Martin Fone's Blog, page 206
January 13, 2020
There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part One Hundred And One
Ian Shanks (1948 – present)
Whilst a laudable idea in principle, patents, which give the
inventor some time to exploit the fruits of their inventive streak without
giving them an everlasting monopoly, can be fraught with difficulties and often
the only winners seem to be the legal profession. One area of difficulty is who
owns the patent when an employee invents something during the course of their
employment and, even if they concede ownership of the patent, are they entitled
to a share of the profits made by the invention, over and above their normal
employment benefits? The case of Ian Shanks has done much to clarify this grey
area, in the UK at least.
I am a bit of an aichmophobe and so I have the greatest admiration
for diabetics who regularly puncture their skin with a needle to get their shot
of insulin or to test their glucose levels. If it was a matter of life or death,
I am sure I would overcome my fear, it is only a state of mind, after all.
Undeniably, though, what has helped diabetics immeasurably is the nifty little
glucose testing kit which has simplified the process and improved the accuracy of
the readings. This was the brainwave of Scottish scientist, Ian Shanks.
Shanks was already a leading scientific pioneer, publishing
the first paper on 3D televisions and being at the forefront of the development
of liquid crystal display (LCD) technology. Around the summer of 1982 he
wondered whether he could deploy LCD technology to make some form of biosensor.
If you could suck a liquid, blood, for instance, between two glass plates and
coat one of the plates with a material that broke up the molecules you wanted
to measure, say glucose, then you should be able to measure its concentration.
Using the glass slides from his daughter’s toy microscope, Shanks
played around with his idea until he had developed a working model. Excited by
his discovery, he had the prototype for a cheap, pain-free device to test glucose
levels, he took it to his employers at the time, Unilever. As Shanks was their
employee, Unilever took ownership of the idea and filed for a patent, which was
granted. And then they did nothing.
Grudgingly, in the 1990s Unilever began to sell off licences
relatively cheaply to other companies to manufacture and sell the glucose
sensors. They revolutionised the lives of diabetics but, for reasons best known
to themselves, Unilever had missed the boat, earning around £24 million from
the licences rather than a billion or so they would have amassed if they had
taken the trouble to market and distribute the device themselves. As for Shand,
apart from his salary and employment benefits, he got nothing and he wasn’t
happen.
Now Section 40 of the Patents Act 1977 enters our story.
Under this piece of legislation an employee, who invents something from which
their employer derives an “outstanding benefit”, is entitled to a “fair
share”. Suitably vague wording, a clause described by an Appeals judge as
drafted “on Friday night and after closing time”, it nonetheless offered
Shand some hope. He sued his employers and after many a knockback, it took him
thirteen years to get justice, in October 2019 the Supreme Court found in his
favour.
Lord Kitchin, in his judgment, opined that
the rewards Unilever enjoyed
“were substantial and significant, were generated at no significant risk,
reflected a very high rate of return and stood out in comparison with the
benefit Unilever derived from other patents”. Their lordships awarded Shand
£2 million. He had got there in the end. The first award made under section 40
was not made until 2010.
Millions of diabetics around the world owe a great debt of gratitude to the genius of Shand.
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If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone https://martinfone.wordpress.com/fifty-clever-bastards/
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And look out for The Fickle Finger, now available in e-book format.
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/computing-science-education/the-fickle-finger/
January 12, 2020
Pastry Of The Week
Just to set the record straight, the twelfth night of Christmas, the day by which all Christmas decorations should be taken down, is on January 5th, while Epiphany is on January 6th. According to the Christian calendar, Epiphany marks the day when the three wise men, bearing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, visited the baby Jesus.
In some Catholic countries, it is a public holiday and in Mexico, they celebrate with a special pastry called a rosca de reyes or Three Kings’ Bread. It is oval in shaped, designed for communal dining, and is often topped with figs, quinces, ccherries or dried and candied fruits.
There is a competitive spirit amongst Mexican towns to see who can bake the longest rosca. The record was smashed in 2019 by the city of Saltillo, whose rosca measured a whopping 6,776.3 feet long.
Not to be outdone, a team of bakers from the Yucatecan city of Tizmin joined forces to create their own whopper. And what a whopper it was, measuring an astonishing 9,874 long. They now hold the Guinness World record for the longest bread line in the world.
For how long, though? Watch this space next year!
January 11, 2020
Animal Fashion Of The Week
A little while ago I wrote about the trend of clothing animals in human clothing, inspired by the desire to get that cute shot for social media (https://windowthroughtime.wordpress.com/2019/12/09/youre-having-a-laugh-part-thirty-one/).
Occasionally, though, there is a good(ish) reason to do it. Take Rose, an ewe from the Auckland area of New Zealand, expecting triplets and producing milk like it was going out of fashion. So pendulous were her udders that she damaged her suspensory ligaments and they were dragging on the ground.
Instead of being whipped in for surgery, her vet, Dr Sarah Clews, fitted her with a size 24J maternity bra and it seems to have done the trick. Not only did Rose give birth to three black lambs but her udder ligaments also healed sufficiently that she was able to discard her bra.
This might catch on. I’m sure Alan Abel would have approved.
January 10, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (264)?
Waiting for dead men’s shoes
Workplaces were much more structured and hierarchical when I
started out on my career. I remember that in order to move up to the next meaningful
step in the ladder, you had to have a certain number of years’ service or have
attained a certain age, as if either factors had much to do with whether you
could do the job. The other problem was that there were strict caps on the
numbers of employees on any particular grade so, even if you qualified on the
grounds of experience or age, you had to wait for an opening to crop up. These
only materialised if someone else was promoted, left, was fired or died in
harness. It was extremely frustrating for young guns who thought they were the
bee’s knees.
In such a situation, you might describe yourself as waiting
for dead men’s shoes, promotion not being solely down to your merits, or
otherwise, but achieved only when someone to retire or die so you can take
their place or, in a figurative sense, step into their shoes. It was a forlorn
and frustrating situation to find oneself in and must have been even more so in
days gone by when there was no retirement age and people only relinquished
their position when they were carried out in a box.
The origins of the phrase go back until at least the 16th
century and it is clear from the contexts in which it was used that there was
little sympathy for anyone who found themselves in such a situation. Indeed,
the explicit message was that you use your time much more profitably by doing
something else. In 1562 the English playwright and epigrammatist, John Heywood,
published his Dialogue contaynyng the number of the effectuall prourbes in the
Englishe tounge. There we find, “who waitth for dead men shoen, shall go
long barefoote”.
A variant of this phrase, slightly more grandiloquent but
the result is the same, appeared in Old Meg of Herefordshire for a Mayd-Marian
from 1609; “it were no hoping after dead mens shooes, for both vpper-leather
and soles would bee worne out to nothing”. And in The Independent from
Wexford on July 14, 1847, in an article full of advice in proverbial form, we
are told “he who waits for a dead man’s shoes may have to go for a long time
barefoot”.
Twentieth century variants included “he who waits for a
dead mans shoes may get cold feet” (Evening Telegraph and Post, September
1, 1913) and “while waiting for a dead man’s shoes you could probably earn a
better pair” (The Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1916). How pathetic a
practice it is was encapsulated by The Daily Mail from Hull on January 16,
1932; “the man or woman who waits for dead man’s shoes, or who lives in the
future, is a most pathetic figure”. These days when the phrase is used the
consequences of such action or the pejorative sense of the phrase is omitted.
Corporate and management structures a re much flatter these
days which means, in theory at any rate, that opportunities are less restricted
for genuine talent and that promotion is not dependent upon placeholders
shuffling off elsewhere. Whether that is a good thing, of course, is another
matter entirely.
January 9, 2020
Gin O’Clock – Part Eighty Nine
The first bottle that I bought at the City of London
Distillery (COLD) in Bride Lane, just off London’s Fleet Street, was their City
of London Authentic London Dry Gin, the first gin they produced, in 2012, although
the current version is now on its sixth recipe. The rules around a London Dry
Gin classification are quite strict; no artificial colours or flavours can be
added, only water and neutral grain spirit can be used along with the selected
botanicals, and sugar, if present, has to be restricted to no more than 0.1 of
a gram per litre.
Just to muddy the water a little, this is the ginaissance we
are talking about, there is another City of London Gin on the market, made by
Burlington Distillery and aimed at the export market. The inevitable confusion
may have contributed to COLD’s bumpy start, after all, you can’t trademark a
location very easily, and will help to explain why they have emphasised their
connection with the City of London by incorporating their logo on the labelling
and using the word authentic in the gin’s name. If you happen to have a City of
London gin in your hand, the easiest way to tell that it is from COLD is to
look at the shape of the bottle.
What gives it its somewhat distinctive shape is that the
upper part of the bottle, leading up to the neck, is ribbed and just blow is a
band with the distillery’s name, giving the impression of the dome of St Paul’s
cathedral. I say somewhat distinctive because to me, apart from the dome, it
looks like a slightly slimmer Tanqueray bottle. The coat of the Corporation of
the City of London is embossed in the glass below the dome and appears twice,
once on the neck and once on the labelling at the bottom of the bottle. Just in
case you don’t get the message, two griffins appear separately on the label and
we are told it is “distilled in the heart of the city”.
The bottle has a distinctive blue hue to it, a sort of washed
out royal blue, and the stopper is made of artificial cork. It may be just be
my bottles but the seal is phenomenally tight, great for transporting home if a
little unsteady after a session in the bar, but a nuisance to open when you’ve
got it home. That all said, it looks great.
As to botanicals, it uses juniper, coriander, angelical,
liquorice, fresh orange, lemon and pink grapefruit. COLD have styled it as a
classic London dry gin, and it doesn’t fail to live up to that billing. Once I
had got the top off, to the nose it was reassuringly juniper-led with hints of
a citrusy zest. In the glass it is perfectly clear, and in the mouth, it presented
a well-balanced, smooth drink with juniper and coriander to the fore. The
citrus and the liquorice make their presence felt but do not overwhelm the
other flavours. The aftertaste is smooth with a hint of pepper. It went well
with a premium tonic, not too much, and makes for a perfect opener for an
evening’s drinking.
Its ABV is a respectable 41.3% but if I had one criticism,
it would be that it was a bit underwhelming. It had all the right ingredients
and was up there among the better London Dries I had tasted but seemed to be
missing a little bit of oomph. Perhaps the seventh recipe will fix it.
Until the next time, cheers!
January 8, 2020
Book Corner – January 2020 (2)
The Measure of Malice – edited by Martin Edwards
In these days of DNA testing and face recognition technology,
it is hard to comprehend how the tools and techniques available to detectives,
whether professional or amateur, have increased and improved by leaps and
bounds over the last century. The indefatigable curator of detective stories
that Martin Edwards has assembled an anthology of fourteen stories, the
organising theme being the use of scientific, quasi-scientific and forensic
techniques to solve a seemingly insoluble crime. The results are not only
entertaining, with a couple of exceptions, but also serve to remind us that the
guardians of the law were often operating with one hand tied behind their back.
The oddest piece of pseudo-science appeared in CE Bechhofer
Roberts’ 1926 story of murder amongst the Italian scientific community, The
English Filter. The idea behind optography is that the retina retains, rather
like a photographic plate, the image of what it has seen. If you could
interrogate the retina of the victim of a murder you would be able to see the
image of what he last saw, the murderer. And, lo and behold, after ruining one
of the eyes they were able to and the case was solved.
The prize for the most irritating detective in the
collection goes to Ernest Dudley’s Dr Morelle in the Case of the Chemist in the
Cupboard. To say he is a male chauvinist pig is to put it mildly and it is a
great shame that he wasn’t the murderer’s victim. I also found H C Bailey’s The
Broken Toad a tad overlong. I’ve always found Reggie Fortune a bit of an acquired
taste and whilst it is better than some of the short stories featuring him I
have read, it was one of the weaker ones in the anthology.
As usual in an Edwards’ collection, Conan Doyle opened the
batting with a Sherlock Holmes’ case, The Boscombe Valley Mystery. It is not
one of Doyle’s finest but is serviceable enough and gets the book off to a
reasonable start. Footprints in the soft ground and Holmes’ encyclopaedic
knowledge of cigar ash – he wrote a monograph on the differences between the
ash of 140 types of cigar, don’t you know? – help unmask the murderer,
although, frankly, it was pretty self-evident.
The Horror of Studley Grange, by the crime writer and
surgeon combo of L T Meade and Clifford Halifax, was a bit of a romp and more
of a horror or ghost story than of crime. It was entertaining enough as was C J
Cunliffe Hyne’s The Third Smoker where the shape of the lethal wound provided
the clue to unmasking the villain. I also enjoyed Anthony Wynne’s The Cyprian
Bees. An especially venomous strain of bee is used to commit a murder, the
ingenuity of the plan, though, is not sufficient to defeat Dr Hailey.
A Dorothy L Sayer story is always a treat and Lord Peter
Wimsey is on form in In The Teeth of the Evidence, using the skills of his
dentist forensically to crack the case. Wimsey is a marmite figure to many, but
I enjoy the dash of humour that comes with him. The most recent story, as
recent as 1955, is Freeman Willis Croft’s The New Cement in which Inspector
French’s knowledge of chemistry foils an assassination attempt and unmasks the
culprit.
These are the stories which piqued my interest, but the
others were all passable in their different ways. The joy of anthologies like
this is that there is always something for everyone, an opportunity to discover
new writers, and, if you can’t get on with one story, there is always another.
January 7, 2020
Food Of The Week (3)
Apparently, it is Veganuary and an employment tribunal in Norwich has just ruled that ethical veganism is a “philosophical belief”. The march of veganism seems unstoppable.
The evidence seems compelling. The Grocer has revealed that sales of beef and pork in supermarkets fell by £184.6m in 2019 while sales of so-called “meat free” lines rose by £61.9m. To cap it all, Greggs, have just launched their vegan steak bake to some acclaim.
I’m an omnivorous carnivore but I respect the right of vegans and vegetarians to make their own choice as to the food they eat. However, I would be sorry to see the sort of quasi-culinary apartheid that persists in some parts of Southern India, where vegetarians and meat-eaters dine in separate rooms in the same restaurant.
But what I can’t understand is why meat-free eaters, or at least the suppliers who attempt to cash in on their tastes, insist on food which imitates that which carnivores eat. If you are proud to eat plants, why don’t you eat them rather than dressing them up as an ersatz meat product? It is almost as if they are missing the real thing.
January 6, 2020
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Thirty Three
William Mumler and the Spirit Photographs
There is a thin line between a hoax, a fraud and an innocent
mistake that gets out of hand. Into which category the curious case of William
Mumler and his spirit photographs falls, I will leave you to decide.
William was working as a jeweller in Boston, dabbling in
photography as a hobby. In 1861, after printing off a portrait of himself, he
noticed what seemed to be the shadowy figure of a young girl behind him. He
thought it must have been an accident, the vestiges of an image of an earlier
photo that was still on the plate, but friends, when he showed them the
picture, identified the wraith as Mumler’s dead cousin.
Word of the remarkable photograph soon got around and was pounced
upon by the spiritualist community. The tragic death toll of the Civil War
meant that interest in the paranormal was never greater, grieving relatives
wanting to get in touch with their lost loved ones. Spiritualists in the Boston
area quickly proclaimed Mumler’s photograph as the first ever taken of a
spirit.
Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Mumler set up
shop as the world’s first spirit photographer and did a roaring trade. During
the course of the 1860s he took thousands of photographs, all with a
characteristic grainy wraith in the background. The greatest showman, PT
Barnum, never one to miss a trick, displayed several of Mumler’s photographs in
his American Museum.
As Mumler amassed his fortune, more conventional
photographers poured scorn on his work, accusing him of blackening the
reputation of the nascent profession. Even the spiritualist community was
divided, some claiming that the photographs were frauds, even suggesting that
some of the so-called spirits were not only still alive but also bore a
remarkable similarity to some of the subjects of Mumler’s earlier photographs. Nevertheless,
there were still enough people desperate enough to try to contact loved ones
from beyond the grave to give him a healthy income.
Mumler’s troubles, though, began in 1869 when he moved to
New York. Despite moving he couldn’t shake off the allegations of fraud and
after the local Police Department sent an undercover agent to have his portrait
taken. Sure enough, a wraith appeared in the background. The Police launched a
case against Mumler for fraud.
The trial pitted supporters of spiritualism and sceptics
against each other and caused a minor sensation. Some photographers testified
that what Mumler was doing using a technique called double exposure,
superimposing one image on top of another. The photographer, Abraham Bogardus
even produced an example, a portrait of PT Barnum with the gjostly image of
Abraham Lincoln behind him.
But for every naysayer, there was a believer prepared to
speak out on behalf of Mumler. In a rather touching testimony Paul Bremond, who
lost his daughter in August 1863, told the court that “she told me when she
died that if I were permitted she would return to me from the spirit land. By
this photograph I see that she has returned”. The court were prepared to
give Mumler the benefit of the doubt and acquitted him. He continued his
business, producing perhaps his most famous photograph, in 1871, of Mary Todd
Lincoln with the ghostly image of her dead husband, Abraham, embracing her. It
is claimed that she introduced herself to the photographer as Mrs Lindall.
Mumler’s business never really recovered from the court case and he gave up spirit photography in 1879. He did, however, invent the Mumler process which allowed the first photographs to be printed on newsprint, revolutionising the look and feel of journalism for ever. But by the time he took his own place in the spirit world in 1884 he was penniless.
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If you enjoyed this, try Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin
Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
January 5, 2020
January 4, 2020
Health Fad Of The Week
Proverbially, it is an area where the sun doesn’t shine but a fad that has had its moment in the sun recently, I missed it first time round when I was away catching some rays, is perineum sunning.
One enthusiast, Meagan from California (natch) is so enamoured with it that she claims she exposes her perineum (look it up!) to the sun for five minutes every day, usually between 7 and 9 am. It gives her so much energy, she claims, that she has been able to ditch coffee. I have may have missed something, but I never really associated coffee with energy but there we are.
Just thirty seconds of exposing your anus, she enthuses, is the equivalent to “a full day of sunlight with your clothes on”.
There are some pitfalls with the practice, though. Josh Brolin, an actor, shared his experiences with a grateful world. “Tried this perineum sunning that I’ve been hearing about and my suggestion is DO NOT do it as long as I did. My pucker hole is crazy burned and I was going to spend the day shopping with my family and instead I’m icing and using aloe and burn creams because of the severity of the pain. I don’t know who the f*** thought of this stupid s*** but f*** you nonetheless. Seriously.“
Moderation in everything is my motto.
