h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'll post to this conversation occasionally with words that are interesting but don't deserve an entire entry.

12 October 2015

Passeggiata

An Italian word for an Italian custom - a stroll around the town in the evening for the purpose of socialising. I'm just back from a weekend in Italy and I participated in this custom. I think it is common in Spain as well, although I've never really been in that country.

It's one of the things that's made me jealous of Italians over the years.

That and the food, the climate, the scenery, the historic sites, the art, the laid-back attitude to work, etc, etc.

In northern Greece, they called it 'volta'.

It might be known as schmoozing in Germany.

The Italians work hard, and they play hard. Everything is done with balance in mind. Everything except, maybe politics . The bureaucracy is mind-boggling.

There are some nice touches, like having schoolchildren go home for lunch. Apparently there are plenty of Italian mothers at home ready with home-cooked food for their children.

Most of the teenagers in my daughters' school used to go home for lunch.

Italy used to be known (possibly still is) as 'a poor country full of rich people' -- high proportion of two-car families and suchlike indicators.

Sounds like a reasonable balance.

It's also aging, with a low birth rate. Parents tend, if possible, to make sure that their children have nice places to live when they settle down. If not, Mamma is there to wash her son's laundry, which he may bring to her on the train .

All of Europe is aging with a low birth rate. We need to encourage immigration.

Even In Ireland?

Todays' word is 'Zoonoses'.

I was feeding my guinea pigs this morning. As I opened the door to their hutch, they looked up at me expectantly and I thought of this word.

No, it is nothing to do with noses, cute and wiggling or otherwise. Zoonoses are diseases that can be transmitted from one animal species to another.

Guinea pigs are good pets because they don't have any of these - you can't catch anything from a guinea pig, no matter how ill they are. But on the other hand, they can catch diseases from humans. In particular, the common cold which makes us feel low can kill a guinea pig. I've a bad cold at the moment, with a sore throat and streaming nose, so I need to be careful not to cough while the gps are around or to breathe too heavily in their direction.

I believe I caught the cold by singing in a performance of Fauré's Requiem last Saturday - good singing requires deep breathing and if one person in the choir of a hundred has a cold, many other people are bound to catch it. That's not to say that singing is bad for you. In many studies it has been shown that being in a choral society is a good way of combating depression and mental illness.

That's a nice word - I've seen it before in crosswords.

You have to remember that the singular is 'zoonosis', not 'zoonose'.

It's probably pronounced "zoh-oh" rather than "zoo". Originally, zoological gardens were 'zoh-oh-logical".

Yes, and you can optionally stress either the second or third syllable: zo-uh-NO-sis or zo-ON-uh-sis

A nice old term for a zoo was 'Intelligence Park' -- or so Vincent Deane tells us. Googling it comes up with nothing but the opera of that name for which he wrote the libretto.

Today's word is "Boolean". George Boole was born 200 years ago today. He was an English mathematician who moved to Cork, Ireland and lived in a house beside the River Lee. Sadly, his house is now falling down - it needs someone to buy it up and restore it as a museum to mathematics.

Boole invented Boolean logic, the mathematical study of logical statements using symbols. The ancient Greeks were masters of logic, but they always stated everything as sentences of words. Boole devised a way of reducing logic to the status of a mathematical operation using symbols which meant that you can examine the validity of a logical argument without worrying about what the statements being examined actually meant. It effectively is a way of automating deduction.

This of course had huge applications in computers, something Boole himself had never considered.

Here's the plaque on Boole's house:

http://flic.kr/p/aLF77v

Did you know there was a Boole's Rule?

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BoolesRule.html

And are there any other rhyming identities in mathematics (Emma's Lemma, anyone?)

Today's google doodle is dedicated to him, too.

I've been hearing about Boolean searches for at least forty years. Library catalogs use that type of search quite a lot.

My favourite Boolean result is that NOT(A OR B) = NOT(A) AND NOT(B).