it has brought me. I can even travel with it on the bus and up till now the bus drivers were all very friendly and helpful. When it came to opening the ramp so, I could get on and off. But now back to the wheelie bins.

On refuse collection day, and there are separate ones for, household refuse, recyclable plastic, and waste paper, the bins are lined up along the sidewalk. If the sidewalk is wide enough, I can usually get past with my wheelchair without any problems. However, if the bins are not on the edge of the sidewalk but scattered all over it, which is often the case after the garbage truck driver throws them back empty, I have difficulty getting past.  However, I have learnt to shove them out of the way with one hand whilst steering my wheelchair with the other. I’m also very adroit at clearing shopping trollies out of the way in supermarkets. The problems start when the sidewalks are narrow, as is the case in the side-street in which I live. If the wheelie bins are out on the sidewalk, even if the stand correctly on the edge, there is not enough space for me to get passed. And I’m forced to driver on the road! Just one of the minor irritants one has to live with when mobility disabled.

Today at 15:03 UT (that’s GMT for all those still living in the past) the Sun on its apparent journey to the south will briefly stand still above the Tropic of Capricorn before turning and beginning its climb northwards up to the Tropic of Cancer. The brief still stand gives the moment its name Solstice from the Latin Solstitium, point at which the sun seems to stand still. A composite noun set together from sol the sun and past participle stem of sistere, stand still, take a stand; to set, place, cause to stand. Tropic comes from Latin tropicus pertaining to a turn, from Greek tropikos of or pertaining to a turn or change. This moment marks the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere.

As I note at this time every year, rejecting the purely arbitrary convention of midnight on 31 December marking the beginning of the New Year, here at the Renaissance Mathematicus my New Year is the winer solstice, the point in the astronomical calendar in the depth of winter, when the light begins to return.

I wish all of my readers a happy solstice and may you enjoy whatever seasonal events you participate in. I personally don’t celebrate any of them. I thank all of you for your engagement, for reading my verbal outpourings, for your comments and your criticisms and hope you will continue to do so in the year to come. 

There will be no normal blog post on Wednesday, because on Thursday we start with another established tradition, the Renaissance Mathematicus Christmas Trilogy. For any new readers, who have found their way here in the last twelve months, they can find out what this is here and at the same time catch up on sixrteen years of previous trilogies! 

In my last but one post I wrote that I couldn’t say when the Renaissance Mathematicus would be back in business. Although, I have been at home for two weeks now and have made some ground good on my state of health since leaving the clinic, I am still finding it very difficult to find the energy and above all the concentration to write a halfway decent history of science post. 

Paragraph by paragraph I have ploughed my way through somewhat more than the half of the post I’m trying to write and I have hope that it will be finished by next week. How long the one after that will take I can’t say but I hope it will prove somewhat easier to write.

Until then you will all have to be patient.

I’m down but not yet out!

Some of my readers might have noticed that things have been rather quiet around here and perhaps wondering why?  Especially those who don’t follow me on social media. What follows is a sketch of the three and a half week long nightmare that has been my life over those weeks.

On Tuesday 7 October I woke up from my midday nap, yes I have reached that stage of my life, and began to cough. It turned into the worst coughing fit I have ever experienced, even worse than when I had Covid. After about three minutes it stopped and I realised that I almost couldn’t breathe. In a state of panic, I asked one of my neighbours if she could drive me to my pneumologist, whose practice is about five hundred metres from my flat. After an initial  refusal, “we don’t deal with emergencies”, I managed to persuade them to examine me. After long periods of waiting and several tests, including an X-ray, the pneumologist told me that I had suffered a pneumothorax; in simple English my right hand lung had collapsed.

An ambulance was called and I was whisked off to a local hospital where they immediately  attached me to a thoracic drainage. They pushed a thick plastic tube into my righthand side between my ribs, which is attached to a suction pump, which sucks out all the air, water and gunge in the chest cavity surrounding the lungs, which allows the collapsed lung to reinflate. The night following the operation I suffered the worst pain I have ever experienced and for the first time in my life was literally screaming in pain. Thankfully when enough pain reliever  and somnifacient had entered my system, I passed out. 

What followed was a week of lying in bed feeling like shit and being examined at regular intervals. Finally, after a couple of control X-rays, the doctors decided that the thoracic drainage had done its job and on Monday 13 October, the tube was removed from between my ribs. At first it appeared that everything was in order, but then about two hours later, the right hand side of my body began to blow up like a ballon. By chance, my doctor was in the room talking to another patient. I called him other, he took one horrified look and rushed my off to the operating theatre, where I had another thoracic drainage inserted. I was also immediately transferred to the specialist thoracic surgery clinic of the university hospital. 

There I was examined and X-rayed yet again and informed that I have a hole in my lung and had suffered a subcutaneous emphysema, that is the air from my lung had blown up the soft tissue under the skin. My right arm was twice as thick as my left arm and my face was blown up like a ballon, I looked like a disgruntled bullfrog. After another ten days of large doses of various medicines, examinations and observation it was decided on the Wednesday of this week to glue my lung. It’s called kleben in German (to glue) and the correct medical term is pleurodesis. There are various  procedure and in my case they injected a slurry of talc into my chest cavity through the drainage tube, which causes irritation between the parietal and the visceral layers of the pleura which closes off the space between them and prevents further fluid from accumulating. By this point a large amount of the subcutaneous emphysema swelling had reduced but it still has a long was to go. 

Yesterday, the drainage tube was withdrawn and after another control X-ray I was discharged. I have been at home since about three o’clock yesterday afternoon, and to use the correct medical terminology, I feel like shit warmed up. At the moment I don’t have to strength or the will to write history of science blog posts and can’t say when the Renaissance Mathematicus will be back in business. I have one finished blog post, that I wrote earlier and was due to be posted on 8 October, which I post shortly after this one and then its hiatus for a least another couple of weeks.

This is a very clear warning to those who will listen, DON’T SMOKE. I gave up smoking thirty five years ago but before that I smoked the strongest black tobaccos and cannabis in extremely large quantities. In the last three and a half weeks I have finally paid the price for those youthful indulgencies. 

You blog sixteen years and what do you get

Twelve thousand comments^[1] and one hell of a rep

You can tell St Peter that I can’t go

Cause I owe my soul to the history of maths.^[2]

It is a highly improbable fact that the Renaissance Mathematicus and his reprobate sidekick the HISTSCI_HULK, or should that be the HISTSCI_HULK and his reprobate sidekick the Renaissance Mathematicus, have now been blogging about diverse things scientific and historical for sixteen years. 

Fuckin’ ‘ell! Sixteen bleedin’ years of stomping on the #histsci cluster fucks brain damaged wannabe historians. 

Now, now Hulky, this is supposed to be a nice post, a celebration, not one of your notorious rants.

Sixteen is of course an integer and one with a unique and fascinating property. 

Hey! Integer is just a fancy-pancy word for a whole number 

Thank you Hulky. In fact, integer is derived from a Latin word meaning whole:

Integer (n.) := “a whole number” (as opposed to a fraction), 1570s, from noun use of Latin integer (adj.) “intact, whole, complete,” figuratively, “untainted, upright,” literally “untouched,” from in-“not” (see in- (1)) + root of tangere “to touch” (from PIE root *tag “to touch, handle”). The word was used earlier in English as an adjective in the Latin sense, “whole, entire” (c. 1500).

As I was saying, sixteen is an integer with a unique property. 

It is the only integer that equals M^N and N^M, where M and N are integers and M ≠ N. Where obviously M = 2 and N = 4 or vice versa. 

Sixteen is also the only number that can be both the perimeter and area of the same square, due to 4² being equal to 4 X 4.

One of Albrecht Dürer’s most famous woodcuts the much discussed Melencolia § I has a four by four magic square containing the numbers 1 to 16. The rows, columns, and diagonals all add up to 34. In two squares in the middle at the bottom contain the numbers 15 and 14 expressing the date the print was made. 

The base sixteen number system, hexadecimal, is used extensively in computer science.

Hexadecimal! You casting spells now?

No Hulky. Hex as in casting spells comes from the German hexen which means to hex or to cast spells. The hex in hexadecimal comes from the Greek hexa for six so, as decimal means the base ten number system, hexadecimal means the base six-ten, or as we say sixteen, number system.

Because hexadecimal needs sixteen basic number symbols the sybols “0”–“9” represent the values 0 to 9 and the symbols “A”–“F” the values 10 to 15. 

As we all know, don’t we Hulky, computer programs at the lowest level are written in binary code, lots of ones and zeros, because Claude Shannon, whilst working as a postgrad on the electrical version of Vannevar Bush’s differential analyser, realised that he could use George Boole’s binary algebraic logic to design electrical switching circuits. Basically, 1 means the electricity flows, 0 means it doesn’t. Now writing things in binary can lead to very long strings of ones and zeros and you can shorten those strings by using hexadecimal, because, as we noted above, 16 = 2⁴:

Software developers and system designers widely use hexadecimal numbers because they provide a convenient representation of binary-coded values. Each hexadecimal digit represents four bits (binary digits), also known as a nibble (or nybble). For example, an 8-bit byte is two hexadecimal digits and its value can be written as 00 to FF in hexadecimal.

Hexadecimal is used in the transfer encoding Base 16, in which each byte of the plain text is broken into two 4-bit values and represented by two hexadecimal digits. (Wikipedia)

Sixteen turns up in antiquated weighing systems. In the imperial system there are 16 ounces in a pound. The ounce has its origins in the Roman system of measurement as the uncia but there it was one twelfth of a libra the origin of the pound, hence lb as symbol for pond.

In the Chinese system of weights, before they introduced the metric system, the liang  was one sixteenth of a jin.

As always, when celebrating our bloggiversary, I wish to thank all those who over the years have taken the trouble to read my #histsci meanderings and Hulky’s explosive rants. In particular I want to thank all those, who offer encouragement and corrections in the comments, they are very welcome. 

---

^[1] Actually, it’s only 11,839 but poetic licence

^[2] With apologies to Merle Travis

Yesterday, I announced here that there would be no Renaissance Mathematicus post this week, as I was going into hospital for a few days for an inpatient neurological examination, but I hadn’t calculated with the cosmos’ sense of humour. 

So, from the beginning. I have been suffering from steadily degenerating orthopaedic problems, principally with my spine and pelvis for more than twenty years. Currently I am officially categorised as 90% severely handicapped and mobility handicapped. The latter comes with the bonus that I can use all public transport throughout Germany free of charge. Back in October last year, I had an appointment with a specialist for scoliosis, one of my problems, and after examining me, looking at my X-ray and CT images, and my medical history, he came to the conclusion that my problems were at root neurological rather than orthopaedic. He suggested an extensive inpatient neurological examination in a specialist clinic. So, my GP perscribed said examination and after some delay I got my appointment in the specialist clinic with registration at 9:40 today.

Now said clinic is not directly on my doorstep. It’s about fifty kilometres away but there is a direct train from Erlangen, where I almost live. I spent yesterday packing and doing the five tons of paperwork the clinic required. Why do in advance what you can do at the last minute. I ordered a taxi to take me to the station and everything was ready. 

Got up early this morning, had a small breakfast, got everything ready and at 7:40 was outside waiting for my taxi which was ordered for 7:45. No taxi! He actually arrived almost ten minutes late so, I’m panicking mildly that I’m going to miss my train. However, we made it on time and my train was also on time. I got into the train, parked my suitcase, found a seat and settled down with a book for the forty-five minute journey; this train is a local train that stops at every heap of sand. The clinic is actually on one of those heaps of sand.

So, I’ve been in the train for about ten minutes and am finally relaxing from the stress of getting there when my mobile phone starts to ring. I press the button, Christie! Hello, here is the clinic, I’m sorry but we have had so many emergency admissions that we can’t admit you today!!!!!!! Am I in the wrong film or what? I get off the train at the next major station and returned home, where I am now typing this journal of the days proceedings. 

There will still be no Renaissance Mathematicus post this week but there will be one next Wednesday, if fate doesn’t intervene, as my new admission appointment is next Thursday at 10:00!

There will be no blog post this week, as I am going into hospital for a few days for an in-patient neurological examination. Yes folks, they are going to investigate whether there is a brain inside my cranium or if it’s just an empty vessel full of age-old LSD fragments and stale dope smoke!