[Image was a full glass of Efes Beer with condensation running down the sides. I drank a lot of this in Incirlik, it wasn't in the glass long enough to take a photo. Besides it was pre-2004, my phone was just a phone]
Hello, all supporters still following these updates, leave a message below if you drop by. Otherwise it feels like I'm singing in the shower, it sounds good but nobody's listening. This week the No Good Deed campaign registered zero pledges, patrons and pounds for the second week in a row. That's the trouble with this way of publishing a book, at this time of year. You could pledge on someone's behalf, but,of course the lucky so-and-so wouldn't be getting a book for Chrismas - well not this year, anyway.
So I'm expecting a few more zero weeks and not much progress before New Year. Anyway, here are some things to do with Zero, since that's what's on my mind.
A (justifiably) little known Boomtown Rats song:- Wind Chill Factor Minus Zero
(more of Bob's infallible logic, methinks)
A very funny film with the great Zero Mostel in it... "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", inspired by the plays of Plautus, who I studied at A Level, when he made me laugh much more than Virgil's Eclogues did.
Ground Zero Man by a more or less forgotten sci-fi writer Bob Shaw, published in 1971, (do not read the cash-in update from '86 known as The Peace Machine).
Oh, about the image, the beer is Turkish, but Efes is Hebrew for zero, and no, it's not alcohol free.
And one absolutely brilliant fact about Zero
Brahmagupta (b.598 CE, d.668 CE - yeah 70 years old) was the first to give rules to compute with zero. The texts composed by Brahmagupta were composed in elliptic verse in Sanskrit, as was common practice in Indian mathematics. I'm pretty sure the Anglo-Saxons were knocking down all the Roman buildings and burning every bit of furniture they could find in them around that time. By the way, he was an astronomer too.
There, I feel better about that zero return already.