Week 17, Monday

For those of you who have had enough of me writing about ‘the situation’, good news: so have I (at least temporarily). For those who want more, let me point you (not for the first time) to the man who, more than any other, makes me feel that anything I have to say is less thoroughly researched, less insightful, less well-expressed than anything he has to say. Daniel Gordis offers a substack (whatever that is) also available as a podcast, entitled Israel from the Inside.

Click the link in the previous paragraph to read all about it, and read it, and even subscribe to it. In normal times, it provides a fresh and wide-ranging dip into anything of interest culturally, socially, politically, academically, scientifically – anythingly really – in Israeli life. (Since October 7, it has, naturally, reflected Israel’s almost exclusive focus on current events.) Its own blurb states, accurately: ‘Israel from the Inside is for people who want to understand Israel with nuance, who believe that Israel is neither hopelessly flawed and illegitimate, nor beyond critique. If thoughtful analysis of Israel and its people interests you, welcome!’ While aimed primarily at American Jews, it is relevant and accessible to everyone, and I highly recommend it.

74 Today

It may have slipped under your radar that today (or yesterday, as it will be tomorrow when I send this out) is (or was) my 74^th birthday. I was planning to celebrate by sharing with you some fascinating facts about notable 74s. When I started researching (which is a rather grand term for Googling) 74s, I soon discovered that 74 is the number of different non-Hamiltonian polyhedra with a minimum number of vertices. This looked promising!

In a previous existence, when I was at college studying to become an English teacher, I was required to take a second subject. I opted for maths, having eliminated all of the options that didn’t appeal to me, and, as part of my coursework, I completed a project on regular polyhedra, which included building models from stiff card of all of the stellated regular polyhedral. (A polyhedron is stellated by extending the edges or face planes of the polyhedron until they meet again to form a new polyhedron or compound.) Here, for example, is a stellated dodecahedron.

 So, non-Hamiltonian polyhedra sounded promising. All that I was missing was the faintest idea of what the hell a non-Hamiltonian polyhedron was. A little further delving clarified the issue. Non-Hamiltonian polyhedra are polyhedra that are not Hamiltonian. Well, who would have thunk it!

All that I was now missing was the faintest idea of what the hell a Hamiltonian polyhedron was. A little further delving clarified the issue. A ‘Hamiltonian’, I learnt, is a function that is used to describe a dynamic system (such as the motion of a particle) in terms of components of momentum and coordinates of space and time and that is equal to the total energy of the system when time is not explicitly part of the function.

Not yet entirely daunted (although the amount of daunt I had left was rapidly shrinking), I felt my heart leap as I read the dictionary’s final laconic instruction: ‘Compare Lagrangian’. ‘Well, this looks promising’, I thought. Lagrange I did at least recognise as the name of an 18^th Century mathematician, The definition of ‘Lagrangian’, I discovered, is: ‘a function that describes the state of a dynamic system in terms of position coordinates and their time derivatives and that is equal to the difference between the potential energy and kinetic energy’.

Increasingly, in recent years, I find that there comes a point in some of my research where I realise that Google has a lot more in common with Hampton Court maze than is first apparent. I felt that I had reached that point, and decided to look for other, equally fascinating, but less abstruse, 74s.

So, how about this? What is the definition of a hurricane (or, indeed, a typhoon)? It is a system with sustained winds of at least 74 mph. How, you are doubtless asking, did they arrive at this precise number? The only explanation I can find is that this figure is chosen on the Beaufort scale because it ‘represents the point at which the storm’s wind speeds become strong enough to cause significant damage to property and pose a threat to human life. Even so, the decision to opt for 74 rather than the more rounded 75 seems bizarre. Converting to kph or even knots (119 and 64 respectively) sheds no further light on the puzzle. Another mystery of life unsolved.

My final, desperate attempt to find something interesting to say about 74 is this. A ‘seventy four’ was, so I gather, a third-rate warship with 74 guns. This definition aroused my interest. I found it difficult to imagine His Majesty’s Navy being so self-deprecating as to describe one of its models of warship as ‘third-rate’.

This was, of course, in the days before British warships bumped into each other, as happened nine days ago in a Bahrain port, when HMS Chiddingfold reversed into HMS Bangor, apparently creating a large hole in the unfortunately named Bangor’s hull. Rear Admiral Edward Ahlgren sounded, to be frank, less than reassuring when he stated that while a full and thorough investigation is conducted, “the UK will continue to play a key part in ensuring the safety of merchant shipping in the region.” It would be petty to point out that the Royal Navy appears to be unable to ensure the safety of even its own shipping.

But I digress! Back to those third-rate warships. In the rating system of the Royal Navy, a third rate was a ship of the line which from the 1720s mounted between 64 and 80 guns, typically built with two gun decks (thus the related term two-decker). A second rate had more guns and a third deck, while a first rate had even more guns, although no more decks. The Navy maintained a hierarchical system of six “ratings” in all, based on size and firepower.

Ironically, the third-rate warships proved to be what we would term ‘first-rate’, since they represented an excellent balance between firepower and sailing qualities. These third-rate warships formed the mainstay of most major fleets in Europe until well into the 19th Century.

So, the mystery remains of why we persist in regarding third-rate as reflecting a ranking of quality rather than being purely descriptive and not judgmental.

And that, dear reader, is about all of the most interesting stuff about 74, so you can imagine what the least interesting stuff is like! I have to say that, so far, 74, for me, doesn’t feel strikingly different from 73. Personally, I’ll certainly settle for more of the same as I enjoyed when I was 73. We are all, of course, wishing for a better year nationally, regionally and globally, but that’s another story that I’m trying not to think too much about for this one day at least.

Editor’s wife’s footnote: I’ve just realised why this post isn’t very satisfying. It’s not at all personal; there’s nothing of David in it.

Editor’s footnote: Bernice is, of course, right, as always. I promise to try harder next week, but it’s now 8:52 on Tuesday morning, so I’m cutting it a bit fine for a complete rewrite, even with my track record of finishing homework on the bus to school.

Wot? No Photos!?

Although I have been vaguely aware of deepfake for some time, an article in The Times one day last week made me much more conscious of deepfake’s invasive reach and ugliness. Apparently, facial images are being lifted from social media and faked onto actors’ bodies in pornographic and paedophile videos.

Over the day after we both read this article, Bernice and I each independently started thinking about this, and when Bernice suggested to me a day or two later that I should stop posting photos of our grandsons, I had already reached the same conclusion. To recognise that this is what the world has come to, and that there seems to be no concerted effort to find a way back, is a depressing thing to think about on your 74th birthday, but it is what it is.