Danskcolin: Friday, March 8 2019

09:00 Lois and I planned to drive to Bishops Cleeve this morning to go food shopping and give Lois an opportunity to practice driving with her new glasses on, but unfortunately I have unexpected pain in the shoulder blades for some reason, so we postpone the trip out there until tomorrow.

a typical painful shoulder blade - at least mine is not a horrible bright red colour

like this one (yet), according to Lois, which is a bit of comfort!

10:00 I sit down with the computer and resume making up a Danish vocabulary list, which I want our U3A Danish group members to memorise before the group's next meeting in 7 days time. I try to help them by attaching interesting notes on the origins of the words, etc. - I am so warm-hearted ha ha ha. But in the end I decide on reflection that it just makes the list all the more confusing, and I drop the idea - damn, two hours of my life that I’ll never get back ha ha ha !!!!

11:00 We relax with a coffee on the couch and listen to the radio, an interesting programme in the series "The Bottom Line", which is all about issues in the business world. This edition is all about the craze for personalisation in the commercial world, as well as in health systems and patient care. The programme's host is the charming Evan Davis, who has assembled a group of 4 experts to help him explore the issue, and discuss the pluses and minuses of personalisation.

An interesting discussion. We hear about "zozo-suits" that were experimented with in Japan a few years ago. Participants received, through the post, a black nylon stretchy "suit", covered with electronic dots, which they then put on. They stood in front of their smartphones, and turned slowly round (360 degrees), while the app carried out a 3D scan of their entire bodies. This data was then used to sell them clothes that were exactly the right size, etc.

a typical Japanese "zozo-suit"

Amazon has a patent on a similar device and their plan is also to use the resulting data to manufacture and sell you tailor-made clothing. These kinds of systems will hopefully reduce the number of clothes being shipped back or thrown away, it’s believed.

In health systems, personalisation based on DNA information will hopefully make drugs more effective and cheaper - in the past, there was a lot of time (on average, 15 years) and a lot of money ($ 3 billion or so) partly wasted, in attempts to produce drugs that were both safe and effective for everyone, "one size fits all", an almost impossible task, given how much we differ from each other genetically. This kind of personalisation is already happening, and additionally in the future, cell therapy will be even more important, systems whereby an individual human's healthy cells are used to heal his / her diseased cells, etc.

We also hear about "Habit", a subsidiary of Campbell's Soup, that can send you a personalised weekly diet and also offers a weekly meal delivery service. They sell you a d-i-y DNA test kit and blood test kit, and you submit the results to the company's laboratory, where these results determine the kind of diet you will receive in your weekly meal deliveries.

Good grief, what madness !!!!

The show's guests also talk about the pluses and minuses of revealing so much of our personal data to the big technical companies, which have so far not handled this data with adequate respect, to put it mildly.

We hear also about China's so-called "New Retail" system, which Chinese counterparts of Google and Amazon etc use in their own proprietary chains of supermarkets. The consumer has no choice but to buy the company's app, and you can only buy food etc. exclusively through the app, using the same company's payment platforms and communication platforms. You choose a food from the shelves, scan it, and put it in your basket or cart. The money has already disappeared from your bank account. My goodness, what a nightmare !!!!

China's big technical companies know everything about you - what you're looking at on the web where you travel, etc. A Chinese version of Shoshanna Zuboff's so-called surveillance capitalism, but even more efficient.

China's "New Retail" system

Personalisation also has its pluses and minuses also when it comes to disclosing personal health information: it may help the average person to receive the best health care, but it is not such a good thing if pharmaceutical companies or insurance companies get hold of all this personal information. Yikes - scary, to put it mildly !!!!

12:30 We have lunch and afterwards I go to bed and take a gigantic afternoon nap. Meanwhile, Lois goes around the corner to the local library to help the library staff lead the weekly Baby Bounce & Rhyme session for local young children and their mothers.

a typical Baby Bounce & Rhyme session at the local library -

Lois always brings along one of the Cabbage Patch dolls we bought for our young daughters in the US in the 1980’s and she sits the doll on her lap, so she looks as much like the other mothers as possible, which I find incredibly touching, for some reason.

15:30 Lois comes back, and we relax with a cup of tea on the sofa. We listen a little to the radio, an interesting edition of the series "The Last Word".

Lois and I have got into the habit of hearing this programme every week because we want to find out if anyone in the past 1-4 weeks has died or not (I have noticed that most weeks there are only 4- 5 deaths, which is somewhat comforting at least!). The programme host is the charming Matthew Bannister.

Sadly the Cambridge mathematician Simon Norton died recently at the age of 64.

His mother had him tested when he was 3 years old, not to determine whether he was crazy (like Sheldon's mother in the Big Bang Theory), but just to find out her little son's IQ, which turned out to be 178 - scary!

Like young Sheldon, young Simon was bullied at his primary school. But as a young teenager, he took the entrance examination to the Eton College boarding school: the school's examiners did not bother to put a grade on his written exam answers, they just wrote 2 exclamation marks at the bottom of the page.

When he was 16, he got a bachelor's degree at London University (young, like Sheldon: except that Simon was 2 years behind Sheldon here - Sheldon was only 14 when he got his degree).

Young Simon

Young Sheldon

Later, when as an adult he was living and working in Cambridge, he went around with wild hair, dirty clothes, worn shoes, torn trousers, in other words, he looked like the stereotype of a very eccentric weirdo. On the other hand, he had a child's gentle innocence, says his friends, and was the kind of man one could trust unconditionally. He used to sit, a slightly dishevelled figure, surrounded by plastic bags, in the corner of his college common-room.

In Cambridge he worked with John Conway on a project to assemble the list of finite simple groups, a kind of periodic table of the molecules that make up the universe - the periodic table of symmetry.

Amongst other things, he and John discovered a symmetrical crystal which sits in 196,883-dimensional space, the so-called "monstrous moonshine" crystal.

"Monstrous Moonshine" – ’simples!’ !!!

Although these kinds of objects seemed completely theoretical, they actually became practical and useful, when it came to transmitting data accurately from the other side of the solar system. Their symmetry was able to be used to correct the errors occurring in long-distance data transfers, and corruption in the binary representations of images sent back from the planet Saturn were in fact corrected by the kind of symmetry that Simon had investigated. The result was crystal clear images of the planet.

Like Sheldon, Simon wasn't specially popular with his students when it came to his lecturing, to put it mildly. Eventually, he was banned by the university from giving lectures, and sadly his academic career ran into the sand in the 1980’s.

Later in his life, he became interested in public transport, i.e. trains and buses, a bit like Sheldon. He absolutely hated cars, to put it mildly, say his friends.

Simon, getting ready to board a bus

Sheldon, as an engine-driver ...

... in Amy's fantasy world

My goodness, what a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

Lois and I discuss whether Simon's life could have inspired the Sheldon figure in Big Bang Theory, but the timing doesn’t quite fit, we think. The sitcom was first aired in 2007 and Alexander Masters' biography of Simon, "The Genius in My Basement," was first published in 2011.

18:00 We have dinner and spend the rest of the evening watching a bit of television. An old edition of Top of the Pops is on, from June 11, 1987. The programme hosts are the charming Peter Powell and Simon Bates.

It's nice to see Australian John Farnham again with his hit song, "You're the Voice", which had already been topping the Australian charts for 22 weeks - yikes, what madness !!!!

It's also nice to see a bagpiper emerging from out of nowhere to perform the so-called "bagpipe break" in the middle of the song.

I recall that Lois and I a couple of weeks ago, during a previous edition of Top of the Pops, were looking at the poet Labi Siffre singing his "So Strong" song, when a beautiful saxophonist appeared from out of nowhere to perform the so-called "sax break", just like tonight.

Flashback to last month: a fair-haired saxophonist with chubby arms

appears from out of nowhere to perform the so-called "sax-break" in the middle of the song

Tonight’s bagpiper has evidently decided not to expose his upper arms for some reason, probably wisely ha ha!

Top of the Pops was usually aired on Thursdays ever since it began in the 1960’s, but this edition was aired a day early, on the Wednesday, because the following day was Election Day in the UK. At the end of the programme DJ Simon Bates encourages TV viewers to vote for one or other of their local candidates.

Results of the following day's election - no comment!

20:00 We continue to watch a bit of television. The 13th episode of the current (and final) season of the Big Bang Theory sitcom is on.

An amusing episode where Sheldon and Amy are invited by university president Siebert to have lunch in the board's luxury restaurant, to meet the scientists whose experiments coincidentally confirmed Sheldon and Amy's super-asymmetry theory.

Amy reminds Sheldon of their recent wedding reception

in the restaurant

Sheldon happily can recall a few good memories about the occasion

22:00 We go to bed. I read about 10 pages of my bedtime book, Ben Elton's "Two Brothers" (Danish version) before drifting off to sleep – zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz !!!!!

Danish translation

09:00 Lois og jeg planlagde at køre til Bishops Cleeve i formiddag for at gå madindkøb og give Lois en lejlighed til at øve sig i at køre med sin nye briller, men desværre har jeg desværre uforventet ondt i skulderbladerne af en eller anden grund, så vi udskyde det hele indtil i morgen.

et typisk pinagtigt skulderblad – i det mindste er mit ikke rødt (endnu),

ifølge Lois, hvilket er lidt af en trøst

10:00 Jeg sætter mig med computeren og fortsætter med at udfærdige en dansk ordforrådlist, som jeg vil have vores U3A danske gruppes medlemmer til at lære udenad før gruppens næste møde om 7 dages tid. Jeg prøver at hjælpe dem ved at vedlægge interessante noter om ordenes oprindelser osv - jeg er så varmhjertet ha ha ha. Men til sidst beslutter jeg ved næmere eftertanke, at det bare gør det hele mere forvirrende, og jeg dropper idéen – pokkers, to timer af mit liv, som jeg aldrig vil have igen ha ha ha!!!!

11:00 Vi slapper af med en op kaffe i sofaen, og lytter lidt til radio, et interessant program i serien ”Bundlinjen”, der handler om spørgsmål i forretningsverden. Dette afnsit handler om dillen for personalisering i den kommercielle verden, samt i sundhedssystemer og patientbehandling. Programmets vært er den charmerende Evan Davis, der har samlet en gruppe 4 eksperter for at hjælpe ham om at udforske spørgsmålet, og diskutere plusserne og minusserne af personalisering.

En interessant discussion. Vi hører om ’zozosuits’, der for et par år siden blev eksperimenteret med i Japan. Deltagere modtog gennem posten en sort nylon elastisk overtrægtsdragt , dækket med elektroniske prikker, som de tog på. De stod foran deres smartphones, vendte sig langsomt om (360 grader), mens appen gennemførte en 3D-scan af hele deres kroppe. Disse data blev så brugt for at sælge dem tøj, der var præcis den rigtige størrelse osv.

en typisk japansk ’zozosuit’

Amazon har en patent på en lignende enhed, og planen er at benytte de resulterende data for at fremstille og sælge dig skræddersyede tøj. Disse slags systemer vil forhåbentligt mindske antallet af tøj, der bliver sendt tilbage eller smidt væk.

I sundhedssystemer vil personalisering, baseret på dna-oplysninger forhåbentligt gøre lægemidler mere effektive og billigere – i fortiden var der en masse tid (i gennemsnit 15 år) og en masse penge ($3 milliarder eller deromkring) spildt på at prøve at fremstille mediciner, der var sikre og effektive for alle, ”én størrelse passer alle”, en næsten umulig opgave, i betragtning af, hvor meget vi adskiller os genetisk fra hinanden. Der sker allerede dette slags udviklinger, og i fremtiden vil celleterapi bliver meget meget vigtigere, end nu, en system hvor et menneskes sunde celler bliver benyttet for at læge hans/hendes syge celler osv.

Vi hører også om ”Habit”, et datterselskab af Campbells Soup, der kan sende dig en personaliseret ugentlig kost og tilbyder også en ugentlig måltidsleveringstjeneste. De sælger dig en d-i-y dna-test-kit og blodprøve-kit, og du sender resultaterne til selskabets laboratorie, og disse resultater vedgør den slags kost du skal modtage i dine måltidsleveringer.

Du godeste, sikke et vanvid!!!!

Showets gæster taler også om plusser og minusser med at vi afsløre så meget af vores personlige data til de store tekniske selskaber, der hidtil ikke har behandlet dem med tilstrækklige respekt, for at sige mildt.

Vi hører om Kinas såkaldte ”New Retail”-system, som de kinesiske pendanter af Google og Amazon bruger i deres egne supermarkeder. Forbrugeren har ikke andet valg, end at købe den tilsvarende app, og du kan kun købe fødevarer osv udelukkende via din smartphone, ved at bruge også selskabets betalingsplatformer og kokmmunikationsplatformer også. Du vælger en fødevare fra hylderne, scanner den, og lægger den i din kurv eller indkøbsvogn. Pengene er allerdede forsvundet fra dit bankkonto. Du godeste, sikke et mareridt !!!!

Kinas stor tekniske selskaber ved alting – hvad du kigger på på nettet, hvor du rejser osv. En kinesisk version af Shoshanna Zuboffs såkældte overvågningskapitalisme, men endnu mere effektiv.

Kinas ”New Retail” system

Personificering har sine plusser og minusser også, når det kommer til afsløring af personlige sundhedsinformation: det kan være, at det hjælper den gennemsnitlige person til at modtage den bedste sundhedspleje, men det er ikke en så god ting, hvis farmaceutiske selskaber eller forsikringsselskaber får fat i denne personlige information, for at sige mildt. Yikes – skræmmende, for at sige mildt!!!!

12:30 Vi spiser frokost og bagefter går jeg i seng for at tage en gigantisk eftermiddagsur. I mellemtiden går Lois rundt om hjørnet til det lokale bibliotek, for at hjælpe bibliotekets personale med at lede den ugentlige Baby Bounce & Rhyme-session for små børn og deres mødre.

et typisk Baby Bounce & Rhyme-session på det lokale bibliotek –

Lois medbringer altid en af de Cabbage Patch-dukker, vi købte i 1980’erne i USA,

og sætter den på sit skød, så hun ligner de andre mødre så meget som muligt,

hvilket jeg finder utrolig rørende, af en eller anden grund.

15:30 Vi slapper af med en kop te i sofaen. Vi lytter lidt til radio, et interessant afsnit i serien ”Det sidste ord”. Lois og jeg er kommet i vane med at høre dette program hver uge, fordi vi ønsker at finde ud af, om nogen i de seneste 1-4 uger døde eller ej (jeg har bemærket, at der i de fleste uger kun sker 4-5 dødsfald, hvilket er lidt trøstende, for at sige mildt). Programmets vært er den charmerende Matthew Bannister.

Cambridge-matematikeren Simon Norton døde desværre for nylig, på 64 år. Hans mor fik ham testet, da han var 3 år gammel, ikke for at vedgøre, om han var sindsyg (som Sheldons mor i Big Bang Theory), men bare som at opdage sin søns IQ, som viste sig at være 178 – skræmmende!

Ligesom Sheldom blev Simon mobbet på sin folkeskole. Men som ung teenager tog han adgangseksamenen til kostskolen Eton College: skolens eksaminatorer gav ikke karakter til hans skrevne svar, de skrev bare 2 udråbstegn på bunden af siden. Da han var 16, erhvervede hand en bachelorgrad i London University (ligesom Sheldon: bortset fra, at Simon var 2 år bagud for Sheldon her – Sheldon var kun 14).

Young Simon

Young Sheldon

Senere, da han, som voksen, boede og arbejdede i Cambridge, gik han med vildt hår, beskidt tøj, slidte sko, revede bukser, med andre ord, så han ud som en meget ekcentrisk original. På den anden side havde han et barns blide uskyld, siger hans venner, den slags mand, man kunne stole på ubetingelsesløst. Han plejede at sidde, en lidt forpjusket figure, omgivet af plastikposer, i hjørnet af sit colleges opholdstue til studerende.

I Cambridge arbejdede han sammen med John Conway på et projekt, hvor de samlede listen over endelige enkle grupper, en slags periodisk tabel af de molekuler, der udgør universet, dvs den periodiske tabel af symmetri.

Han og John opdagede en symmetrisk krystal, der sidder i 196.883-dimensional rum, den såkaldte ”uhyre måneskin”.

”Uhyre måneskin” – ’simples’ !

Selvom disse slags objekter virkede fuldstændigt teoretiske, blev de faktisk praktiske og til god nytte, når det kom til at udsende data på en akkurat måde fra den anden side af solsystemet. Deres symmetri kunne blive brugt for at rette fejlene, der opstår i dataoverførelser. Korruption i den binær repræsentationer af billeder, der blev sendt tilbage fra planeten Saturn, blev faktisk korrigeret ved hjælp af den slags symmetri, som Norton undersøgte. Resultatet var krystalklare billeder af planeten.

Ligesom Sheldon, var Simon ikke ret populær blandt de studerende, når det kom til at holde foredrag, for at sige mildt. Til sidst blev hun forbudt af universitet at holde foredrag, og desværre løb hans akademiske karriere ud i sandet i 1980’erne.

Senere på sit liv, interesserede han sig for offentlig transport, dvs tog og busser, lidt som Sheldon. Han hadede biler, for at sige mildt.

Norton, ved at stige ind i en bus

Sheldon, som lokomotivfører...

... i Amys fantasiverden

Du godeste, sikke en skør verden vi lever i !!!!!!

Lois og jeg diskuterer, om Simons liv kunne have inspireret Sheldon-figuren i Big Bang Theory, men timingen passer ikke, tror vi. Sitcommen blev først sendt i 2007, og Alexander Masters’ biografi om Simon, ”The Genius in My Basement”, blev først udgavet i 2011.

18:00 Vi spiser aftensmad og bruger resten af aftenen på at se lidt fjernsyn. De viser et gamle afsnit af Top of the Pops fra den 11. juni 1987. Programmets værter er de charmerende Peter Powell og Simon Bates.

Det er rart at se igen australske John Farnham med sin hitsang, ”You’re the Voice”, der allerede havde toppet de australske hitlister i 22 uger – yikes, sikke et vanvid!!!!

Det er også rart, at se en sækkepiber, der dukker frem fra ingen steder for at opføre det såkaldte ”bagpipe break” midt i sangen.

Jeg mindes om, at Lois og jeg for et par uge siden under et tidligere afsnit af Top of the Pops var i gang med at se på digteren Labi Siffres ”So Strong” hitsang , da en smuk saxofonist dukkede frem fra ingen steder for at opføre det såkaldte ”sax break” midt i sangen, ligesom i aften.

en lyshåret saxophonist med buttede arme dukker frem fra ingen steder

og opfører det såkaldte ”sax-break” midt i sangen

Aftenens sækkepiberen har åbenbart besluttet ikke at afsløre sine overarme af en eller anden grund, sandsynligvis klogt ha ha ha!

Top of the Pops blev normalt sendt om torsdagen, men dette afsnit blev sendt 1 dag tidligt, på grund af, at den følgende dag var valgdag i Storbritannien og Nord-Irland. I slutningen af programmet opforderer DJ’en Simon Bates tv-seerne til at stemme på en eller anden af deres lokale kandidater.

Resultater af den følgende dags valg

20:00 Vi forsætter med at se lidt fjernsyn. De viser det 13. afsnit i den nuværende (og sidste) sæson af sitcommen Big Bang Theory.

BBListing

BBBLurb

Et morsomt afsnit, hvor Sheldon og Amy bliver inviteret af universitetets præsident Siebert til at spise frokost i bestyrelsens luksusrestaurant for at møde de forskere, hvis eksperimenter tilfældigvis bekræftede Sheldon og Amis teori om super-assymetri.