March 2013 – Fooyah

March 27 2013March 27 2013

Sandwich

No, not the town in Kent. What I mean by sandwich is what most of you would think about straight away. Food! Now, I like bread and I like fillings in bread and hence I like to eat sandwiches. However, I am rather fed up at being made to feel as though I am greedy when sandwiches are on offer. Here’s an explanation.

At Home
If I make a sandwich at home I will use four slices of bread and make two sandwiches, or in proper terms, two rounds of sandwich. A round of sandwiches is what I would call a sandwich and has two pieces of bread.

In A Shop
If I buy a sandwich in a shop it normally comes in a triangular prism package and contains one round of sandwich cut diagonally with all the filling showing. This makes it look like there is a lot of filling, but there isn’t, it’s all pushed towards the middle of the bread and hence on display. It is socially acceptable to buy one of these packets but not two, that would be greedy but equal to what I would make at home.

At An Hotel
If you eat sandwiches from a buffet then they are normally single rounds of sandwich cut into quarters.

Now, I will grant you that the filling tends to be a little thicker and substantial that the supermarket offering but there is a social awareness problem when deciding how many quarters to put on a plate (or how many “returns” to the buffet are acceptable). If I eat two rounds of sandwich at home and I expect to be able to eat the same amount when out then I will put 8 quarters of sandwich on my plate. This looks greedy and also restricts what other items can also be placed on the buffet plate. It would seem socially acceptable to place four quarters on a plate (although this looks a little greedy being a male ape I tend to get away with this). This means I need to make two trips to the buffet table to ensure I have eaten what I would consider a polite amount. Socially this a mine-field and deserves more academic in-depth study. The social pressures of buffet eating should be considered when designing the food and perhaps, one day, mankind will break through this glass ceiling of the sandwich/buffet trip dilemma.

Image credits: Tesco and some blog.

March 23 2013March 23 2013

Lego 10 Model 60017

Here’s the latest addition to the Lego collection. A Lego City sports car and breakdown truck. All glued and lovely.

March 16 2013March 16 2013

They Just Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore

It doesn’t have to be said, but I’m going to say it anyway. Those Victorians really knew how to build lovely buildings. Just look at the ceiling in this cafe area of the Natural History Museum!

March 15 2013March 15 2013

Cold Morning

It was a touch cold the other morning. I know it gets colder elsewhere in the world but I live in the south-east of the UK where it’s not often this cold. The worst I knew was -10 Celsius, both the dog and I felt a bit cold that morning!

Car in the cold (spot the engine insulation lines):

March 11 2013

I Think It’s A Porsche

Although I understand the connection between sponsorship and sport, especially in the USA, I was somewhat surprised to see a Porsche on the tennis court at the ATP Delray Beach Competition. If you look carefully you can see two people sitting in the car. I guess they are either the dealership owners or winners of a competition. I guess they’d be ok if they have the air conditioning on!

I thought I’d seen it all!

March 6 2013October 8 2022

For Sale – Home Cinema Amp

Just in case anyone reading this wants to buy it, I have a home cinema amplifier up for sale. If you can collect it and pay me GBP50 then you can have it. It’s a Sony STRDG-910. I do not have any speakers for you, you’ll have to get them yourself.
Here’s the gumpf I have collected about it:

For Sale

Home Cinema Amplifier £50

Looking for a bit more bang for your buck?

Buy this 700W 7.1 Sony Amplifier (no speakers supplied)

Sony STR-DG910

Feature packed High Definition home cinema receiver with HDMI, autocalibration for easy set-up and BRAVIA Theatre Sync for one-push button operation. Also listen via the DMPORT connection to all audio files stored on your Walkman, mobile phone or laptop.

Features

Future-proof HDMI connection (3 In/1 Out) to bridge multiple High Definition sources to Flat TVs/Home Cinema Projectors without any picture/audio quality loss.
Digital Cinema Autocalibration – just place the microphone on your couch and plug it into the receiver. The receiver adjusts automatically the perfect surround sound according to your room and speaker set-up.
BRAVIA Theatre Sync functionality, The feature enables you to operate your home cinema system just by pushing one single button if connected with BRAVIA TV.
DIGITAL MEDIA PORT (DMPORT) connectivity. Just plug in any of the 4 available DMPORTs and enjoy your audio files from your Walkman, mobile phone or laptop.
Video Up-conversion to HDMI. You will need only one HDMI cable to your TV and just switch the video sources on your receiver.
8-channel Linear PCM for High Definition sound from Blu-ray discs. Enjoy 7.1 sound in CD-quality for each channel.
1080p pass through – HD film quality passed to screen with no loss in quality
Discrete 6 channels with equally 100W (+subwoofer) for powerful home entertainment.
All relevant surround formats are supported: Dolby® Digital / DTS / Dolby® Digital EX / DTS-ES (Matrix/Discrete) / DTS 96/24 / DTS NEO:6 / Dolby® Pro Logic / Dolby® Pro Logic II / Dolby® Pro Logic IIx / Dolby® Dual Mono /96k/24Bit PCM
Sony’s Proprietary Digital Cinema Sound (developed together with Sony Pictures) to bring the sound from the best cinemas to your living room.

This text is probably (c) Sony as I lifted it from their website.

March 5 2013March 6 2013

Jack Frost

This Fooyah Communication concerns the weather and cars. It does not concern the fact that my car doesn’t like starting if the temperature is below 2 Celsius and nor does it concern the run of cold weather recently. I also have not done any controlled, scientific tests to confirm my observations but I would be interested in doing so.

Observation:

When there is a frost and the cars in my street have ice on the windows the side of the car that is closest to the buildings has less or zero ice.

Hypothesis:

One side of the car is warmer than the other resulting in less ice.

Mechanism:

The nearby buildings radiate heat and keep that side of the car warmer or slow its loss of heat.

Pretty picture:

Cars parked in the road in position A have less ice on the SW facing side which is nearest the buildings in the street. Cars parked in position B have less ice on the NW side which is closest to the buildings there. It is not a phenomenon to do with the sun as both of these positions are shaded from the sun’s rays in the early morning and there isn’t any sun when I go out to the car in the deep dark midwinter.

Most of the houses in these streets were built around 1880 and so have brick-thick walls and no cavities to insulate. Therefore they radiate the heat energy of the house quite efficiently. I need to park my car outside a modern house with cavity insulation to see what effect that has on the frost of the car.

Some not-very-sciency-maths-stuff:

I have made a huge number of simplifcations in the following calculations but the order of the result will be about correct and if it isn’t then I am sure that one of the F5 +1 will let me know. Essentially I have estimated the amount of energy lost by the air in my whole house and have assumed that about one third goes through the front of the building (the roof is quite well insulated). I have also assumed that the bricks of the house will lose some heat over the night and that this is radiated out although some will be radiated in. Then the car absorbs the energy without any loss. Basically, the final answer is a big ISH.

So the car absorbs about a couple of Watts per metre squared. That seems about right, but what do I know? Thermodynamics freaked me out at college!

March 5 2013March 6 2013

It’s Just Right

Once a fortnight is just about the correct frequency.

Private Eye is a fortnightly news magazine to which I subscribe. It’s possibly the only newspaper willing to spread the truth and print what is going on. It’s quite frightening really just how corrupt and dodgy most organisations and societies are. Maybe corrupt is the norm and I’m just hoping for an idealised society that can never exist? The other magazine I subscribe to is Scientific American.

In the same week that I receive Private Eye the Merseyside Skeptics Society release their podcast called Skeptics With A K. It’s a show about an hour long which features three normal (ish) guys chatting about skeptical items that interest them. There’s a bit of swearing and a reasonable amount of poking fun at people but it is very interesting and I learn a lot.

Both these subscriptions arrive in the same week and have for a few years, even allowing for the Christmas break they have. Each new year I wonder if the synchronicity will be altered but I haven’t found so this far. Perhaps it’s deliberate?

March 5 2013March 5 2013

Crocus

Saw this earlier today in the sunshine and it warmed me through. So nice to see spring flowers and sunshine. It’s been rather grey for the last few months.
A garden in Kent:

March 4 2013March 4 2013

Too Much Milk

I think there’s too much milk in this fridge door!

March 4 2013

Official Declaration

As an encouragement to one of my classes today I decided I would declare them as a genius on this website if they produced a scattergraph that looks better than mine. The criteria I used were:

Axis scales consistent
Axes correctly labelled and correct variable
Small crosses for each datum
Good, well-positioned line of best fit
Good interpolation value from graph

The following pupils succeeded and are therefore declared geniuses:

Ed
Louis
Leo
George W
Cameron
Stewart
James

Note: genius should only be taken to mean able to draw a graph.

March 3 2013March 3 2013

Not Green Fingers

Just spent a wonderfully pleasant hour with #1 son sowing seeds in the garden. We tidied the vegetable patch and got rid of the weeds and then planted this year’s selection of veg. It’s going to be carrots, parsnips and chillies. I don’t think the chillies are going to survive the cold so I’ll get some more and grow them inside.

We also read the instructions for the tomatoes and are actually going to grow them inside. They are on the kitchen window sill.

March 1 2013March 11 2014

Wow, A Castle!

This morning I might have been having a cheeky couple of laps on Gran Turismo 5. I was possibly attempting to win one of the seasonal events (which for some reason I find quite tricky).
While racing around the GT Original track I noticed a castle in the background. I was so fascinated by this that for a few laps I couldn’t really concentrate on the track. The castle is a rather good looking building and really adds to the atmosphere. Sometimes I wonder whether game designers have bets about the most ludicrous things they can add!

Screen #1:

Screen #2

These two screen grabs were taken using the LG remote app on my iPhone that has a capture function!

March 1 2013March 5 2013

Endless Speculation

This morning was the result of the Eastleigh by-election. I was listening to BBC Radio 4 while getting breakfast and I was amazed at the utter rubbish that the presenters and politicians were promoting.

There was endless speculation about why the public had voted a particular way with nearly every party claiming the result was good for them and using their own justifications. What utter rubbish. I do understand that the political parties are trying to spin the message and make sure that people think that they have done well but when you hear one argument after the other you begin to realise it’s BS.

I like the way that the politicos were trying to gather to mood of the nation and applying interpretations about the thoughts of the voters from this election result. Surely to gather any evidence about people’s motivation for voting a particular way would take some serious questionnaires and detailed investigation. It is not possible for this to be done a few hours after the result. I am sure that the sociologists out there must be swearing at their radios far more than me.

Politicians and spin! Perhaps one day we will get someone in charge who is quite happy to say things as they are and admit that they don’t know much!