The Clan of the Cave Bague

Two weeks holiday! And I have my children staying with me for the whole time! Double win!

Yay!

I do this from time to time. I pick a random page from the notebook I use in meetings and scan over the notes trying to work out what frame of mind I was in.

22nd February, 2009

Tweedle dum and Tweedle dummer

Robots of Death!

Oh no!

We’re all doomed!

dibble

flibble wibble! Woo! Fnee!

Swoggy woo!

Tears that fall from eyes that only know joy

Alright, I admit it. I have no idea WHAT I was on that day.

I’ve just made an awesome discovery! I was having a surf and came across this page detailing the chemical composition of the human body broken down by element. This is an awesome, awesome thing because armed with that page, knowledge of my own body mass, and a periodic table, I can calculate my own atomic mass, and therefore how much one Mole of me would weigh!

So – here goes. At the gym this morning, the scales told me I was 67.4 kilograms. Ok, so that’s not hugely accurate, given I’m going to be working with atomic weights, but it’ll do. The table on the web site, sadly, doesn’t show each element as a percentage, but rather as an amount of kilograms based on a 70kg man. As I’m slightly less than this, I need to adjust each of the figures down by 3.714% (so *nearly* pi!). I’m obviously far too lazy to do it by hand, so I’ve put together a little spreadsheet (linked at the bottom of this page) which will allow you to put in a number and it’ll work out the weights for you.

So, now equipped with the knowledge of how much of my body mass is composed of each element, I need to work out what percentage of my body mass each element comprises – another column added to the spreadsheet. Summing this column gives me a total of 104% which is a little high an error margin. Given that the original page provides a total of 70.1kg for a 70kg man, I’m inclined to believe the error comes from a combination of rounding errors in the orginal source as well as precision errors in my calculations. Given I’m calculating to a precision of 14 decimal places, 4% does seem a little high, but hey – it’s lunchtime.

Anyway, now I know what percentage of my body is composed of which element, it’s time to put in a column for the number of molecules in each percentage. For example, 63.7982195845697000% of my body is Oxygen, with an atomic weight of 15.9990. One Mole is the atomic weight expressed in grams – in this case, 15.9990 grams. Conveniently, one Mole contains Avogadro’s number of atoms (we’re dealing in elements here, not compounds) and works out to a neat 6.022 x 10^23. So, by working out how many Moles of each element are in the percentage of my body mass comprised of that element, I can tell how many atoms of that element there are. More or less So my next column is simply the amount of mass comprised of that element divided by the atomic weight expressed in kilograms.

Almost there! I now know how many moles of each element there are. Now I’m ready to work out how many atoms of each molecule there are, and out of the bottom will drop the number of atoms that make me! So – my number of moles column x Avogadro’s number will do the trick.

And is it happens, I have 6.14 x 10 ^ 27 atoms! WOOHOO! That’s LOADS!

But hang on – I still haven’t worked out how much a mole of me as a compound weighs. This isn’t so easy, because I’m not a compound but a collection of loads of compounds. So to actually calculate a single atomic weight for the whole of complex little me would effectively involve taking the atomic weight of each element, multiplying it by the number of atoms of that element and then adding them all together. Which would be a pretty vast number, really, and not a proper atomic weight. But just for completeness sake, it’s (drumroll please)

4.06 x 10 ^ 28

Ummmm. Suppose I should really get back to work now. If you want the spreadsheet, you can download it from:

http://www.nelefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/meInMoles.xls

Ok, so there I was standing in my kitchen and gazing with a little horror and a touch of disgust at my fruit bowl. It had, as memory serves, contained a couple of bananas, a chinese pear, and a solitary wizened looking apple.

Imagine my shock to discover a small colony of unexpected grapes lying on the top!

I have several theories about how this came to be, described (in no particular order) below.

1. Spontaneous manifestation. In all fairness, I only considered this possibility for the briefest of moments. I believe spontaneous manifestation is tied either to a particularly strong will to live or to a strong sense of will to return originating from a hive mind. As I am not part of a hive mind, and as fruit (to the best of my knowledge) are not sentient, this possibility was dismissed brusquely, with a sound swat on the bottom.
2. Quantum Superpositioning. This is a very real possibility. I had spent rather a long time in the fruit section in Asda during the morning and, while I didn’t actually buy any grapes (that I can remember), spent a significant amount of time eyeing up the juicy goodies. My hypothesis here is that the intensity of my gaze, coupled with a healthy dose of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle,  generated enough high-energy activity at a quantum level to cause the fruit in question to immediately superposition, resulting in it existing simultaneously in Asda and in my fruit bowl. When the inevitable shiny distraction caused me to change the focus of my attention, the field was broken and the grapes were left stranded. This is a sound theory. I feel further research is needed; in particular using women’s undergarments as the experimental media.
3. Pixies. The Swamp Pixie, who has been spending an increasing amount of time stalking around my living room in the dead of night, posits that I may have a colony of wild male pixies living in my back garden. It may well be that the grapes have been left by one or other of these annoying little people as some form of primitive gift. Either way, tough luck! They’ve already been nommed.

It has been suggested to me that I may simply have bought the grapes and then forgotten about it and then forgotten that I’d forgotten. Not true. I’d remember if I’d forgotten I’d forgotten about something I’d boughten. I’m clearly perfect, and I don’t take kindly to people casting aspersions on my heroic intellect.

(15:19:21) j.dow/Home: Matey – can I schedule a two hour outage some evening to take a cold backup of live?
(15:19:41) Dave: aye
(15:19:54) j.dow/Home: or morning would work just as well (and be quieter)
(15:20:01) Dave: get a date in mind and then i’ll pass to Simon to notify the clients
(15:20:13) Dave: Morning may indeed be better if you can handle it
(15:20:16) j.dow/Home: wednesday, 5am?
(15:20:25) j.dow/Home: I’ll script it
(15:20:31) j.dow/Home: then get up to check it’s back up
(15:21:08) Dave: I think what you mean is you’ll “fandazzle it”
(15:21:30) Dave: that way the schnoozing should be positivly Christmaster
(15:21:31) j.dow/Home: exactly
(15:21:56) j.dow/Home: and I can ping you a spofnigator to congogulate the reticulated splines.
(15:22:22) Dave: absolcisely

So, I’m writing again, which is good. I’m in the right kind of mental position to do a half decent job of it, so I’m happy with that. But it really is slow-going. Careless Talk is real-world dark fantasy – which is to say that a fair amount of it requires real-world settings and the real-world laws and rules generally apply.

So why am I telling you this? Well, it’s a funny thing. When I say I’m writing again, I’ve actually spent four days reading and taking notes and haven’t actually put a single word in the manuscript. Careless Talk is currently standing at about 35,000 words – about a quarter of the length the first draft will end up. But I must have at least that many words in notes as well, and must have read at least 10 times that amount. In order to get where I currently am, I’ve researched:

• Seances and mediums
• Angels, archangels, nephilim, demons and all things spiritual
• The architectural history of Chambers Street Museum in Edinburgh
• The geography, flora and fauna of East Texas, Mount Olympus, Massachusetts , Glencoe, Babylon and Troy
• How to sail a 19th Century trading ship, how many crew it needs, what they’re called and how they’d spend the day
• The religious rituals of the Ancient Babylonians

Honestly, I’m knackered, and I’ve barely written a thing!

So, I’m back at work after a particularly restful holiday. Restful for everything except my gob, that is. I’ve spent an unholy amount of time sitting in Starbucks gabbing, sitting in the living room gabbing (until the sun came up!), sitting in the garden gabbing, and just generally, you know, gabbing.

Am I gabbed out? Not at all! I’m now busily thinking of new places in which to gab.

Gab gab gab.

I haven’t been. I’ve let my novel slip horribly due to all the stupid but necessary wrangles that have been going on in my life.

But things are calming down a little now. An excerpt of the first chapter was read out last night, and chapter nine is underway. Just need to keep the pace up….

Edit It’s amazing how much easier it is to write an angsty novel when you’re effectively living in one. Now that things are calmer, I’m finding it very difficult to keep the tone of the novel dark. Hopefully, there won’t be a cost to my soul in doing so.