Maraschino cherries and orange futures

The Maraschino cherry makes every Manhattan perfect. Well, actually having equal measures of whiskey and dry vermouth makes a Manhattan perfect, of course. And while it is hard to improve upon perfection, any cocktail is surely improved by being served at the Savoy's American Bar. It's described as "American" after Harry Craddock, an influential barman of the 1920's, and not after Ernest Wiegand, the American professor at Oregon State University who re-invented the maraschino cherry in the 1920's (thanks again, Simone!).

Interestingly enough, the name "vermouth" comes from Wormwood, a herb more famously used to flavour Absinthe. Wormwood is also a road of bankers in the City of London, and the name of a "great star" in the book of Revelations at the tail end of the Bible, which claims it will fall to earth, making "one third" of the planet's water fatally bitter. As Kato Mivule said in a dream, "I was like, no Lord no!", which seems like a fair reaction to the upcoming apocalypse. On further investigation, I learned that the makers of Vermouth add sweeteners to it, because otherwise it tastes too bitter. So if you see a "great star" burning across the sky, just reach for a Maraschino cherry and the sugary juice they come with. Should do the trick nicely.

Going back to the Manhattan cocktail, although there are various claims to its origin and originator, it was certainly made famous by Winston Churchill's mother, Jennie Jerome, who was a bit of a goer, by all accounts. Her husbands, besides Lord Randolph Churchill, included George Cornwallis-West and Montague Phippen Porch, both good working class lads from the clay pits of Bedfordshire. Mrs Churchill's active promotion of the Manhattan led to a surge in demand for Maraschino cherries, much as Delia Smith's comments on cranberries did some years later. There is no evidence to suggest that either Churchill or Smith personally profited by careful investments in fruit futures, showing that art doesn't always imitate life.

Tubular balls

Mathematically, a "metric" is a function that defines the distance between pairs of points. The usual, everyday metric is the Euclidean metric, but there are plenty of others. The Euclidean metric is defined as the square root of the sum of the squares of the distances along each dimension, such as the north-south difference and east-west difference between two points. So if you draw a line between two points on a map, and form a right-angle triangle with the north/south and east/west grid lines, then the Euclidean distance is the length of the hypotenuse of the triangle. Other metrics include the so-called "taxi cab" or "Manhattan" metric, which adds together the north-south distance to the east-west distance, just like walking along the lines of grid.

In general, all metrics are non-negative (nothing is closer a point than the point itself), symmetric (going is the same as coming back) and have triangular inequality (meaning there's no shortcut to a straight line). If we take the p-th root of the sum of the differences, each raised to the power p, then we have the p-norm. So the Euclidean distance is a 2-norm and the Manhattan distance is the 1-norm. There's also an infinity norm, which if you don't mind thinking about taking the infinitieth-root of numbers raised to the power infinity is actually very simple: it's just the length of the single longest side of the triangle not counting the hypotenuse, in the map example.


And today I learned that travelling from King's Cross to Euston on the London Underground is 0.1 miles shorter on the Northern line than it is on the Victoria line. Let's use the notation that <A>L<B> means travelling from A to B on underground line L. So if I do <KC>N<E> then <E>V<KC> I end up back at King's Cross where I started, but travelled further on the way back (Victoria line) than I did on the way out (Northern line). By extension, if I do <KC>N<E>V<KC>N<...>V<KC> (i.e. repeat the looping journey) enough times, then I should end up back where I started, but will have travelled a negative distance. Thus that corner of North London obeys none of the three laws of metrics listed above.

Given that the Parisian underground is the "Metro", which sounds a lot like "metric", one can only assume that their system is more rigorously Euclidean, and no such shortcuts are allowed with typical Napoleonic efficiency.

The inevitable Sweeney post

Everyone knows that ITV's classic gritty cop show, The Sweeney, was centred around two characters called Carter and Regan, between them a mere one letter away from the 39th and 40th presidents of the USA respectively. The actor who played their boss, DCI Haskins, is called Garfield Morgan (James Garfield was the 20th president). The 19th president was Rutherford B. Hayes, and large parts of the show were filmed in and around Hayes, in West London. We're told in one episode that Regan's mother came from Cleveland (c.f. Grover Cleveland, 24th president).

The show's title is of course rhyming slang (for Flying Squad), and the characters often use it. For example, in the episode "Crane Flies", George Carter describes one petty vandal as being "a bit William Howard in the 'ead, guv", meaning "daft" (after William Howard Taft, 27th president). And several times, Regan refers to desk-bound police officers as being "herberts", a clear reference to Herbert Hoover (31st president), who was notoriously desk-bound after a horse-riding injury. And now the Greater Manchester police have an Assistant Chief Constable Vincent Sweeney, responsible for Territorial Policing. I can hardly Adam'n'Eve it, guv!

(Of course, if you add up all the numbers of the presidents listed above... well, I needn't spell it out.)

Various Portlands

With somewhat belated thanks to the lovely Simone, I recently learned that many of the characters in the popular animated television series, "The Simpsons", are in fact named after streets of Portland, Oregon, where said Simone currently resides. Apparently this is very well known, but I've never been to that Portland and in fact have only visited the UK's Portland Bill the once, on a school field trip. Somehow, I had never heard of the FilmFair cartoon series, The Adventures of Portland Bill until today, though it does sound a) cracking, and b) exactly the kind of thing I lapped up when I was a kid. Back to the Simpsons' Portland though, and what people seem to have forgotten is where it got its names from in the first place. One of the cities founders, a Francis W. Pettygrove, chose in 1845 to name Portland after his hometown (also called Portland, in case you were wondering). He bought the claim to the land from a Mr Overton who had bought a land claim for half the area. The other half was owned by lawyer Asa Lovejoy, who later became mayor and chief justice, and is lovingly recorded for posterity via the character of the Reverend Lovejoy in the aforementioned Simpsons. Anyway, Lovejoy was a big fan of Charlotte Mary Yonge and in particular, her novel "Heartsease, Or, the Brother's Wife". When the street layout of Portland (Oregon) was being designed, Lovejoy went through his bookshelf and noted down suitable names from this and a handful of other books. So yes, Ned Flanders is named after Northeast Flanders St., but Northeast Flanders St. is only called Northeast Flanders St. because Yonge set part of "Heartsease" in a fictional Lancastrian village of Wrangerton, whose local vicar was called... Flanders. Indeed, in Heartsease there is a passing reference to a "Bishop Fox", "a north-country bishop" who was obsessed with the future, and particularly the Twentieth Century. No mention of Television though, clearly.

Just for the record, the opening lines from Heartsease are:
The sun shone slanting over a spacious park, the undulating ground here turning a broad lawn towards the beams that silvered every blade of grass; there, curving away in banks of velvet green; shadowed by the trees; gnarled old thorns in the holiday suit whence they take their name, giant's nosegays of horse-chestnuts, mighty elms and stalwart oaks, singly or in groups, the aristocracy of the place; while in the background rose wooded coverts, where every tint of early green blended in rich masses of varied foliage.
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/hrtss10.txt
They don't write 'em like they used to...

Tea for Two

Those crazy Spanish academics in Barcelona have figured out why green tea is good for you. Apparently, it's because of "an extremely narrow adiabatic potential-energy profile corresponding to the hydrogen abstraction by the peroxyl radical," which is much as I always expected. I once took part in a study at UCL into the benefits of black tea, which included being made to do stressful tasks while someone measured my cortisol levels. I had to drink some rather unpleasant fruit tea for 10 weeks, and no coffee, no chocolate, no cranberries. Still, I was well paid and contributed more to science in those 10 weeks than the previous three years (during which I completed my PhD in tea studies).

The Dormouse in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was occasionally woken by the Mad Hatter by having hot tea poured on its nose. While this is cruel and unusual, the real point that Carroll was making is a reference to a Biblical story. Lewis Carroll was the pen-name of the Reverend Charles Dodgson, sometime vicar of Daresbury. A favourite sermon topic of his was an account of when then prophet Elijah was wandering in the desert, near starvation, he prayed to God. The next day, some ravens bought him some meat to eat, under God's command, and a dormouse bought him tea to wash it down with, as is every Englishman's right. By the way, Dodgson's middle name was "Lutwidge" which is anglicized via Latin as "Lewis", while "Charles" becomes... Carroll. Hence the pen-name. Rather more impressive than the usual porn-name generator.

I can sing a rainbow

Aristotle believed that rainbows were made up of just three colours: red, green and violet. He said that sometimes, you can also see yellow, but this is just "due to contrast for the red is whitened by its juxtaposition with green." He was sadly unaware of refraction and so tried to explain rainbows purely in terms of reflection, which is tricky. Does a cloud look like a gigantic ball of mirrors to you? Ibn al-Haitham introduced the idea of refraction (along with camera obscura, possibly) and totally re-invented optics towards what we know today. He way cool. Isaac Newton was convinced there were seven colours in the rainbow, so he made up the name "indigo" for one of them.

In fact, we can see around seven million colours in the rainbow, though we don't yet have names for all of them. A UN-sponsored project, headquartered in Sweden, is collating every colour name used in every language spoken (and as many extinct languages as can be analysed). The aim is to come up with a definitive list of all 7 million visible shades.

Irradiating bathers

Seurat's rightly-famous painting "The Bathers" has many interesting features, including the use of irradiation. That is to say that if a light object is placed on a darker background, then it appears even lighter. So certain light objects (e.g. the bathers' skin) are enhanced by darkening their backgrounds (e.g. the water) in a way that is a) totally artificial and b) very pleasing. This has been known for centuries, and is an example of simultaneous brightness contrast. The eye is not trying to tell us exactly how the world is, but only allowing us to behave usefully in the world.

Irradiation also refers to bombarding objects with radio waves (such as gamma or x-rays), typically in order to sterilise food. When anthrax was sent through the US mail repeatedly a few years back, the postal service started routinely irradiating parcels and letters. This led indirectly to the bankruptcy of at least three mail-order cheese companies, whose products were irradiated to the extent that the mould in the blue-cheeses was killed, along with widespread problems regarding magenetic tapes, photographic films and slides becoming corrupted.