Hats off to a war winner
QUESTION What is the name of the high-crowned hat (not a homburg) that Churchill is often seen to be wearing in World War II documentaries?
WINSTON Churchill wore many hats in his life. He knew the value of maintaining a strong personal image. Throughout his long career, he was rarely pictured without a trademark hat, bow-tie and big cigar.
Aside from his silk top hat, the hat in question is one he nicknamed ‘bowker’. This was a curious, tall-crowned, square-topped felt bowler called a ‘Cambridge’ (the same hat was worn by Oddjob in the Bond movie Goldfinger).
First seen in 1865, it was popular in the 1870s and 1880s – the years of Churchill’s childhood.
By 1940, it seemed an absurd anachronism. Only someone with the giant personality of Churchill could get away with wearing it.
His valet, Norman MacGowan, had a nice anecdote about the hat. He recalled: ‘While talking about the way my Guv’nor kept to well-tried and long-owned clothes, I am reminded of the interest his hat aroused in Washington in January, 1952.
‘It was that very characteristic piece of headgear which he wore, which some people referred to as a “sawn-off stove pipe” and is in fact what’s known as a Cambridge hat.
‘All sorts of men’s shops in the US hurriedly made inquiries from American manufacturers as to where they could obtain them, and on being told they were essentially English, cables came to London, where agents eventually discovered the source of my Guv’nor’s purchases, a famous hatters in St. James’s Street.
‘When the staff turned up the records kept at this establishment, it was discovered that the last time Mr Churchill had bought one of these hats was in 1919.’
Tom Bright, Portsmouth.
QUESTION Why is a failing business said to have ‘gone to the wall’?
‘THE weakest go to the wall’ was a statement of fact in the earliest Christian churches. There were no pews or chairs, the congregation stood throughout, except the old and inform who could lean against the wall or sit on the floor with their backs to it. Hence, the weak-around est really did go to the wall and the expression was adapted to other contexts where advanced or terminal weakness was suggested for businesses, institutions or individuals. Michael Cole, Woodbridge, Suffolk.
QUESTION Scientists claim that all the computer data produced last year could be stored on four grams of DNA. What do they mean by this?
DNA consists of sequences of the nucleobases adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine (abbreviated to A,G, C, and T).
DNA represents a storage mechanism for a ‘programme’ which allows it to replicate itself so that life can exist.
DNA can potentially retain its programme for hundreds or even thousands of years.
In the laboratory, DNA sequencers can read the DNA programme from samples taken from living and dead organisms.
There are companies which can go the other way, and write a specific programme into synthetic DNA if supplied with the required sequence, which can later be read back using a sequencer.
You can immediately see how this could be used to store specific non-biological information if a sequence were written to synthetic DNA for that purpose.
The trick to being able to store usable computer data is not so much to do with synthesising the DNA, but rather in encoding the data to be used in the sequence in the first place so that it can be recovered later.
Without going into the absolute detail, researchers have been using synthesised DNA where the bases T and G represent binary ‘1’, and A and C represent binary ‘0’.
It’s a lot more involved, as the data in each DNA strand consists of an address block followed by the actual data, and the sequence which is subsequently read back has to be reassembled using these address blocks. It is a similar approach to what is used within the computer industry, though more advanced.
It should be borne in mind that this DNA has nothing to do with life or genetics. Its purpose is totally non-biological.
The storage capacity of DNA has been going up as experiments continue. In 2012, Harvard scientists managed to get 700 terabytes (TB) of data into one gram of DNA. This year, more than 200 petabytes (PB) has been crammed into a single gram.
To put this in perspective, a typical DVD can hold up to 4.7 gigabytes (GB) of data. A terabyte (TB) is 1,000 times bigger than a GB, and could hold the equivalent data of around 210 DVDs. A petabyte (PB) is 1,000 times bigger than a TB, so scientists have managed to pack the equivalent of 42million DVDs into that gram of DNA.
Going up the ladder further, an Exabyte (EB) is 1,000 times bigger than a PB, and a zettabyte (ZB) is 1,000 times bigger again.
Some scientists have suggested that a single gram of DNA can potentially hold up to 455 EB of data (96billion DVDs), though others have estimated a lower figure of 270 PB.
As of 2011, total world data was estimated at just under 2 ZB (380billion DVDs), meaning that all of it could be stored on about four grams of DNA (a teaspoon) if this upper storage limit could be realised.
Even with the recent results, all human knowledge would easily fit in a bucket or two! Or a swimming pool – as of 2017 the entire content of the world wide web is estimated at 1 yottabyte (YB), where a YB is 1,000 times larger than a ZB.
Not to throw water on the flame, searching and indexing that amount of data would still be problematic.
The numbers involved are hard to imagine, but 1 YB of data would take trillions of years to download on even the fastest broadband connection, so searching through it would take a lot of time.
Nonetheless, it is truly amazing science – and I have read that Microsoft is working on the technique now.
IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, Embassy House, Herbert Park Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles.legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.