the Frankenstein chronicles

Over a lazy weekend, I watched the TV series The Frankenstein Chronicles, which I found quite remarkable (if definitely Gothic and possibly too gory for some!). Connections with celebrities of (roughly) the time abound: While Mary Shelley makes an appearance in the first season of the series, not only as the writer of the famous novel (already famous in the novel as well) but also as a participant to a deadly experiment that would succeed in the novel (and eventually in the series), Charles Dickens is a constant witness to the unraveling of scary events as Boz the journalist, somewhat running after the facts, William Blake dies in one of the early episodes after painting a series of tarot like cards that eventually explains it all, Ada Lovelace works on the robotic dual of Frankenstein, Robert Peel creates the first police force (which will be called the Bobbies after him!), John Snow’s uncovering of the cholera source as the pump of Broad Street is reinvented with more nefarious reasons, and possibly others. Besides these historical landmarks (!), the story revolves around the corpse trafficking that fed medical schools and plots for many a novel. The (true) Anatomy Act is about to pass to regulate body supply for anatomical purposes and ensues a debate on the end of God that permeates mostly the first season and just a little bit the second season, which is more about State versus Church… The series is not without shortcomings, in particular a rather disconnected plot (which has the appeal of being unpredictable of jumping from one genre to the next) and a repeated proneness of the main character to being a scapegoat, but the reconstitution of London at the time is definitely impressive (although I cannot vouch for its authenticity!). Only the last episode of Season 2 feels a bit short when delivering, by too conveniently tying up all loose threads.

snapshots from Nature

Among many interesting things I read from the pile of Nature issues that had accumulated over a month of travelling, with a warning these are mostly “old” news by now!:

• the very special and untouched case of Cuba in terms of the Zika epidemics, thanks to a long term policy fighting mosquitoes at all levels of the society;
• an impressive map of the human cortex, which statistical analysis would be fascinating;
• an excerpt from Nature 13 August 1966 where the Poisson distribution was said to describe the distribution of scores during the 1966 World Cup;
• an analysis of a genetic experiment on evolution involving 50,000 generations (!) of Escherichia coli;
• a look back at the great novel Flowers for Algernon, novel I read eons ago;
• a Nature paper on the first soft robot, or octobot, along with some easier introduction, which did not tell which kind of operations could be accomplished by such a robot;
• a vignette on a Science paper about the interaction between honey hunters and hunting birds, which I also heard depicted on the French National Radio, with an experiment comparing the actual hunting (human) song, a basic sentence in the local language, and the imitation of the song of another bird. I could not understand why the experiment did not include hunting songs from other hunting groups, as they are highly different but just as effective. It would have helped in understanding how innate the reaction of the bird is;
• another literary entry at the science behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein;
• a study of the Mathematical Genealogy Project in terms of the few mathematicians who started most genealogies of mathematicians, including d’Alembert, advisor to Laplace of whom I am one of the many descendants, although the finding is not that astounding when considering usual genealogies where most branches die off and the highly hierarchical structure of power in universities of old.