Evening started with a puzzle about cold legs, in the form of a young lady in a hurry who overtook me on the way to Epsom Station, who had long legs, was wearing extremely short shorts and did not appear to be wearing any tights. In which case, one might have thought that she would be cold, but BH assured me on return that fashion & flaunting beats cold every time when you are under 25. As it turned out, for all her hurrying, the young lady caught the same train as us seniors.
Then, stuck in a line of people who were not moving down the left hand side of the down escalator at Vauxhall, it struck me, perhaps for the first time, that as long as the escalator is full, once the line has stopped moving down, it is not going to start again. For that, one has to wait for a big enough gap to open up that the person at the top of the gap can walk down without being blocked before he or she reaches the bottom. Elementary queueing theory I suppose, fashionable when I was small, but not something which I ever took up.
A new route from Green Park tube to the Institution, which meant that we took in this former public house which had been redeployed as some kind of shop. Once a Charrington house, purveyors of a pale session beer which I used to rather like. A house which is well known to Bing and called the 'Duke of Albemarle', which put in more than three hundred years, from 1685 to 2006. Licensed to one Henry Last in 1862. I dare say there is more out there if I were to give it a bit more time.
Stopped off at the Goat, but failed to notice that Quickie had returned until it was too late. But what I had instead was entirely adequate.
Kilograms had sounded good from the prospectus and had attracted a good crowd, but for some reason we had been relegated to one of the ground floor lecture rooms. The first time we had not been in the historic lecture theatre in the round, the one illustrated at reference 2.
The speaker was an experienced man, something of an ambassador for science, but for me at least, he got it all wrong: good material, badly presented. I think he fell between the Scylla of talking to schools and the Charybdis of talking to students of physics. Which was a pity, because the whole business of making standards for measurement is a fascinating business.
He wasted ten minutes of his hour or so on his own private system of standards, with the various units mostly being given the names of ladies from his family. A private system which might of done good service in a talk at a school - but which did not do so here.
He failed to do a decent job of summarising the seven standards and the move to definition in terms of fundamental constants, things like the speed of light and the Planck constant. Rather better at conveying something of the flavour of the business of international standards, with first class copies (of, for example, the standard kilogram), second class copies, third class copies and all the myriad committees. And I was interested to hear about the importance of utility in adopting these standards. In theory, one could manage with two or three, or perhaps even one, standard - but it was much more convenient and useful to have seven. Which also had the merit of playing to our collective fondness for that particular number, noticed here before, on several occasions.
The young lady half of the young couple sat next to us at the back of the room persisted in chatting with her young man on and off, which I found rather tiresome. To the point, for once in a while, of giving her a gentle poke and asking her to shut up. Which to be fair to her, she did.
I would have done better had I done a bit of preparation, perhaps by reading the article at references 2 or 6, but that is not supposed to be necessary for public lectures of this sort.
For a change, to the Civil Service Club off Whitehall, a place I had been taken to once or twice in the past. On the way, our taxi driver held forth about the iniquities of the new rules about new taxis which meant that the likes of him had to stump up around £65,000 for a new hybrid taxi, rather than the £45,000 of what one had before. Certainly sounded rather a lot to me.
Civil Service Club quite a decent place, more CIU than pub, with cheap drink, cheap food and cheap beds. Will I stump up the £50 a year which would buy me membership? Will it draw me away from the not so far away Terroirs? See reference 5, but beware of irritating noise.
Reminded on the way home of the Charing Cross route to Waterloo East, rather quicker than walking across Hungerford Bridge. But one does miss the opportunity to visit the Archduke.
Reference 1: http://www.npl.co.uk/people/michael-de-podesta.
Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/more-counting.html.
Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units.
Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/fake-47.html.
Reference 5: http://www.civilserviceclub.org.uk/.
Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_redefinition_of_SI_base_units. 'The proposal can be summarised as follows: there will still be the same seven base units (second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela). Of these, the kilogram, ampere, kelvin and mole will be redefined by choosing exact numerical values for the Planck constant, the elementary electric charge, the Boltzmann constant, and the Avogadro constant, respectively. The second, metre and candela are already defined by physical constants and it is only necessary to edit their present definitions. The new definitions will improve the SI without changing the size of any units, thus ensuring continuity with present measurements'.
Reference 7: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-was-avogadros-number/. By some happy chance, I came across this article shortly after getting home from the lecture. I forget why.
Group search key: kga.
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