El Club Dumas

“El Club Dumas”, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, 1993: 84-663-1831-3 (Blackwell’s, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk).
“The Dumas Club”: 0099448599 (Blackwell’s, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk).
“The Club Dumas”: 015603283X (Blackwell’s, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk).

Wanting to brush up my Spanish, I realised that the reason that I’d been finding Spanish novels heavy going was that I’d been reading heavy Spanish novels. If you’re not the sort of person who reads Russian novels, sitting in the corner of a café in rimless spectacles and dressed entirely in black, then there is little point in trying to find enchantment in Gabriel García Márquez or Pedro Vargas Llosa. You want something entertaining and unimproving: hence this book.

At first it works excellently. The Spanish is clear, straightforward, and literately colloquial. The main character, Lucas Corso, is a predatory outsider, a hunter of rare books whose wolfish nature hides itself behind a rabbit-like innocence (on one occasion, a rabbit engaged on half a carrot) when he needs to charm or disarm. All the standard “film noir” ingredients are there: the old friend and drinking companion, the rough bar run by a couple of lesbians, the girlfriend who left him one day with no explanation. The other characters are satisfyingly grotesque: crooked twin bookbinders who can restore any book, whether it exists or not; a phenomenally rich and evil antiquarian bookseller (called Borgia) with satanist obsessions; an inconsolable widow, blonde and pneumatic, aggressive and seductive just like Dumas’ Milady.

The whole book, in fact, is an echo of and a homage to The Three Musketeers: even the chapter headings are direct references to Dumas. As long as this is a game, it is rather fun. As soon as you’ve identified the Rochefort character you can have fun half-remembering Rochefort’s part in the original and seeing the variations that are played on it. But ultimately, in this genre of thriller, it is compulsory to bring things down to earth and tie them back into 20th-century reality, and the necessary explanations end up deflating the story and leaving it flat and lifeless, like a soufflé that’s been left in a draught.

Dyslexia in Chinese

This article from the Guardian suggests that people who are dyslexic in English won’t necessarily be dyslexic in Chinese.

The argument turns on dyslexia being a defect of phonemic processing, and since Chinese is not a phonetic script, being bad at phonemes doesn’t cause trouble.

If the argument were true then it might suggest an explanation of why older scripts (such as Chinese and hieroglyphic Egyptian) represent words and concepts rather than sounds, and perhaps even why the first phonetic scripts were syllabic. One might say that phonemic analysis is a skill that took time for the human race to learn.

There are many missing parts to the story, which the journalist presumably had to leave out to save space.

• Is dyslexia worse in Italian than it is in English? It should be worse because English is less phonetic and so depends more on whole-word memory and less on the analysis of phonemes, but it should better because Italian has fewer spelling rules to learn.
• Does Chinese dyslexia exist and in what does it consist?
• Why, if English dyslexia is about phonemes, do similar-looking letters (d/b, p/q) get confused?

On Quaternions and Octonions

“On Quaternions and Octonions”, J.H. Conway & D.A. Smith, 2003: 1568811349 (Blackwell’s, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk).

This is a book about mathematical beauty. Not the facile surface beauty of Lissajous figures or fractals, but a beauty that is visible only to the inner eye. We are in the world of concepts that are almost too simple to understand, whose visible manifestations (polyhedra, wallpaper patterns) are only consequences of the underlying reality and not pictures of the reality itself. It is a lot like theology: for God cannot be seen, is too simple for human comprehension, and his visible manifestations are nothing more than shadows and signposts to a reality that they cannot circumscribe or define.

Shaun Bailey in Hammersmith

Shaun Bailey has been selected as the Conservative candidate for Hammersmith.

Westminster’s gain will be North Kensington’s loss, but perhaps he will inspire others to make something of themselves. If all the energy that goes into wasting time criminally were harnessed and put to use, the country would be unrecognisable.

St Ronald Aquinas

Here is a hitherto unsuspected passage from the Summa Theologiae:

HARD KNOCKS

The notion of a bazaar is ‘that form of vendition in which things of the least possible value are sold at the greatest possible price, by those who most want to get rid of them to those who least want to acquire them, for charitable purposes’.

Cyprian’s Last Theorem

I’ve been looking at the value N(n) of N that satisfies the equation

Thus turns out to be

where the O(1/n) term is about 1/400n for n>10.

I’ve verified this by calculation up to about n=1000, using Lenstra’s long integer package LIP.

This result is so beautiful and simple that it must be possible to prove it without brute-force calculation. If anyone has any suggestions as to how to begin then I’d be very grateful.