Geekspeak: Why Life + Mathematics = Happiness. Graham Tattersall
technique. The dictionary I used has about 60 entries on each page, and over 800 pages. That’s around 48,000 words altogether.
I opened the dictionary 125 times, and made a tick on a piece of paper if I knew the meaning of the word at the top of the page, and a cross if I didn’t. Like me, you’ll probably find it hard to stop yourself jumping ahead to other entries if the first is unfamiliar. Don’t – that’s cheating, and invalidates the statistical sampling!
The result: there were 25 words whose meaning I didn’t know. On that basis, my passive vocabulary is 48,000 multiplied by 100/125. That’s around 40,000 words. It sounds high, but it includes all the possible extensions of the stem of each word. For example, take the word ‘abstract’. The dictionary will include ‘abstractedly’, ‘abstractedness’, and so on. The number of stem words I know is a lot less than 40,000.
Still, I’m feeling pretty good about myself, so I’m going to exercise my gigantic male vocabulary by introducing the next chapter:
‘The, er, next chapter is, er, fucking interesting…’
SPEAK GEEK
‘IT IS A TRUTH UNIVERSALLY ACKNOWLEDGED THAT A SINGLE MAN IN POSSESSION OF A GOOD FORTUNE MUST BE IN WANT OF A WIFE.’
Some authors are instantly recognisable from their vocabulary. For example, everyone recognises the style of Jane Austen, and many would say that her writing’s distinguishing feature is its abundance of long words. But is this true? A bit of statistical analysis can reveal the answer.
The four longest words used by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice have 16 or 17 characters. They are ‘superciliousness’, ‘communicativeness’, ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘misrepresentation’. But just looking at the longest words is not enough: we need to examine the distribution of word lengths over her entire vocabulary, as shown in the graph below:
For comparison, here is the ‘fingerprint’ of the writer Ian McEwan, showing that his vocabulary includes many shorter words:
And, what about this book? In this work I intend to speak with candour, and without misrepresentation or superciliousness, of the accomplishments of the irreproachable retrospections…
PUMPING IRON
Are you powerful as a washing machine?
For the price of a few cupfuls of oil, men can be transformed into mechanical supermen. Next time you pass major roadworks or a large building site, watch the hydraulic rams on a mechanical digger pushing the bucket and scooping up one-ton heaps of sand, all at the twist of the wrist of the driver. Those rams become extensions of his limbs: he is a superman.
Mechanical power is often quantified as horsepower, a word coined by the eighteenth-century engineer James Watt, the man whose work changed steam engines from profligate steam guzzlers into much more efficient and powerful machines.
In Watt’s day, ponies or horses were used to turn a windlass that hoisted buckets of coal up a mineshaft. He would have wanted to know how many horses would be needed to lift a bucket in a given time. Watt knew that a horse could pull with a force of about 180 pounds, and that it could walk a total distance of around 180 feet each minute while pulling the load. That became his definition of horsepower: it’s the power needed to move a force of 180 pounds through a distance of 180 feet every minute.
To get a feeling for one horsepower, think of it this way: an average man weighs around 180 pounds, so with a suitable pulley and rope, a horse could hoist him 180 feet into the air in about 1 minute. The Eiffel Tower in Paris is 986 feet high. If we could position our hoisting pulley at the top of the Tower, our man would be dangling almost one-fifth of the way up after 1 minute.
Connect the same pulley rope to the 60 hp engine in your car, and you could hoist the same man to the top of the Eiffel Tower in less than 6 seconds, although he might not have much stomach for the view once he arrived at the top.
What about men instead of horses? A simple way of measuring your power in horsepower would be to tie the pulley rope around your own waist, take the strain, and see how long it takes you to hoist the 180-pound man through 180 feet.
A 180-pound man is too much for most of us to lift, so let’s replace him with a small child weighing, say, a quarter of that, 45 pounds. If you managed to hoist the child through 180 feet in 1 minute, you would have a power of one-quarter of a horsepower.
In reality, even if someone was willing to lend you their child in the service of science, most people would have difficulty in performing the task in less than 2½ minutes. So, a man’s power is nearer one-quarter divided by two and a half, which is one-tenth of a horsepower.
Nowadays power is usually measured in watts rather than horsepower. We’ve just changed from using Watt’s own term, horsepower, to using his second name as our standard unit of power. There are 746 watts in one horsepower.
Power comes in many forms, but it’s always a measure of the rate at which energy is delivered somewhere. For a car it’s the rate at which mechanical energy is delivered at the engine’s flywheel. For a gas cooker it’s the rate at which heat energy is delivered by the burner to the bottom of the pan, and for a light bulb it’s the rate at which electrical energy is supplied to the bulb.
It would be quite legitimate, and possibly more meaningful, to rate, say, a 75-watt light bulb as one-tenth of a horsepower. A label of 1/10 hp on the bulb would indicate that one horse turning a windlass connected to an electrical generator could light ten such bulbs. More sobering, it shows that one athlete turning a windlass or a treadmill could manage to keep just one 75-watt bulb burning.
I’m guilty of sometimes having up to 300 watts-worth of light bulbs switched on in my house during the evening. In a pre-fossil-fuel era, I would have needed four slaves continuously walking a treadmill to keep them alight. But don’t be too smug – to boil your 3 kW electric kettle you would need forty slaves.
The use of watts as the unit of power has probably contributed to the divorce between our understanding of machine power and of human power. Labelling the power of commonplace machines and devices in manpower instead of watts would keep us much more aware of the gearing provided to our lives by fossil fuel.
In a world without fossil fuel, the unit of power might be the ‘slave’. Perhaps the obscenity of slavery disappeared only because we invented other means of getting cheap energy.
If a slave is equal to 1/10 hp, your car has a 600-slave engine, your water heater is rated at 40 slaves, and your fridge is about 1 slave. Yes, there is one slave pedalling a generator 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep your food cool.
| Machine | Power in watts | Power in slaves |
| Pocket torch | 1 | 1/75 |
| Phone charger | 1.5 | 1/50 |