Le Foyer de la Danse á l’Opéra, by Edgar Degas

 

Edgar Degas (1834-1917) was born in Paris. As the son of a wealthy banker he was free to paint without having to worry about making an income from his art. He was not particularly sociable, being regarded by his contemporaries as being a somewhat forbidding character.

Despite having sympathies with the principles of Impressionism, and being acutely aware of the opportunities offered by exploring the boundaries of light and colour, his prime interest was in capturing movement, primarily that of racehorses and of people at work.

Ballet dancers often featured in his work, with Le Foyer de la Danse á l’Opéra, painted in 1872, being a prime example. His method of work involved close observation and analysis of a scene, recorded by numerous sketches, before he worked on the final painting in his studio.

The painting conveys an atmosphere of uninterrupted activity, being a snapshot of the Opera dancers hard at work, either keeping in shape or practicing their routines. Nothing is posed and there is no awareness by any of the dancers or other subjects of anyone else being present. There is a variety of activity going on – some dancers are at the barre, one is resting on a chair, and one is being coached by an instructor while other dancers look on and a violinist prepares to play.

The painting has been carefully constructed to draw the viewer in. The centre of the canvas is virtually empty, with all the features of interest being arranged towards the sides and edges, thus forcing the eye to move around and give the painting more attention than might otherwise have been the case. The groups on either side are linked by the red line of the barre and the other splashes of red on the canvas – a sash on the extreme right and a fan on the foreground chair - also lead the eye to complete the frame by drifting to the painter’s signature at the bottom left.

The open space in the centre, and the apparently random arrangement of people and furniture, accentuate the life and immediacy of the painting. A mirror reflects a group outside the composition and a girl whisks past a half-open door – perhaps she is on her way to another dance studio. Everything suggests that there is movement beyond what we can see.

Le Foyer de la Danse á l’Opéra is exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

© John Welford

Radium

 

Radium (Ra) is an element with the number 88 on the periodic table. When freshly prepared it is a brilliant white metal that quickly darkens when exposed to the air. It glows in the dark, giving a faint bluish-green luminescence.

It was discovered in 1898 by the double Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie (1867-1934), who failed to recognise just how dangerous it was. She was unaware that it was a million times more radioactive than uranium and highly carcinogenic. She regularly handled radium and other radioactive elements without taking protective measures and even kept lumps of radium in her desk because she liked the way it glowed. Her work undoubtedly led to her death from a form of leukaemia, and even today some of her personal papers have to be stored in lead-lined cases and are considered to be too dangerous to handle without wearing protective clothing.

During the years before the full dangers presented by radium were appreciated, it would take the lives of many more people who worked with it in ignorance of the dangers to which they were unwittingly exposed.

Radium was added to many patent medicines and products such as hair cream and toothpaste, because the glow was thought to indicate health-giving properties, when the precise opposite was the case.

In 1917, the US Radium Corporation produced a brand of luminous paint called Undark, invented by Dr Sabin von Sochocky. The corporation supplied the US military with it in the form of luminescent watch dials and instrument faces. Although the company’s managers and scientists protected themselves by using lead screens and protective clothing when handling radium, these precautions were not extended to their employees, who were mainly young women hired to paint the watch dials with radium paint.

The girls were so impressed by the luminescence of Undark that they used it as make-up and to decorate their fingernails. One radium worker is known to have painted her teeth with it before going on a date, so that her smile would glow in the dark.

Encouraged by their managers, the workers regularly shaped their brushes by using their lips and tongues, which led many of them ingesting considerable quantities of radium.

The results were devastating, with many of the women developing mouth cancers, bone fractures and what was termed “radium jaw”, a type of necrosis. There were hundreds of premature deaths.

When these cases were brought to public attention, the company denied the claims and organised a medical cover-up. Eventually, justice was done when the subsequent court case became a cornerstone of labour safety law.

Radium also took the life of the inventor of Undark. Dr von Sochocky died in 1928 from aplastic anaemia, the same disease that would kill Marie Curie in 1934.

© John Welford

Study Guide: Teach Yourself to Read

 

 

 It may be a strange thing to say, but many students when they start college have little idea how to read! OK – I know that you can read in the sense that you can work out what the words on the screen mean, but do you really appreciate the difference between reading a web page and reading a book or a journal? Today, many courses are taught from handouts and Internet links, but that is not enough if you want to succeed at the highest level.

We have all become used to getting our information in pre-packaged chunks – I’m writing one now, come to that! – and students have got into bad habits in terms of copying and pasting from web pages to essay pages, so the prospect of using books as information sources can daunt the modern student.

Don’t Panic

That’s definitely the first thing to take on board!  If you have been given a booklist by your tutor, there will probably be some items on it that are “musts” and others that are “recommended”. With the latter, you don’t need to read them all. With the former, you don’t need to read them all at once!  If you can get hold of several of them, do so, but at this stage only look through them and see what it is that you need to know and that is contained within them.  Write this down, and make your list the basis of your study plan, either for the semester or the assignment to hand.  Work out a system of priorities, and a preferred order as to which books you need to tackle first, second, etc.

You should be able find all the books in your college library, but remember that there are other people looking for the same books and they may not all be there when you want them. Don’t take out everything you find, as this is unfair to your fellow students. Just take what you can manage to work on at the moment.

 

Choosing what to read

Don’t just rely on the books on your booklist. Indeed, you may find this hard to do if most of the items are missing from the library shelves. You can always ask the library staff for help in tracking down other books that might help with your assignment.

There are certain clues as to which books are likely to be most useful. For example, the well-thumbed ones have clearly proved useful to students in the past, and might have useful material in them for you as well.  

Remember that your college library caters for students at all levels, including postgraduates, and for academic staff, so some of the books will be more advanced than others. Use material that you are comfortable with.

 

Getting down to it

Read a small amount at a time, and re-read it if it doesn’t sink in the first time. If it does your head in, leave it and come back to it later. Find the key points and note them down. DON’T go through the book with a highlighter pen marking all the key points in bright orange or whatever.  This applies even if it is a book that you have bought for yourself.  Another time you might want to read it for another purpose, and the key points will not necessarily be the same.  However, if you photocopy the relevant pages, using the highlighter is not such a bad move.

You also need to learn to speed-read. This is the technique of focusing on only certain words on the page and ignoring the rest. You might need to get out of the habit (assuming that you are in it!) of “reading aloud in your head”. The idea is to gain an impression of what the text is about, so that you can move quickly between the sections that need more concentrated attention.  With practice you can become quite skilled at this.

 

Ask your own questions

This applies to any information source you may use, whether printed or web-based. It is certainly true that many Internet sources need to be treated with extreme caution as providers of trusted information, but just because something appears in print in a book does not mean that it must be taken as gospel. Note down things that surprise you, or look dubious, and compare them with what you read in other sources.

For one thing, how up-to-date is the information? You can usually find when the book was published by looking at the back of the title page. Is there a later edition of the book? Is this available to you? If you know that the information is old, it could be unreliable.

You also need to distinguish between what the author describes as fact and what comprises his/her opinion based on that fact. In most academic textbooks you will find that authors give references to the sources from which they obtained their facts. As a student you are not expected to check those sources yourself, but you could if you find the facts in question hard to believe!

 

Organise your notes

When you have read as much of the book as you need and are ready to move on to something else, you should have several pages of notes that contain the essential facts and opinions that you might want to make use of in your essay or assignment. Whatever you do, don’t lose those notes!  If they are handwritten, or are marked up photocopies, file them in a way that ensures they are easy to find. You could mark the page edges in a colour that you have assigned for that particular subject, and then go straight to that colour when you need to refer back to the notes.

A better plan is to make your notes on a laptop, which gives you many more options for using the material later. Don’t forget to make back-ups though!

Also, remember to include in your notes proper references to the material in question. If your college uses the Harvard referencing system, use it at this stage to label your notes so that you don’t have to go back to the book at a time when it might not be available.  If you have noted a particular line or short passage, include the page number(s) as part of your reference.

Good luck!

© John Welford

Miranda: a moon of Uranus

 

Miranda is the innermost of the five moons of Uranus that were known purely from telescopic observations before space probes ventured in its direction. Images returned by the Voyager 2 probe in 1986 revealed a surprisingly complex world, with a mixture of heavily created and smooth terrain, separated by deep canyons and towering cliffs. The most impressive features are regions covered in parallel grooves, which are known as coronae.

It was originally thought that this small moon, with an average diameter of only 293 miles (472 km), had shattered completely at some point in the distant past and then reassembled. However, it is much more likely that Miranda followed a much more eccentric orbit at some stage in its history that it does today. This would have caused extreme gravitational tidal pressures on the moon, leading to alternate periods of melting and re-forming. Large areas of the crust would have subsided and new material welled up from inside the moon to replace them.

With Miranda’s orbit becoming more regular, the tidal pressures would have ceased, leaving the surface to freeze into its current configuration.

© John Welford

What would happen if abortion was criminalised?

 

There are many people,  particularly Evangelical Christians, who are actively campaigning for the 1973 Roe v Wade judgement, that made abortion - under certain conditions - legal in the United States, to be overturned. The question then arises as to what the effect would be if such an event were to happen and abortion became far more difficult to obtain than it is at present.

It seems to me that one has to look at this matter in the round and not be swayed by any prejudices one might have regarding abortion, based on religious beliefs or anything else.

There are many examples across the world that point to the likely outcome. These relate to the practice of women who desperately seek abortions taking all means they can to achieve that. The fact that abortion becomes illegal does not mean that abortions will not take place.

One recourse is to leave the country and seek an abortion in a country where the rules are far more relaxed. Some years ago abortion was far more easily obtained in Poland than in Sweden. There was a steady flow of Swedish women travelling to Polish abortion clinics. Then two things happened - Poland tightened its laws and Sweden relaxed theirs. The flow then reversed, with Polish women travelling to Sweden.

But suppose a woman cannot afford to make such a trip? The temptation then is to get a "back street" or "do it yourself" abortion. Many women have died as a result of undergoing an unsafe abortion, and the vast majority of these cases occur in countries where abortion is severely restricted in law.

The United States has a particular problem in this regard, due to the huge cost entailed in undergoing a live birth. One might say to a young woman that she should go to full term and have the child adopted - but suppose she cannot afford the huge fees that hospitals charge for births and maternity care, these running to tens of thousands of dollars? This prospect can only add to the sense of desperation that a woman of limited means, without health insurance, is likely to feel. She might well come to the conclusion that paying far less to an illegal abortionist is worth the risk.

This is not an easy moral dilemma, and I will confess to having changed my mind on the general question of abortion. I am well aware that - had abortion been freely available in Scotland in 1951/2 - I would quite likely never have been born. A young wife was made pregnant by someone other than her husband, who had no intention of bringing up another man's child. At that time, the adoption route was the only one available, so I was duly adopted.

So why am I not a "right to life" advocate"? It is because I am fully aware that it is always unsafe to generalise from a particular case, and I am also conscious of the big picture - which shows the misery and death that result when abortion services are severely restricted.

© John Welford

Factfulness, by Hans Rosling: A Book Review

 

Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. Sceptre, 2018. ISBN 9781473637498

There is hope for the future of mankind and the world, but only if we learn how best to understand it. That is the message of “Factfulness”, a book published in 2018 by Hans Rosling, a Swedish doctor and researcher who co-founded Swedish Médecins Sans Frontières and was an adviser to the World Health Organisation and UNICEF. He died in 2017, so the book was completed by his son and daughter-in-law, who had been involved in his research for several years.

The book is subtitled “Ten reasons we are wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think”. It begins with a set of 13 questions, these being the ones that the author posed when he gave presentations to audiences of influential people in many countries across the world. Each question has a choice of three answers which means that, as he points out on several occasions, a roomful of chimpanzees could be guaranteed to get them right 33% of the time, simply by pointing to an answer at random. Rosling shows that highly intelligent humans often score considerably worse that the chimps!

Here are three of the questions:

1.      In the last 20 years, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has …

A.     almost doubled

B.     remained more or less the same

C.      almost halved

 

2.      How many of the world’s one-year-old children today have been vaccinated against some disease?

A.     20%

B.     50%

C.      80%

 

3.      Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school, on average. How many years have women of the same age spent in school?

A.     9 years

B.     6 years

C.     3 years

The answers, which are based on evidence collected by world bodies such as UNICEF and the World Health Organisation, are quite likely to surprise many people, and that is borne out by the statistics that Rosling presents. For the questions quoted above, the least pessimistic answer is the correct one in each case, but very few people appreciate this. The chimpanzees apparently know better!

Rosling has no time for splitting the world’s nations into “developed” and “underdeveloped”. He prefers to see a gradation across four levels, where a population at Level 1 lives on $1 a day, water has to be collected from a distant mud hole, food is basic and hard to obtain, and there is no education. This is how roughly one billion people live in the world today.

However, it is possible to rise above this level of absolute poverty, and many populations have done so. As a result, three billion people in the world are now at Level 2 (earning $4 a day), two billion are at Level 3 ($16 a day) and there are one billion at Level 4 (at least $32 a day).

The tendency to regard the world as split into two vastly disparate camps is the first of ten “Instincts” that Rosling describes in the book, their explanations comprising most of the text. These are what prevent people from seeing the truth of what is really happening, and why – when the Instincts are taken into account and dealt with – everyone should gain a much greater degree of hope for the future of mankind. It is only by adopting the principles of “Factfulness” that a proper perspective is possible.

The ten instincts are:

• ·      The Gap Instinct – described above
• ·        The Negativity Instinct – the media would much prefer to give us bad news than good
• ·        The Straight Line Instinct - trends are much more likely to be curves or slides than straight lines
• ·        The Fear Instinct - proper calculation of risks often makes them less frightening
• ·        The Size Instinct – the tendency to get things out of proportion
• ·        The Generalisation Instinct - lumping things into categories and making false assumptions
• ·        The Destiny Instinct - assuming that Level 1 populations are fated to always stay that way
• ·        The Single Perspective Instinct - it is important to see things in terms of the “big picture”
• ·        The Blame Instinct - looking for scapegoats
• ·        The Urgency Instinct – saying that “something must be done” and then doing the wrong thing

Each Instinct is fully explained and explored, including examples from the author’s own experience, some of which taught him valuable lessons from very bad mistakes that he made. There are multiple suggestions for how each Instinct can be avoided and/or controlled.

One danger that may come from suggesting that the world is not as bad as one might have thought, and that hope is far more reasonable than despair, could be complacency leading to the belief that everything is turning out for the best and we can all just sit back and watch it happen. However, that is not the purpose of this book and it is certainly not the message that comes across.

One area where this is particularly true is climate change, where the author is in no doubt that the world is definitely going in the wrong direction. Even so, despair is certainly not what Rosling advocates. By applying the principles of Factfulness, progress can be made on this front just as it has been on many others.

This is a thought-provoking and challenging book that deserves a wide audience. As well as being an enjoyable read, it cannot fail to change one’s perspectives and make one see things in a new light.   

 © John Welford

 

Clouds

 

A cloud forms when invisible water vapour turns into visible water drops. The warmer the air, the greater its capacity for holding water vapour. When air rises and cools it contracts and its capacity to hold vapour is reduced until it becomes saturated. Any further cooling results in a shedding of moisture as tiny water droplets, which form clouds. Clouds therefore indicate areas of rising, cooling air. Clear skies indicate areas of sinking, warming air.

Air masses sometimes rise quickly and vertically. When this happens they form one of two basic types of cloud – cumulus or stratus.

Cumulus clouds are brilliant white in those upper parts lit by the sun, dark grey in shaded areas. A cumulus cloud is constantly changing. From parts of it fresh towers of cloud rise, while other parts are caught in downdraughts of air and disappear by evaporation of their droplets.

Sometimes the top of the cloud rises high enough for its droplets to freeze into tiny ice crystals. These show in the sky as a frothy, dazzling white mass, falling diagonally in the direction the wind to form what is known as an anvil because of its shape. This type of cloud, known as a cumulonimbus or thunder cloud, can contain up to 50,000 tons of water and usually produces heavy rain or hail.

At other times air masses rise slowly and on a low gradient – often as low as one in 150. This is the case with a warm front, which is warm air gliding above a shallow wedge of cold air from more northern latitudes. As this warm air slowly rises and cools it forms the second basic type of cloud – stratus or sheet cloud. Light rain often falls from the thickest parts of this bank of cloud and in winter it tends to reach ground level as fog.

A cloud composed of small droplets reflects sunlight more than one consisting of large droplets. A silver lining occurs when sunlight behind a cloud composed of large droplets filters through its edges. A layer of strato-cumulus reflects 55-80 per cent of the sun’s energy. The amount reflected by other clouds depends on their density.

The highest clouds, known as noctilucent clouds, shine after dark on clear nights. They are found at heights above 50 miles above Earth and consist of ice-coated dust particles from outer space. But nearly all water vapour is found in the 6-9 miles nearest Earth. A slight amount of vapour is found at about 16 miles from Earth where ‘mother-of-pearl’ clouds can be seen on rare occasions.

© John Welford