Ep 379: Alan Nash, Peter Shantier (February 9,2012)

Alan relates the tale of how he went backpacking through Europe just after he finished university, and in particular through Switzerland.  He had never seen snow before, so he took a cable car up a mountain; there were several stations along the way, and he was so impressed with the snow that he decided to walk through the snow from the top to the second top of the stations.  This was very enjoyable, until he realised that the cable cars coming up had stopped... and so had the ones going down.  This meant that he had to walk all the way down the mountain, and he discovered that the sun sets very fast there.  In short, he had to walk all the way down a mountain in the dark, and through snow.  That sounds potentially quite dangerous; fortunately he survived unscathed!

Tonight's challenger is Peter Shantier, a fragrance compounder.  His job involves working from a recipe to put together the ingredients to make a fragrance that might smell like peach or apple or strawberry or raspberry... but does not include any of them.  He has a selection of around six hundred ingredients to use; the measurements are done by weights rather than volume, apparently.  (The liquids have different specific gravities, and hence different weights per unit of volume.)  On reflection, I imagine the reason is that working by weight is much more precise than working by volume.  Peter notes that most fragrances probably include around twenty to thirty of these ingredients.

There's some discussion later on in the round where it is pointed out that Peter is doing this for industrial use rather than the perfume business: Shampoos, soap powders, dishwashing liquids, that kind of thing.

I strongly doubt that I have Peter's surname correct, but I have not been able to unearth a more likely spelling for it.  If anyone out there knows, I'd welcome a correction or even simply a plausible suggestion.


Alan is in good form today also; Peter is only able to keep up with him on three rounds.  There was scope to improve on Alan's performance, but they weren't necessarily the easiest of finds.  Alan rounds it off by solving a difficult conundrum to reach the 70's, winning 73 to 24.

I had a frustrating game tonight, due to issues with full monties and the Macquarie's foibles.  Arguably 43 points of relative difference hinged on those, which is a huge amount.  In the end, and reassuringly given some of my difficulties of previous weeks, success in the numbers saw me home by a single point against him.

As usual, details after the jump.