The wife's been reading a biography of W.C. Fields (W.C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes, by Robert Lewis Taylor). It was first published in 1950 - the hardcover copy we have is from the library, and it's been in the library so long that it was put away into the archival shelves aeons ago. A look through the borrowing dates shows that it was first taken out in May 1953, and then about once a month till October 1954, after which the frequency dropped to once in two months or so till mid-1956. Then the borrowings fell even more to about once or twice a year, and there was a long pause where it gathered dust between 1969 and February 1972, the last year stamped on the borrowing slip.
1972! The wife wasn't even born then. She was very excited to be holding a book that was so old. Plus it had the smell of old books that we love so much. We took turns taking deep whiffs. Then I saw the sign on the borrowing slip that reads as follows:
SURREY COUNTY LIBRARY
140 HIGH STREET, ESHER
This book should be returned to the Branch from which it was borrowed by the latest date entered below: if not, fines will be charged. If the book comes into contact with any notifiable infectious disease you should follow the instructions of the Medical Officer and notify the Librarian.
ENQUIRIES ARE WELCOME
Notifiable Infectious Diseases?! And we've been breathing them in? Head for the hills. Nobody is safe.
The other day, the wife wanted a frappuccino so we nipped into a Starbucks. While she bought the drink, I popped over to the loo. As is my custom, I lowered the lid before flushing, and what did I find? £160 in crisp twenties fallen behind the toilet lid.
I handed the cash over to the barista. He said, 'You found this in the toilet?' He laughed. A customer standing at the counter laughed. They both stared at me.
The manager saw the cash in the barista's hands. 'Where did that come from?' she said. The barista pointed at me. 'The gentleman found it in the toilet.'
Loudly, he said, 'I shall put it in the safe.' He looked around the cafe to see if everyone had heard him. He laughed again and shook his head.
'Maybe the loser will come back?' the barista said hopefully.
The manager and the barista muttered to each other.
'Here you go, sir,' the barista said, offering me a coupon. 'You can have a free drink of your choice at any Starbucks.'
'Three!' said the manager from somewhere beneath the counter.
'Manager says "three"', said the barista, and offered me another two coupons. I thanked him and he laughed once more.
So there you go. Three coupons for free drinks. And all for lowering the toilet lid before flushing.
[You do close the lid, don't you? Before flushing? Think of that fine aerosol of disgusting matter that would otherwise spew all over your clothes and the toilet if you didn't.]
Welcome to the twenty-fourth instalment of the Giant’s Shoulders, the monthly carnival of science and history-of-science blogging from around the planet. In this issue, there’s a bit of a preponderance of historical vignettes, which I trust you’ll find interesting.
Shall we start with a timeline of scientific discoveries, analyses and inventions? How about this – from years that end in 24 in every century? I’m missing several years, so if you’d like to fill those in, please be my guest.
I can’t think of any particular grouping in this carnival. You know, by subject and all that. It’s pretty motley. Chronological order is somewhat unsatisfying, like arranging books on your shelf in alphabetical order of title. Let us, therefore, be whimsical.
From New at LacusCurtius & Livius, we have Bill Thayer’s introduction and a link to a classic paper about how people developed effective ways to compute the heights of mountains. It’s a wide-ranging work, starting from the Ancient Greeks and working its way through Kepler and The paper is from 1929, so expect nothing on GPS in it!
Continuing with mensuration, Ethan Siegel at ScienceBlogs has a neat little piece about how to determine distances to the stars. In How Far to the Stars, he explains the principle of parallax, notes that Copernicus thought he could use it to tell distances, and then goes on to Christiaan Huygens’s idea of using luminosity to compute how far Sirius is from us.
So we are able to measure distances with excellent accuracy. But what of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Surely it’s impossible to measure simultaneously (to arbitrary precision) both the position and the momentum of an object? This is certainly true on the scale of the truly small, but why is it not so evident on the scale of our senses? Why does quantum mechanics explain to remarkable accuracy the weird behaviour of the minute but loses that weirdness at the macroscopic? On homunculus, Philip Ball presents Big Quantum, where he talks about this explanatory lacuna in the transition between the very small and the large. It’s all due to decoherence!
For another example of the genre, we have Caroline Rance at The Quack Doctor with an interesting little piece about one type of alternative medicine – uroscopy. This is the use of urine’s colour, consistency, taste and smell as a diagnostic tool. By the 19th century, professional medics had discounted this as quackery, but common people continued to frequent piss-doctors. In Cameron the Piss-Prophet, we learn how one such worthy was hoist by his own petard.
From one aspect of quackery, we move on to another. In 1726, a woman named Mary Toft (or Tofts) was a sensation in England for having allegedly given birth to rabbits.
She had supporters and deriders in equal measure; scientists argued both in her favour (e.g. a medical doctor, John Maubray) and against (Sir Richard Manningham, a male midwife). William Hogarth’s Cunicularii at the Wellcome Library Item of the Month (besides analysing some lovely etchings by the great artist) raises a subtle question.
Leaving quackery, we ponder another form of obfuscation. Via Thony C. we have an article titled “Follies of the present day”: Scriptural Geology from 1817 to 1857 by J.M. Lynch at A Simple Prop. Who were scriptural geologists? These were scientists who tried somehow to unify vast geological time with their faith in the Bible’s six days of creation. Note that these people did not believe (pace Ussher) that the Universe was formed in 4004 BC.
Why did these Christian scientists not pay closer attention to James Hutton? In 1785, he had published an article Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability in which he began the study of deep geological time. Via Thony C., we have John F. Ptak’s Raising Greatness: James Hutton’s Deep View of Time, 1795 posted at Ptak Science Books talking about Hutton’s remarkable intuition, as he saw the entirety of Earth’s history explained in the sloping red sandstone at Siccar Point.
While on the subject of deep time, a fossil of the Archaeopteryx was first discovered in 1861. Since then palaeontologists have argued whether this transitional creature (between dinosaurs and true birds) was capable of flight. Ed Yong presents First Birds Were Poor Fliers at the Discover Magazine Blog. There were some reasons to believe that the beast could fly but also good reasons why not.
Dorset Ancestors have a biography of Francis Glisson, a native of that English county, who went on to great success as a doctor in 17th century London. When he heard of a new debilitating disease among children of Dorset, he studied it carefully and concluded that this bone-deformative condition (which we know as ‘rickets’) was caused by malnutrition.
A sesquicentennial after Glisson plied his investigative mind, another Englishman began to consider the various causes of deafness in people. As a diagnostic tool, John Harrison Curtis invented the Cephaloscope, which is described in Jaipreet Virdi’s post The Cephaloscope on From the Hands of Quacks.
John Harrison Curtis also insisted that aurists – students of auditory illnesses – should also be attached to medical hospitals. Jaipreet Virdi’s related post The London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb tells this story.
From illnesses of the body, we segue to a illness of the mind. The dreaded African disease, sleeping sickness, when in an advanced stage, often resulted in violent mania. Was this true insanity on the part of the natives, or just a manifestation of a fear of isolation in a camp? From Sleeping Sickness and Lunacy at the Colonial Psychiatry Hub, we learn that much documentation of the effects of sleeping sickness on the local population is available from the British staffers of the Colonial Office (Uganda).
This video is an overview of the life, times, and accomplishments of Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), the Dutch scientist who used hand-made single-lens microscopes to become the first human to see protozoa, bacteria, sperm, and red blood cells, among many other things.
And although that video’s only 7 minutes long, it promises more riches to come. Can there be any more to van Leeuwenhoek, then? Indeed there can, and Thony C. presents Lego-nhoek? posted at Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Centraal.
van Leeuwenhoek, of course, was a contemporary, competitor and Royal Society colleague of that polymath Robert Hooke. I found several blogs on this brilliant Englishman, and planned to chuck them in here, but closer scrutiny revealed that at least one of those pieces was a copy of a Wikipedia article. I hope this is not a similar copy: Leland Velazquez discusses the Physics of Bungee Jumping. Hooke’s work on elasticity leading to his eponymous law is the underpinning of this extreme sport.
If Robert Hooke is around, Christopher Wren can’t be far behind. Another brilliantly multifaceted man, Wren involved himself in astronomy, mathematics, architecture, art, and – we learn from Christopher Wren and the Bees by Gene Kritsky at Wonders & Marvels – beekeeping. Why is this scientifically relevant? He also developed the transparent beehive that was suitable for the scientific observation of bee behaviour.
The bees were able to move between the various layers of the hive, and glass panels set into the structure allowed an observer to see the honey cascading down inside it. Although Wren’s construction had not been an immediate success (due to a failure to realise that bees worked downwards), it offered the prospect of an ever-increasing stock of bees and honey within the same hive. [from here]
Speaking of polymaths, there was Florence Fenwick Miller in the 19th century. She was a suffragette, a journalist, an educator, and a qualified medical doctor. From Peacay at the absolutely ravishing BibliOdyssey, we have An Atlas of Anatomy.
From Peacay at BibliOdyssey again, we have Fungis Danicis, a lovely set of illustrations of fungi studied by a Danish lawyer-turned-botanist named Theodor Holmskjold in the 18th century. This worthy actually identified over fifty new species during two years of observation in the countryside near Aarhus.
************************************************
Now for some controversy! When scientists without training in history try to develop works in the history of science, clearly feathers are ruffled. Via Thony C., we have Renaissance Art or Neuroanatomy? Part 1 and part 2, posted by Darin at PACHSmörgåsbord. It appears that there have been a series of papers over the past 20 years by various scientists trying to find hidden anatomically precise messages in Michelangelo’s art.
R. Donald Fields wrote up a guest blog at Scientific American recently that discusses the oeuvre; as it turns out, none of the scientists involved is a trained historian. As the rebuttal at PACHSmörgåsbord makes clear, this is dangerous practice:
Why does this matter? Because such articles attract the attention of editors and contributors at places like Scientific American. These contributors then post a redaction of the article on the website, where the post becomes one of the most popular. Such redactions misrepresent the history of science, suggest that anybody can write the history of science, and deny that historians of science have a discrete expertise. That’s why it matters.
But just to show that not all scientific speculation on art is ill-founded, check out this interesting bit of detective work by a bunch of astronomers at Texas State University. Via Thony C., we have a post by Roger Sinnott on Sky And Telescope titled Walt Whitman’s Meteor-Procession, we learn about the great poet’s imagery (“the strange huge meteor-procession" that went "shooting over our heads" with "its balls of unearthly light”) and an interesting astronomical phenomenon.
I’m not sure if this next piece fits within the purview of our Carnival (as it may be more aligned to sociology) but I think it relates to a seminal work of behavioural psychology, so perhaps I can present it? Christopher Greene’s Clarks’ Black-White Doll Experiment Replicated at Advances in the History of Psychology blog discusses an even more controversial subject than that in the preceding paragraph, and highlights its most recent replication under the aegis of CNN (full report here in PDF).
************************************************
On to more jolly subjects. Remember Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation? It is 50 years since the invention of the (optical) laser. Via Thony C., we have Happy Birthday! posted by Matt Springer at Built on Facts.
Another anniversary is that of Vannevar Bush’s visionary piece sixty-five years ago in the Atlantic Review about associative links in information, which one can easily see as an early precursor to hypertext and all that. Via gg, we have Simon Harper’s review ‘As We May Think’ at 65 from his blog Thinking Out Loud.
We end on a luminous, numinous note. What links a certain 1980s teen film, a song by John Parr, the Chinese sea-goddess Mazu, and – wait for it – ionised air? In St Elmo’s Fire, Captain Skellet of A Schooner of Science explains the whys and the hows of the gorgeous blue glow that appears on the tips of masts on sailing ships.
************************************************
[And there you have it. Thanks for stopping by. I hope this encourages you to write up your own pieces on science and its history and philosophy. Do consider submitting your blog article to the next edition of the giant's shoulders at The Dispersal of Darwin. You can use the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.]
It appears that dieting is harmful to your health. The stress induced by forcing a change in your diet results in heightened levels of cortisol, which eventually leads to heart attacks and cancer.
Surely this just goes to show that there's really no clear road to health. Exercise? Forsooth. Consume fewer carbs? Bunkum. Yoga? What for? Lifestyle illnesses will eventually consume us, and for all the blandishments of gyms and sculpted bodies, our systems will go down sooner or later, and there is no possibility of a reboot.
The reason for all this quite simple: a human's life is supposed to end early! It's only artificial measures such as medical care, and petroleum-fuelled rescue apparatuses, and a taboo against nose-picking that have led to multi-decadal lifetimes and pollution. In the good old ages until Alexander Fleming started mucking about with fungi, diseases and wild animals kept our populations in check. There was little existential angst. Our footprints on this planet were short-lived.
So here is my solution to all of the world's ills: environmental degradation, voracious capitalism, the pensions shortfall. Every human's life should end at 40.
How does this help? Well, for one thing, knowing from early childhood that our life is limited to four decades will either instil a powerful drive to overachieve, or stunt us into a shadowy existence of ennui and fatalism. People with the former quality will work wonders in our understanding of life, the universe and everything; everybody else can become managers. No need for pensions, no need to accumulate wealth, no boom and bust, and the constant demand for immediate gratification should work wonders for production. People can procreate in their teens, consolidate their achievements in their twenties and thirties, look after their grandkids till they are 40, and then go quietly into the void, after, preferably, handing over the keys to their apartments to the nearest stranger.
The human mind is a wondrous thing. It can imagine incentives where there are none, discern incentives other than those that are on offer, and - in all cases - act supremely rationally. But the human mind also operates under incomplete information, and what is rational to one is sheer idiocy to another.
The public health services in the UK have been crying themselves hoarse against smoking during pregnancy. Besides the respiratory burden imposed on the mother, chemicals in the cigarette tend to stunt foetal growth. Smaller, sicklier babies are the result.
Clearly, the part of the public health announcement that says 'unhealthy babies' is drowned out in the minds of these sexual athletes.
Why, though, are these girls so keen on a baby in the first place. Well, there's a couple of incentives again. First, they don't want to be known as lesbians in school. It's all about peer pressure, and school is a minefield even without being labelled a 'frigid dyke'. By the age of eleven, then, it makes sense to sleep with the first likely fellow that comes along. Falling pregnant is the ultimate stamp of heterosexuality.
Secondly, the public perception is that single mums' priority to obtain municipally funded accommodation rises dramatically. (Actually, according to Wigan Council, it doesn't - not directly, anyway.) Why would they want to stick around their working class homes with screaming mothers and absent fathers? Which teenager doesn't crave independence from interfering adults? Coming from broken backgrounds, a life away from all that turmoil can only bring peace, they think.
That civic-minded effort was instituted to help those at risk: poor single mothers who might get thrown out of their homes or faced assault from their partners. Unfortunately, somewhere between intention and execution, the plot was lost.
In the five years that I lived in London up to January 2008, I don't think I saw more than four or five women taller than me. In the last four months, I've encountered more than a dozen. What's going on? Where are they all coming from? Why are they all in the City? And why do they all have heavy bags that they use mercilessly to knock lesser mortals out of the way as they bestride the pavements like colossi?
Personally, I blame the Dutch. Ever since their king conquered England 320 years ago, they have been growing ever more prosperous and taller. Now it appears that their women are the tallest in Western Europe. Sure, there are some communities in the Dinaric Alps who can look down upon the Dutch, but face it: how many Dinarians are there in the City? And anyway, these Amazons who power their way down Bishopsgate are all blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked and smiling, and everybody knows that that's what the Dutch are: a happy and well-fed people.
The link between quality of diet and height has been known for quite a while. The remarkable growth of the Japanese post-WW II has been documented here and there. Sure, there are supposedly tall tribes in Africa (e.g. the Dinka) who are probably malnourished, but very well adapted to the hot clime. But, in general, the average height of a population is a good proxy for the quality of their lives.
As usual with such sweeping study, there's always an interpretational ruckus. The average height of Indian men has increased much more than that of Indian women in the past sixty years. Clearly, this would lead one to conclude that women in India have had a much worse time of it - foodwise, especially - than their menfolk. But no. The cry goes around town that the correlation between height and nutrition applies only to foreigners. We Indians are different.
But I'd like to claim that so are the Africans. And mid-nineteenth century British. In fact, everybody is different.
This paper suggests that the reason why South Asians are shorter than would be implied by their relative wealth is that historically, their population could only be supported by adopting a vegetarian cereal-based diet that did not permit people to be so tall as a more balanced diet with a higher percentage of fats and animal-basd foods...the preferences that evolved to support the diet, most notably vegetarianism, may take many generations to change.
The paper also points out that while there is a directional relation between quality of food and height, the reverse is not necessarily valid. Also, inferences on quality of life from records of average height are dangerous. For instance, the Irish in the 19th century were poorer yet taller than their British counterparts. The Irish had a nutritionally better-balanced diet (of dairy and potatoes) than their cousins across the Irish Sea.
Likewise, attempts to infer African income levels or African disease burdens from African heights would fail spectacularly, much more spectacularly even than the well-known but relatively minor failures in the height to income relationship in mid-nineteenth century Europe and America, particularly because at least some of the latter can be accounted for by an increased burden of disease.
The Economist recently had an interesting discussion of the relation between income levels and height. Stature, it announces, is a measure of deprivation, not necessarily prosperity. As the quality of life improves for a population, its average height rises dramatically. But once essential nutrition is widely available, even if the population continues to grow richer, its height does not grow as much.
Consider this, though. Two societies with equal average wealth can have different average heights. In general, the society with the taller average is more equitable. Why is that? Because in a more equitable society, the good quality of life is better distributed among its people.
Yet another piece of evidence (if one weren't already convinced) that "equitable" and "India" are, still, sadly far apart.
Despite globalisation and the general (average) rise in wealth around the world, the state of childhood nutrition remains dire, especially in South Asia (where it is worse than even sub-Saharan Africa). Meera Shekar of the World Bank has written this study (PDF alert!) of the problem. Check it out - it makes some seriously disturbing points about the state of health of the world.
Also, take a look here (PDF alert!) at Angus Deaton's Health, Height and Inequality: the Distribution of Adult Heights in India.
On a lighter note: Greg Mankiw suggests that taller people be taxed more than shorter folks because the giants tend to out-earn and out-perform the midgets over their lifetimes. I think the point he is making is that taxing entrepreneurs for the fruits of their given-by-nature genius is no different from taxing taller people for their naturally-obtained economic benefits. Of course, there are any number of refutations and counter-arguments, and were I more interested in arcane economics, I might follow them all.
Of course, the reason why - as models go - Elle Macpherson was more successful than, say, Kate Moss (I'm not saying she was, but what if?) - may not be entirely because the former is better eye-candy than the latter. There's a paper (yet another PDF alert!) reported at the Freakonomics blog that links height with intelligence, and documents that, as early as age three, taller children perform significantly outperform on cognitive tests; these scores persist throughout childhood. Hot damn, and we just found out that our boy is in the 25th percentile of height for his age group. I'm now getting worried again.
For the seventh time in as many weeks, I've fallen victim to a new variant of the cold virus. It's all the boy's fault, of course. His nursery is a hotbed of virulent mutants and pernicious disease, and my immune system can barely cope with the constant onslaught. So I sniffle and I snuffle and you better not shake hands with me.
I have a theory. Laugh all you want or propose me for the next Nobel Prize in Medicine. I swear it makes sense. I think these viruses actually modify human behaviour! Look at the facts dispassionately before you roll your eyes.
What does one do when faced with an epidemic? One flees the cities for the countryside, where one promptly spreads the infection among the unsuspecting peasants. Do you honestly think that a city dweller wants to go live in the boonies? He'd sooner kill himself. The reason he doesn't is that the virus won't allow it.
What does the AIDS victim do? Why, if he is particularly weak-willed, he has unprotected sex with as many partners as he can, so that the virus is disseminated far and wide. How about that, then?
Why has no cure ever been found for the common cold? The viruses have prevented it. Why would they permit their own destruction? Hoo-boy, bet you didn't think of that, did you?
Immigrants from tropical climes come to the dreary countries of the north and fall victim to various colds and flus. Does this rash of ill-health impel them to return to their more salubrious ancestral homes? No! Why not? Because the virus would not have much of a chance there, eh? The virus wants a growing pool of victims to live on, so the immigrant stays on in London. He faces cold after cold, convinces himself that his life is immeasurably better in this city of despair.
The mighty virus, meanwhile, continues to multiply, mutate, and laugh itself silly at yet another pusillanimous punter who continues to believe in free will.
What a weekend. The clan has been down with a rather severe attack of a rhinovirus. The boy is extra whiny and clingy, the wife is extra snappy, and I'm extra exhausted and furious. Pourquoi? Well, I have spent the last couple of days assembling an IKEA wardrobe with sliding doors. Each bloody part weighed more than me. I have pulled muscles I only know the medical names for. I have been cursing the day I agreed that I would set up the furniture. Thoroughly, consistently and without surcease. The boy has a brand new vocabulary that I did not expect him to learn for several years yet.
IKEA and I have a long history - at least ten years. In my dissipated youth, before the wife agreed to marry me, I led a life of Spartan austerity. Surrounded by books on the carpeted floor, a Bose boombox by my head, I would lie in my sleeping bag, survey the apartment and feel smug. This state of affairs didn't last as long as I would have liked; the wife insisted that we live like normal couples, even if initially like graduate students in a dorm. And so began the onslaught of DIY furniture in my life that has lasted to this day.
I absolute loathe DIY. Painting our Claremont Square flat was torture enough. Assembling a nonstop sequence of chests of drawers, book-shelves, dining tables, chairs, sofas, futons and beds has calloused my knees, strained my shoulder blades, pulled the skin off my face and decreased my life span by at least two years a pop.
You can probably tell I'm not very good at it. Unfortunately, my innate resistance to self-assembly invariably loses the battle against my inherent thriftiness. Okay, okay, you might as well hear it from me - I am more kanjoos than whatsit. There are various outfits that will, for a tidy consideration, assemble furniture for the inept or the lazy. Comme moi, as the French might say it. But will I shell out twenty-five quid per item when the item is worth about the same? Périt la pensée, madame!
Meanwhile, if like me, you end up doing it all yourself, here are some hard-earned and useful tips that may help easing some of the pain:
1. Do not start off your marriage feeling macho whenever your wife coos at your manly talents of construction and haulage. No matter how sincere the coos, you will pay for them with blood, toil, tears and sweat. Hubris is never far away.
2. Once you assemble a POÄNG chair, do not - ever - allow the wife to get rid of it. Its comfort, once lost, is never coming back.
3. Do not assemble anything if you have a child at home, particularly if at the moment he is snotty and rubbing mucus on any available surface, pointing out the ensuing mess and squealing disgusting, the latest word he has learnt.
4. Don't even think of assembling furniture in the nude. It's not just that the family jewels might lose something of their value (or function). IKEA very often supplies parts that need to be stuck on to the carcasses. The adhesive tends to be, how do I put it, groping. While the cops may not take kindly to a complaint of having been molested by glue, you really do not want your visitors to be greeted by the sight of various body hairs peeping out from various joints, hinges, or - and the mind still reels - from the mirror of the dressing table.
Anyway, with the wife's support, I have finished the wardrobe. I lost screws, dropped the hammer on the fibreboard carcass, misplaced the screwdriver, scratched our newly painted walls, and tarnished our recently-laid wenge blackwood floor. Despite following the graphical illustrations of assembly like a scout, I managed to mess up the left and right doors. Then the electric screwdriver discharged. The boy wanted to be put on the potty, and while he strained with vim, expected songs about wheels on a bus going round-and-round. Every time I got off my haunches, I'd need to sit down for a moment and consider my navel. After a while, the blood rush got a bit wearying. Meanwhile, the wife informed me cheerily that were I to fast once or twice a month, I'd cut my risk of heart failure by umpteen percent. Before I could say Ramadan, she had polished off the last of the delectable pasta she had made for lunch.
I can't sleep. I have been tossing and turning for minutes. My throat has been sore for twelve days. This has never happened before. I have trouble swallowing. Coughing is agonising. Age is catching up with me.
Usually, a night of laryngitis quickly transforms itself into a phlegmy cough and cold. After a week of sniffling and hacking, I am back to normal. But now that I am approaching forty years of age, the system is weakening. What is a boy to do?
I flatter myself that the cause of my sore throat is not this. Still, there are other worries. I had a physical checkup recently. Now I am faced with that bête noire of the average desi: high cholesterol and too many triglycerides. So that puts paid to my exploration of the great cheeses of the world. I have to stop eating red meat. The five fruit I consume a day will need to be supplemented by raw salads - without dressing. That is to say, I'll be naked while eating those salads. Do I continue to casually amble to work with my nose buried in a book? No longer! Instead, I shall speed-walk and speed-read simultaneously. I shall continue to run up the stairs to the fourth floor in the office. I shall descend gingerly to avoid stressing my knees. Then I shall run upstairs again. I shall be all sweaty and glowing with health.
But first, I have to get rid of this sore throat. Strepsils, Halls - lozenges all of utter uselessness. The saline gargle, so beloved of mothers and old-fashioned doctors, makes my throat even sorer. I drink hot water, which merely serves to make me thirstier.
I have modestly given myself the name of the greatest of the Eldar: Fëanor, the maker of the Silmarils and the creator of the Tengwar. He was a Master of many things. I am merely a Jack.
