An article "Time Warp: how your brain creates the fourth dimension" in the 24 October 2009 issue of the New Scientist was particularly stimulating. Taking the 'Wagon Wheel effect' of cinematography which is due to the mismatch between the speed of rotation of the wheel and the frame rate, the author argues that similar effects can be observed due to the operation of the human brain. The human eye collects data as samples and that there is a natural sampling rate within the brain. If data is presented at the edges of the sampling intervals then it is not seen and that this is a large part of the art of the conjurer.

I have observed another form of wagon wheel effect while stopped at a traffic light at a T-junction that includes a pedestrian crossing. In UK these are fenced off. The galvanised rails comprise 10mm square cross-section rods, set 100mm apart as seen in the picture. Now, if from your parked position you watch the progress of a car wheel through the railings, then, depending on the speed of the car you will see the perforations on the wheel rim rotate at a different speed to the wheel itself. Does anyone know if this effect has a specific name?

Did anyone see the article in the Daily Telegraph which is on their website
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6439621/How-maths-makes-the-world-go-round.html ?

It really annoyed me because of a myth that seems to be perpetuated. The article was praising a new book by Ian Stewart who for many years contributed to Scientific American when Martin Gardner gave up his wonderful "Mathematical Games" slot. I have not read the book yet, but a title " How maths makes the world go round" is indeed very worrying. The sub-title " Whether you’re searching for oil, the lost chord or a better kind of carrot, mathematics is the key, says Ian Stewart" is irrefutable, but the article in the Telegraph gave the impression that first God created mathematics and then the of his world conformed to this formalism. People already have problems with mathematics and its teaching which such a thesis would do nothing to dispel. When I taught mathematics I reminded students of the apocryphal story that the dictionary of Inuit has hundreds of words to describe the quality of snow, but only a few to describe the quality of vegetation. This was because that language needed to express concepts to the Inuit people which are important for them, but are not necessarily important to someone living in the UK. We talk about being able to express thoughts in one language which cannot be easily expressed in another. Gemütlich is a single word which expresses something in German that requires multiple words in English. So, armed with these thoughts I explained to students that mathematics is merely a language which has its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax. It is a very useful language because the shorthand 'sine' and 'cosine' are used to save someone doing a lot of out-of-phase hand-waving. When students absorbed this concept, then the learning of mathematics suddenly lost its mystique. So, to Professor Stewart and the Daily Telegraph I would have to say that the wonderful world in which we live is amenable to the mathematics that we have developed, just as it is amenable to description in any other language. Where we observe something that is outside current formalism, then we have to develop new mathematics. The journalist who wrote the Daily Telegraph article talks about Fourier analysis. Today most students on mathematical science courses will learn about this at an early stage and yet, in 1857, when people were uncertain about the feasibility of laying an Atlantic telegraph cable, there was mention that Professor Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) of Glasgow University "was one of the few people in Britain who understood the new techniques of Monsieur Fourier". If we come closer to our own time and look at the efforts which Oliver Heaviside had to go through to derive some of his ground-breaking results we can be awe-struck by the tenacity of the man. Today, armed with a mathematical curiosity which is entirely imaginary (the square-root of minus one), science and engineering students can easily deliver the same results. The world is wonderful. Mathematics is wonderful, but let us please not perpetuate a myth which makes the situation even more opaque for so many.

This is a story which is recorded in two parts. The encounter upon which these are based occurred in early September 2006 and shortly afterwards when I was already in Shanghai a news disclosure prompted me to make a record of the first part of this story which I will refer to as a collusion hypothesis.
*****
The recent (mid 2006) publicity about collusion between the armed forces and loyalists in Northern Ireland should really not have come as a surprise to anyone who tried to analyse events beyond the immediate. I would like to add some information about a meeting that I had that, at least for me, seemed to cast so much light on so much of the happenings in NI since 1968. People seem to have forgotten that British troops were sent there to protect the minority in the unpleasant aftermath of the civil rights marches. People have long forgotten that James Callaghan was feted as a hero in the Bogside. Slowly and inexorably the emphasis changed. The protected became the villains. This process was accelerated when the Wilson government was replaced by the Heath administration. Internment and Bloody Sunday followed and these were points of no return. So, how/why did this come about? I think that I might now have some pointers and would like to draw a hypothesis which was given strength by an amazing conversation that I had in early September 2006 when I met a man who had been a senior officer in Northern Ireland, someone who was able to boast that during his period of command he had not lost a single man. Whereas presence in conflict zones damages many people, it had not done this for him. If anything the experience had enhanced him. He relished the challenge and was fascinated by the paradoxes that he encountered. He liked a bit of stone-throwing when they were on patrol "You knew that everything was okay. If there was no jeering/stone throwing then you knew that something was up and you called for back-up". "Over my time there I gained the begrudging respect of the catholic population, which was all that I wanted. It was July, the 'Marching Season' that was just so crazy, so screwy. Here you were, having had the Catholics throw stones at you all year, standing between them and the loyalists. The Catholics were handing you cups of tea, while the loyalists were lobbing bricks at you. One time I was in an armoured car at the front-line, writing a report when a brick somehow got through the window and hit my wrist - it didn't half hurt. I was out of there like a shot and ordered the snatch squad out to get the little bastard that had hit me. What they dragged over was such a wimpish little specimen and when I asked him why he had done that I got a tirade of abuse about denying them their right to march. I had him banged up for six months".

Finding a person who was quite clearly of an open mind I posed him the question that had worried me for such a long time. Why was it that a force that had been sent to protect the Catholics had been so transformed in purpose? He agreed with every point raised. He said that it was entirely brain-washing that all had undergone during the pre-tour-of-duty training. They had been prepared to deal with a belligerent population that was hell-bent on their destruction. What he and fellow officers encountered was completely at variance to their expectations. He and they found that they had to go against their training and adjust their strategy on-the-fly as circumstances on the ground permitted. "I did it by adopting a system of frequent, in-depth patrols". I made it clear that if the population did not cause me any problems, then I would reciprocate, and it worked".

He said that he found my questions raised questions that had been in his own mind. I put to him the hypothesis that there were forces (individual and/or groups) within the UK military that had agendas that were not necessarily in harmony with official Government policy. I believed that these parties were unhappy with the alteration of the status-quo that followed the events in Northern Ireland from October 1968 onwards. Although the army had been sent to protect the nationalist population, it was possible to influence the mindset of individual servicemen through a very effective propaganda apparatus. I had seen the husband of a friend of a friend who had been posted to NI in 1969 was in a very short time intensely antagonistic to the catholic minority. Later, when I was Deputy Warden in Rutland Hall, in Nottingham I found that one of my resident tutors was very biased in his attitudes to the Irish problem. His father was in the army and was then based in NI.

So, who are these forces? How did they acquire their power and do they still wield this power?

Some sort of answer seems to have come from a programme on BBC TV called "The Plot Against Harold Wilson". It was clear in the programme that there were forces in the military who disagreed with much of the Wilson policies. I certainly remember an exercise where there was a sudden strong military presence at Heathrow Airport. What I had not realised was that it was undertaken without the knowledge of the Government. It was believed to have been intended as a warning to the Government that the army could mount a coup d'etat, if it found it necessary to do. But, why would any army, the servants and defenders of the State want to do that? The programme pointed the finger of blame at Earl Mountbatten and his supporters and there has not been much to refute that.

Now, if an army can collude against its own government, then should we be surprised that it colluded with loyalists in order to preserve what it wished to be the status-quo in Northern Ireland? The question should not be whether this happened or not, but whether it happened with the knowledge and approval of the Government? Depending on the response to that question, there should be another question, namely, what steps are HM Government taking to limit any ex-jure activities of its military forces?

There is another question that does not appear to have been asked and that is the extent of contact and possible collusion between some within the army in Northern Ireland and Republican sympathisers? This was perhaps less unusual than one might think. My informant had reason to visit certain Ulster prisons and developed a profound respect for republican prisoners, for their discipline and for their use of time in prison to pursue personal study. On the other hand, he found Loyalist cells full of hate messages, body-building kit and heavily tatooed occupants. So, if this individual view was shared by others who might be less scrupulous, then one could conceive that the boundaries between respect and collusion could in places be blurred. I therefore ask again if there was substantial army/republican fraternisation, sanctioned or otherwise?

I have an as yet unsubstantiated hypothesis that the eventual assassination of Earl Mountbatten could have been the result of collusion between certain republicans and members of UK security forces. For many years Mountbatten and his family had been holidaying in the same place in the Irish Republic and, although there could have been many opportunities to kill him, these had not been taken. So, why then? From his side, his disdain of the dangers to personal security might be viewed as a form of arrogance as he would never have accepted that a part of Ireland had seceded from the Empire. However, many years ago someone told me that he had a particular liking for activities not dissimilar to those mentioned in "One Girls War". Although it was well known in certain circles, it was never discussed (just as John Major's affair was known but not discussed). Nevertheless, there was an indication that in 1979 it was threatening to become a major source of embarrassment to the Royal family. If any of this is true then how convenient it would be if the man who appears to have been the architect of UK military policy re-alignment in Northern Ireland should perish a hero.
*****

The second story relates to the same informant and committing this to record at this point was occasioned by the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was in Berlin in November 1989 and relates how strange it was that at a critical time, when events were unfolding so quickly in Eastern Europe all senior commanders of the Four Powers were in conclave somewhere in Bavaria and thereby incommunicado when things started to happen in Berlin.

People in West Berlin had only an inkling of what was happening and his report of how the lower echelons of command of the Western Powers reacted is particularly illuminating. The French pointed out that whatever was happening on the other side of the Wall, it was not in their Sector and therefore not their problem. The Americans were convinced that an attack was imminent and brought out every tank onto the streets facing the Wall in their Sector. The British, meanwhile, loaded up their trucks and drove up to the Wall, left their armaments in the trucks and set up trestle tables against the Wall. As holes started to appear, they passed through cups of tea.

He then went on to relate how, with the collapse of the Soviet Union their lines of supply disappeared. There was a Soviet barracks in Potsdam where the troops only survived as a result of food supplied by the British. In return for this kindness their benefactors were allowed access to (allowed to play with) the tanks and other equipment which until a short time before had been threatening them - it was great fun.

Summertime is when all the home construction that was planned all winter suddenly gets done. There is also the element of trying to get lots of exercise while sharpening up one's skills as a carpenter, plumber and electrician. In this environment history hardly gets a look in, but that does not mean that things are not rumbling on. Son, Dominic and I have already co-authored a paper on the legal instruments by which the UK Government managed to control telegraphs even before they had effectively come into common use. By contrast, they were very slow to respond when mobile phones and the internet took off. Anyway, I have been nagging Dominic for some time to look into the House of Lords case between Western Union and the Anglo American Telegraph Co. It was concerned with an interpretation of taxation law and as he is a tax lawyer, I am sure that he is best placed to clarify this. He informs me that so far as the law is concerned it was relatively straightforward, even if some of the judgements were somewhat unusual. So, it looks as if any paper will be an historical one with a legal perspective rather than the other way round.

I am still gathering comments about the content of my history of meteorology. Although it addresses many important issues and links information from different disciplines, I am not sure if I have the energy to haul it around conventional publishers and am considering on-line publication via Lulu.

Many people may not be aware that the 1911 census fore Ireland is available on-line. At first sight this might appear unusual as the normal practice in the UK is not to publish this information until 100 years have elapsed. Ireland was part of the UK in 1911, so why this alteration of convention? I do not know what the official view is, but public records in Ireland are in short-supply, many having been destroyed in the fire which engulfed the Four Courts building during the Civil War of 1922. Access to census data has been a boon for those starved of other sources of information. Initially, only a few areas were available. These included Dublin and Co. Kerry, where the telegraph cable stations were located. We were surprised that none of the names of cable staff that we might have expected to see (Graves, Hearnden, Mackey) were there and we thought that perhaps they had been elsewhere in Ireland on Census Day 1911. Well, data for the whole of Ireland is now available and there are no cable staff or their dependents. I suppose a search of UK records in two years time, might give us some indication, but maybe there were other reasons of which I am not aware. Does anyone have any ideas? Incidentally, it is reported that 1901 census data for Ireland should be available before the end of this year. We will be continuing our hunt

Bill Burns (http://atlantic-cable.com/) has been providing much very useful advice about the future of our web-pages. The 'stories to share' website needs moving to a permanent home, as does the collective record of my father's work which exists in rather dense form at http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~ddc/Maurice Project/. Anne is working on this side of things at the moment. We are also considering providing an on-line version of my book on the history of weather forecasting, so altogether we need to think carefully about our ongoing strategy.

Regarding the met book, the chapters were circulated to many and I have been fortunate to have had some very useful responses. I am still not certain whether I am going to seek out a publisher for this. The main objective is to make it accessible to as many people as possible. It will be some months before I have an opportunity to incorporate all of the suggestions that have been made, but watch this space.

A long time ago I mentioned finding a confusing book entitled "Elizabeth Bowen Notes on Eire" compiled by Jack Lane and Brendan Clifford and published by Aubane Historical Society 1999 (ISBN 9 780952108191). It seemed to promise everything that was so tantalisingly alluded to in an interview that I did with Lt. Genl M.J. Costello on 25 June 1985. While maintaining a complete denial of anything but total neutrality by the Irish Free State Costello responded to my enquiries about two British security officers " Quintrell travelled extensively in S. Ireland and together with a Col. Knaggs supplied reports of supposed submarine sightings. They rewarded anyone who supplied information with rounds of drinks. Accordingly sightings abounded. In general Quintrell and Knaggs were fairly ineffectual. However Miss Elizabeth Bowen, the writer was a most important source of information, whom the British disregarded until very late in the war." Several years later I enquired in Irish Army archives but they reported that they had no record of any Bowen correspondences that Costello claims had been routinely read by the Irish authorities. Of course they hadn't, because, as this book shows, she submitted reports under her married name, Elizabeth Cameron. So, maybe next time I am in Cathal Brugha Barracks I will try again.

If I had hoped that this book was to provide answers to my curiosity about 'the Bowen Factor' then I was to be disappointed. For one thing the purpose of the book (at least to the outsider) appeared unclear. A "North Cork Anthology" was compiled in 1993 in which the authors felt under pressure to include Elizabeth Bowen on account of her links with Bowens Court. They report " . . In the end, we compromised and - somewhat lightheartedly - we included excerpts from Seven Winters and Last September, but put a line through her name in the title. This was to signify that though Ms Bowen had been physically connected with North Cork, through Bowens Court, she was not a North Cork writer." They could easily have omitted her from what was a 'parish-pump' work, but their actions were interpreted as vindictive by the outside world and eventually led to a whirlwind of invective in the newspapers. Possibly because this stung them, they produced "Elizabeth Bowen Notes on Eire", where they are aggressively defensive and use a tone more reminiscent of the "Burn everything British, except their coal" attitudes of the 1930s. Their excerpts from Bowen's reports are of no real historical significance except to highlight a spirit of the time when more young men from the Irish Free State than from Ulster went to serve in the forces of the King. They were doing their bit for what they believed in, so, why should she not do hers?

Parts 2 and 4 of the book are at the heart of the confusion and do not need to be read. However, in Part 3 Brendan Clifford is clearly on home ground when he lays out what he believes to be the "Reasons for Irish Neutrality". Even here he is scathing of what he calls 'revisionist historians'. Now I disagree with him on two counts. History in my school days was a catalogue of Irish woes, the results of vindictive British against the Irish. There was no sense of a bigger picture in the teachers or the teaching. There was no sense of the fact that 'top-dogs' were doing similar things everywhere, Turks/Armenians, Germans/Herero, Japanese/Chinese. There was no awareness that our hero, Roger Casement had exposed the conditions under which the people of the Congo survived, or didn't (see Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost). So, I welcome revisionist historians. The second reason for my disagreement is because in fact in his analysis of Irish neutrality, Clifford's work in this area is quite revisionist. One may not agree with every word he says, here or in (http://web.ukonline.co.uk/pbrooke/bptdg/programmes/0601-/clifford/talk), but at least he is providing a fresh perspective.

And finally, a limerick or two. While at a recent IET Fellowship Fellowship Assessor Training event I was minded to compose a limerick about the process. On my return home I posed Anne with this task, which led to:
When considering a Beatle for Fellowship
Be sure to enquire if the Yellow Ship
Is a true Submarine,
Some craft in-between
Or merely an aspect of Mellowship
She says that this is far from her best limerick. The events surrounding the illegitimate offspring of a prominent Irish cleric may already have slipped from public memory, but here is her version:
The bishop of Galway said Blastit -E
vents have now shown that I'm pastit -E
nough of dog collars
They're not worth the dollars
I spent to repent my inchastit -E

Oh where has time gone?
I know where we have gone - South Africa in April and it was wonderful. In the old citadel in the centre of Capetown there is an IEEE plaque celebrating the first use of wireless for military operations during the Anglo-Boer war. The interesting thing is of course that the army had a very bad experience while the Navy did not. Early radios needed a good earth connection which the land in South Africa did not always provide, but the sea did. We stayed at Fish Hoek which is two bays away from the Simonstown naval base. The museum there had several examples of six inch guns of the type that my father was involved with installing at Fort Shannon in 1942. Simonstown also boasts a converted cableship, Cable Restorer see
http://atlantic-cable.com/Cableships/CableRestorer/index.htm. It is now part of the Simonstown Museum and is used as the Roaring Forties restaurant.

Since last writing the first draft of a book has been completed, cumbersomely titled:
"Forecasting History: (a curious engineer's view of the history of predictive meteorology)"
Not really sure who it is for or who might publish it or whether it should just appear on this website. The chapters headings are
1 The first steps in a quest to satisfy curiosity why write the book
2 Weather Lore just as it says
3 Standard Time time delivered by telegraph
4 The beginnings of a UK meteorological service weather collected by telegraph
5 The science underlying meteorology exactly what it says
6 Meteorology and flight exactly what it says
7 Forecasting and World War II The weather war is fascinating
8 Bits and Pieces on the road to modern forecasting Weather balloons and tephigrams
9 Weather models old and 'new' A self-indulgence that could be omitted


Today we are planning to mount the material that comprised my contribution to the October 2008 meeting on the1858 trans-Atlantic cable. There was to be two contributions, but when it was discovered that the first of my two presentations was to be made in a very short time it was impossible to fit in all the material. For that reason the content was distributed between the oral presentation and the published paper, which can effectively be read as one contribution. The second oral presentation and the second paper were identical in content, so that only one has been placed on the website.

It is so gratifying to see that the website is being so useful. There have been several email contacts on technical matters, but there is also a family social networking aspect. Only today we had two emails from relatives of Anne's who saw their grandmother in a picture in one of the papers on the site. I wonder do they know about their relative, William S. Pilfold, manager of the Mexican Cable Co offices in Galveston who was drowned along with his children during the flooding that followed the hurricane that made landfall there on 8 September 1900 see www.gthcenter.org/exhibits/storms/1900/. I have never been able to understand that there was no reference to his wife amongst the casualties. Did she escape or was she not there at the time?

All of this make me think that there is room for a 'bits and pieces' section on the website, a place for relevant family histories. Then maybe I will get back to my project of completing a contextual record of the craft/artwork and military career of my father, Maurice F. (de) Cogan. The only corpus of his work that is not yet available on-line is his extensive medical illustrations. What is at http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~ddc/Maurice%20Project/ needs editing and reduction in the size of the individual jpeg files.

This week has seen the preparation of a set of biographical notes which are to be mounted on the web-site. These include
Henry Crocker, who was on duty the night the Great Eastern cut into the 1865 cable
Robert Halpin, First Officer and later Master of the Great Eastern
John Gott, Superintendent of the 1869 French cable station at St Pierre
George Oslin, Press Officer for Western Union
John Moores, one-time CCC telegraph operator, better known for Littlewoods Pools etc
J.V. Foll, the saviour of Muirheads

This Foll biography is from an anonymous document in my collection. Moore’s is particularly interesting because my late father-in-law, Arthur Hearnden remembers him peddling his luxury goods at the Valentia station

Am trying to track down biographical material for Jules Despecher, who was one of the prime movers in the French cable of 1869. It seems that he spent a lot of time promoting such enterprises. Another subject is Henry Labouchere, well known in British politics. The Labouchere Amendment led to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. Anyway, he did play a part in trans-Atlantic telegraphy, largely attempts to destabilise the status of the Anglo American Telegraph Co and support for the Direct United States Telegraph Co. These contributions are virtually unknown to historians in UK, but figure quite large in histories of Newfoundland.

A further item concerned with Italian cable history has been mounted. This addition looks in details at the various messages that were in transit at the exact moment when the Italian cable was cut.. Background researches show that Gino Bandini (b. 1881) was appointed Director General of Italcable in 1936. Was he the 'Professor Bandini' cited in the message from Italy to the US or was it a relative? Does anyone know?

Am planning a Bits and Pieces section for the web-site. There are snippets of information like the succession of Superintendents at Valentia and Heart's Content. There is also a record of the succession of Medical Officers that were appointed for these stations, although here the precise dates are less clear. There is a series of photographs of staff at Valentia in the period 1914? - 1916 and my late father-in-law was able to identify many of the people there. Another item is the record of wages/salaries paid to different staff at these stations. Just bits and pieces that might be of relevance to other researchers.

And now to some musings. Obituaries are always a good place to start and the 'engineer' noted the Times entry on 18 October 2008 (p.75) for Thomas Coughtrie, who invented the Mole, self-gripping wrench. The 'curious conspiracist' saw that the Times for 9 January 2009 (p.70) described the contribution of Vladimir Rubinstein to the BBC Monitoring Service, first at Evesham and later at Caversham

The death of the Conor Cruise-O'Brien (Times 20 December 2008, P. 68) had the 'Irish man' thinking. Here was someone who was for so many years was at the centre of Irish politics, but always seemed to be in opposition to the status-quo. He had a major role in the aftermath of the withdrawal of colonial Belgium from the Congo (there is a major topic there, the role of the Irish military in the Congo - another time). Anyway, Cruise-O'Brien was clearly a genius, but one suspects, a flawed genius. Perhaps there was much about his background that might have contributed to this. At the age of ten, following the death of his father he came under the conflicting influence of his two aunts. Hannah Sheehy-Skeffington was an agnostic radical, whose pacifist husband had been murdered by an insane British officer during the Easter 1916 Uprising (perhaps more of that again another time). Hanna's sister was a pious Roman Catholic whose husband, the poet and former MP, Tom Kettle had been killed on the Somme. Now if we add to this mix the distillation from a fascinating biography of John Charles McQuaid by John Cooney, maybe we have a new perspective. McQuaid was the despotic archbishop of Dublin from 1940 - 1972. Many felt that he was the real ruler of Ireland during that period and perhaps even before when he had been president of Blackrock College. Eamonn de Valera had been a mathematics teacher at the same school before entering politics and it is rumoured that McQuaid had a very strong influence on deValera's drafting of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland. Cooney's book has helped to clarify some early confusions. When I was young I was aware of the 'rantings' of W.B Stanford and Owen Sheehy-Skeffington who represented Trinity College Dublin in the Senate (the upper house of the Irish Parliament). These seemed to mirror Cruise-O'Brien's opposition to the status-quo, whatever that was. Hindsight permits us to see the extent to which life in Ireland was dominated by the views of McQuaid. We can now understand that these were amongst the few people who were brave enough to stand up to the public opinion of the time and act as a bulwark against the monopolistic Catholicism which McQuaid epitomised.