It is possible to divide the literature on the subject into two broad
categories: the romantic and the technical. For the romantics, the voyage
itself was incidental, a mere prelude to the arrival where the real adventures
could begin. For the technicians, the voyage was at least as important, if not
more, and the difficulties associated with such a journey had to be
addressed.

Lucian, from his account Icaromenippus, would probably be considered a
romantic today, as his chosen method of transport – an eagle’s wing on one
arm, a vulture’s on the other – would hardly be considered feasible. But we
must always take into consideration the level of scientific knowledge of the
time; in the second century, the old idea that the atmosphere extended
throughout the Universe, allowing the gods and birds to wander freely,
remained unchallenged. Eventually, the Arab astronomers were to calculate a
maximum extent of atmosphere of one thousand miles from the Earth; but that
was not to be for several centuries.

After his hero’s flight is aborted, owing to divine disapproval, and he
returns to Earth (at a lesser velocity than his predecessor Icarus, I’m happy
to say), Lucian ends his tale by considering some form of flying chariot, “in
which a man may sit and give such motion unto it … as shall convey him
through the Air”. He goes on to consider multiple-seaters, in-flight meals and
“commodities for Traffique”, but strangely says nothing on how to placate the
gods – not even an altar on the flight deck for emergency sacrifices.

Johannes Kepler’s account Somnium, which was published in 1634 four years
after his death, is definitely technical, as befits a man who spent his life
at the cutting edge of astronomical discovery. The atmosphere is no longer
considered to extend as far as the Moon, let alone the farthest reaches of the
Universe, thereby requiring some means of passing the hero, Duracotus (The
Thick Skinned?) through a vacuum; Kepler administers an anaesthetic and has
his nostrils stopped with moistened sponges. But what makes Somnium unique in
this field is that Kepler includes the conclusions and speculations arising
from his own researches. It is probably safe to assume that by the time he
wrote the story he had already completed his study of the motion of the
planets around the Sun, derived the three laws describing their motion that
are still taught in schools today, and was trying to determine why they
behaved as they did. We know now that what he was groping for was gravity and,
in the story, he nearly gets there. Duracotus is pulled up (by demons) to a
point “where the Moon’s force balances that of the Earth”; on being released,
he falls to the Moon unaided. At this point, Duracotus, reviving, sees his
arms and legs curling inwards (without incurring lasting damage – space
travellers have a charmed life), which Kepler explains in this way:

“When the attractions of the Moon and of the Earth equalise each other, it
is as though neither of them exerted any attraction. Then the body itself,
being the whole, attracts its minor parts, its limbs, because the body is the
whole.” It is as if Einstein had worked his Special Theory of Relativity into
a story for the Boy’s Own Paper.

To pass from Kepler to Cyrano de Bergerac’s Comical Story of the States and
Empires of the Moon (1657) is to go from the wholly technical to the wholly
romantic. De Bergerac was clearly unimpressed by science; his chosen method of
travel suggests that he was as unaware of the true configuration of the
atmosphere as Lucian, with far less reason. He is first raised aloft by the
evaporation of the dew to the upper reaches, where he discovers a flying
chariot which sends him on for the greater part of the journey, which is
finally completed by the Moon’s attraction for the marrow-bone jelly he has
been using as a salve. Munchhausen, eat your heart out!

Herge’s two-volume work (Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon) is
undoubtedly the most familiar of the quartet. By far the most rigorously
researched of the Tintin stories, it features nuclear fission, the effects of
gravitation in space and why meteorites make lunar craters, as well as side
references in Professor Calculus’s log book to the “constant of solar
radiation” and the “limits of the solar spectrum in the ultraviolet”. All this
as well as the usual adventures.

Lucian and de Bergerac, the romantics, soared on the wings of their
imagination; Kepler and Herge, the technicians, preferred to use their
knowledge to make their dreams come true. But they were all as one in seeing
the Moon as a mysterious, wonderful place; even in this century, when
telescopes and unmanned probes had already furnished a great deal of
information and shattered the dreams of those prepared to listen, the Moon
retained its aura of mystery, by virtue of being unassailed by Homo sapiens.
Which came to an end 25 years ago.

The game is easily explained: to beat the bookie you must not only get
the right result to win but must also have been quoted high enough odds
for a good return on a small stake – numbercrunchers are very mean. To achieve
champion status, you need to manage something along the lines of the man
who got odds of 1000-1 in the early 1960s against a man walking on the Moon
by the end of 1970. In a general election, however, you are only likely
to get those sort of odds against Screaming Lord Sutch forming the next
government (even the Liberals are only quoted at 500-1) so you will probably
have to settle for more modest returns.

There are two ways of using mathematics and in particular probability
theory to Beat The Bookie. The first is what I term Massaging the Odds.
Let me give an historical example; the 18th-century mathematician Jean d’Alembert
relates how he was once offered a slightly unusual wager by (he thought)
a friend. They would each toss a coin, one after the other, and if heads
came up either time, the friend won. D’Alembert considered all possible
scenarios and concluded that there were two ways the friend could win (tossing
heads first or tossing tails then heads) and one where he could (two tails)
so that the friend should pay him twice as much for a win as he paid the
friend.

The friend agreed with suspicious alacrity and the game began, ending
when d’Alembert decided he’d lost enough. This story is told at greater
length in Darrell Huff’s seminal work on probability in everyday life, How
To Take A Chance (Penguin); suffice it to say that the friend should have
paid three times as much.

Put simply then, Massaging the Odds is to make something appear more
or less possible than it is in reality; in this case less, so that the odds
quoted are higher than they should be. How’s this? Given that the election
must be held on a Thursday on or before July 1992 (we say to our bookie),
that means that there are 22 possible dates left in 1992 (every Thursday
from 30 January to 9 July inclusive) of which only two (2 and 9 July) fall
in the second half of the year. Consequently the odds against an election
in the second half of the year are 11 to 1 (22 against 2), so will you quote
me 8-1? If you say it quick enough, there’s a good chance the bookie will
agree without thinking, if only to stop his head reeling.

The bookie will, of course, have misread the situation, as the facts
you quoted would only be true in a completely random situation, which would
mean that John Major didn’t care which Thursday he chose, when we know that
he does care; he wants it to be on the Thursday that gives him the best
chance of winning. Consequently, there are several Thursdays that he will
judge unpropitious and the odds are in reality a good deal shorter. Worth
at least a ÂŁ2 stake if you can pull it off.

The other way is to play on their conservatism, their tendency to assume
that because a thing has never happened it will never happen. So let’s say
we were to ask for odds against 100 women MPs being returned as against
the present 44 (the bookie might even think there are still only 41 and
forget the three returned at by-elections – quite a lot of journalists seem
to). This means that at least 56 (59) more women must win seats than lose
them. Pretty unlikely, he may assume (especially if it is a he); but again,
consider the other facts.

Of the 75 MPs who have announced their retirement to date, only one
(guess who?) is female; so 43 women will be defending seats rather than
fighting them, an easier proposition. Also several of the candidates who
will be defending (for their party) vacated seats will be female; when you
consider that virtually no retiring MP leaves a marginal seat behind (all
those years of constituency work usually count for something); while in
the Conservative marginals where the election will be won and lost only
5 of the 100 most vulnerable are presently held by women. All this doesn’t
make it a certainty; but the chances are good. If you get more than 10-1,
make it a fiver.

There are more complex ones; such as 20 or more candidates polling an
exact multiple of 1000 votes, which sounds impossible enough to get you
100-1 but is worth a quid. Or 100 seats with majorities of under 1000. I’m
not going to do it all for you – I want to leave a few up my sleeve. I just
hope no bookie reads New ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´.

Ian MacKillop is a hospital pharmacy technician and occasional Enigmatist.

Some pharmacists have attempted to counter this indifference by adopting
an ‘open plan’ system whereby customers can watch them dispense the medicine.
However, as more and more medicines now come ready-made the opportunities
to impress are limited.

On the one occasion that pharmacists really come into their own-calls
to the prescribing doctor querying the choice of treatment-the customer
is kept in ignorance. At such times, the pharmacist must display a wide
range of skills.

These include diplomacy: ‘Are you quite sure about this dose?’ (seeing
as it would kill a carthorse); didacticism: ‘We can’t actually dispense
this now’ (did anybody ever mention the blacklist to you?); and, most important,
deduction: ‘As Mrs X is exempt charges because she’s pregnant, should she
be taking this?’ (No). To say nothing of the cryptographic skills necessary
to decipher the handwriting (not that I am complaining-it is just embarrassing
to have to ask the patient’s name all the time).

If all this were to be carried out within the patients’ earshot the
pharmacist might be better appreciated; unfortunately it is certain that
many of them would go off doctors altogether and go back to abusing themselves
with ancient nostrums. All this wouldn’t be so bad if the doctors monopolised
the blame as well as the credit. Yet scarcely an issue of the Pharmaceutical
Journal goes by without an account of a pharmacist’s censure for failing
to pick up a mistake on a prescription.

So what’s to be done? If the advertising industry cannot improve the
pharmacist’s image, who can? Well, try this. Name three fictional doctors.
No trouble-you probably came up with Finlay and Watson (of Sherlock Holmes’s
fame) without even thinking, then followed by, say, Jekyll. Now try for
three fictional pharmacists. Ellis Peters’s Brother Caedfel doesn’t really
count as an apothecary-they’re half doctor. Apart from that, all I can come
up with is Dai Jenkins, a minor character in A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel,
and the Compounder in George Orwell’s Burmese Days, who doesn’t even get
a word in.

And these are hardly what you’d call sympathetic characters. Consider
Dai Jenkins: ‘You don’t have to be so early, doctor, I can do the repeat
mixtures and the certificates before you come in.’ Mrs Page had a rubber
stamp made with doctor’s signature when he was taken bad.’

Then the Compounder: ‘The patients took the prescriptions across the
yard to the Compounder, who gave them bottles filled with water and various
vegetable dyes. The Compounder supported himself largely by the sale of
drugs, for the government paid him only twenty-five rupees a month.’

Thanks, guys. Perhaps this is what we need to improve our image; positive
pharmaceutical literature. We could have romance (a dispensary is just as
much a separate world as a hospital, if not more so), drama (Ten Green Bottles:
a melodrama in three acts) and, most important, pharmacist detectives. Someone
in the Phillip Marlowe mould perhaps (‘There’s a lot of crazy people out
there and some of them write prescriptions. I get to clean up the mess.’).

Or perhaps we need something in the classical vein:

‘It was the epilepsy that first aroused my suspicions.’

‘There was no mention of epilepsy.’ ‘That was the curious incident.
You see, Watson, our ulcer sufferer was a registered epileptic. Hence the
exemption from prescription charges. Now cimetidine, your choice for relief,
while excellent in many ways has the unfortunate tendency-does it not?-of
interacting with phenytoin, the anticonvulsant most commonly used by epileptics.
It was the work of a moment to confirm that the patient was indeed taking
phenytoin and that in consequence cimetidine was unsuitable. I therefore
suggest that ranitidine be substituted. One twice a day?’

‘Of course, of course. Your powers of deduction never cease to amaze
me, Holmes.’

‘Elementary, Doctor Watson,’ muttered Holmes, as he replaced the receiver.

Ian MacKillop is a hospital pharmacy technician.