My Shatism on Storm Sandy.
Temporary Temporal Location
The Theory Of Relativity and the space-time continuum must be having a joke. It is Guy Fawkes night here in the UK and it is traditionally the time of year when people spend their hard earned cash and buy fireworks to explode in celebration of the destruction of a Catholic plot to take over the country. Every year we ritually burn a Catholic effigy on a fire, just to make a point.
Fireworks are not just limited to the 5th of November as they can be let off anytime from about a week before to a week after the actual date, or so seems the tradition in areas I have lived.
This sudden need for fireworks to burn has a strange effect on the existence of shops that sell fireworks. All of a sudden, shops exist where none have existed before. It is almost as if the universe knows that we need fireworks and obliges by creating these quantum spaces where money can be exchanged for coloured explosives. For the rest of the year these shops do not exist. I have no idea where you can buy fireworks at any other time of the year.
It seems strange that the will of the people is satisfied by the universe in allowing these shops exist. Yet, prayers for health and wealth go un-listened!
I imagine that fireworks shops are floating around in hyperspace just waiting for a critical mass of “need”. This “need” gives the shops the energy binding to fix their position for a short while so they can serve their reason for existence. As soon as that “need” passes the shop can no longer maintain its bind to reality and it is forced back into hyperspace. Perhaps they follow the need of Earth’s population around the globe and end up following the seasons! Early November in the UK, Diwali in India and New Year everywhere. The number of fireworks stores for the Olympics must have been immense!
Just imagine, a world where the needs of the people are served by a wonder of shops and services just floating outside existence until the “need” reaches critical mass. That’s my sort of universe!
Bad App
Shocked
It’s not a strong enough word to describe my reaction the the ABC Animals app from the Apple App Store.
I looked for an alphabet app for #1 to play with as he is starting to learn to read. ABC Animals looked good and I was quite impressed with it.
You go through the alphabet and touch the screen and get a picture of an animal, that animal’s sound and the animal is aurally named.
There’s a crocodile for C:
An elephant for E:
A tiger for T:
But hold on just a MF minute. WTF is this?.
There’s a UNICORN for the letter U:
This is just utter ARSE. I am ashamed I ever even downloaded this app. It’s not like there’s a shortage of animals beginning with U.
The app managed just fine to find the X-Ray Fish for the letter X so why are they messing around with a mythical animal for U?
The app has been deleted.
Summary
I’m not sure how the Met Office app gets its summaries for each day but the following doesn’t seem to make sense to me unless it just “averages” the day’s weather.
Today’s summary:
Today’s actual forecast. See the difference?
Why 100 000?
I just don’t understand why this waterless urinal is labelled as saving “up to” 100000 litres of water a year. It rather seems a cop out. Perhaps they should have used the term “on average”? But then, perhaps some of the McDonalds clientele wouldn’t understand the use of the term “on” let alone the incredibly difficult word “average”. Why not just write the following:
This waterless urinal saves up to 1000000 litres of water per year and may be responsible for the saving of the whales and arctic ice sheet
My use of the words “up to” and “may” allow me to write whatever the hell I want. I prefer my version.
315 Feet
The car had to go to the tyre and brake people this week. I had noticed the feel of the brake pedal was changing slightly from smooth to a bit jerky when releasing pressure. This didn’t really concern me but the fact that the rear discs were looking rusty and there was only a thin band of clean metal had me worried.
The car went in to ATS Euromaster at 08:30 and I’d had the call by about 09:30. New pads and discs at the rear (I’d expected that), two new tyres as the fronts were worn to just about legal. I hadn’t really expected that but then I don’t hang around and a little sliding when it’s damp is good fun (no kids in the car and only where it’s safe and there’s space). I had mentioned that there was a slow puncture on the nearside rear tyre and it’s just aswell.
When I went to pick up the car it was still on the jacks so the guys could show me the problem that was causing the slow puncture. The inside of the tyre where the join normally occurs and is “welded” nicely was just a split. It had gone down to steel and would eventually have caused some serious issues. They believe it was a manufacturing fault and the tyre has been sent back to Pirelli and I hope I get a refund and I ended up paying for 3 tyres.
An interesting little fact that I hadn’t considered was that the new tyres went on the rear of the car and the worn tyres were swapped to the front. This is to try and ensure that when the car is on the limit it will understeer rather than oversteer. Understeer is much safer that oversteer and so by keeping the grip at the rear of the car (especially an estate where the rear is quite light) the car is safer to drive. Nice.
315 feet is the stopping distance of a car travelling at 70mph. This is the number given in the Highway Code. Most cars will stop much shorter than that. Should you ever be lost for a stopping distance then the formula s=v+(v^2)/20 works to give you the Highway Code numbers. The thinking and reaction time is the same number of feet as miles per hour and then the actual breaking distance is proportional to the speed squared. It’s all down to kinetic energy! See the Wolfram|Alpha stopping distance calculation here.
Stunning Mach
Amazing.
That’s all that’s needed really.
Felix Baumgartner and a huge team of engineers and back up crew including Joe Kittenger have done it. It was stunning.
I wasn’t alive for the Moon landings so I couldn’t see them live and I don’t recall watching Andy Green break the sound barrier live on television although I definitely watched the documentary on it. Felix Baumgartner’s skydive from a billion miles up was something I could watch live and, such is technology nowadays that I streamed it to my phone while I was walking the dog in the park. I was trying to watch it on my phone while the kids had thier dinner. Then it got to bath and bed time and Felix hadn’t jumped. But, then it was time to walk the dog. Fortunately I can get a 3G signal in the park and watched the live stream via cellular technology. It was quite an amazing thing to see. The check list was simple and yet necessary. The standing on the edge and then the fall. I imagine that watching the moon landing was like this but much more so. I felt chilled and elated at the same time. It was as though time slowed and I watched every second of his freefall in utter peace. I am astounded at how it went when all the possibilities are considered.
Well done to all involved.
Changing Appearance
I’ve just been editing my theme files of this website to remove the “leave a comment” link at the bottom of pages. I have no idea about php but I can see how it works from looking at the files stored on my server. A little bit of searching of the internet (world wide web really) and I found the sections to remove from my index.php file. I think this has meant that the website looks a little neater.
However, I do need to have another look and edit out the | symbol that appears at the end of each communication after the tags for that communication. One of the issues is that it is hard to see where these parts of the php file are when you already have deleted the “leave a comment” bit.
Anyway, it’s been about 14 months since I started this website and I am finally doing some tidying up. If they update the theme that I am using then I’ll have to do the whole editing thing again, BOO.
Cool Glacier
Here’s a very cool glacier photo. I stole the link from Phil Plait. His text from his RSS feed follows:
“This is so cool – photographer André vd Hoeven visited the Pasterze glacier in Austria and took quite a few pictures of it. Quite a few. He then stitched them together to make this astonishing 10,000 x 8600 pixel version that you can pan and scan and zoom:[You may need to refresh the page if you don’t see the pannable and scannable image directly above this sentence.]The scale’s a bit hard to grasp. So do this: go to the bottom left corner, where you can see a little splash of blue. That’s where the glaciers is breaking up, exposing cleaner ice. Zoom way in on that spot using the control buttons on the bottom right of the picture. See the people standing there near the open water? That’ll give you a sense of scale. Keep your eye on them, and then zoom back out.”
Glacier:
Resting
My resting heart rate is between 52 and 58 beats per minute. According to Wikipedia this means I am an athlete (adjusted for my age). This is good.
I have spent much of the last 5 months running. I started with a 2 mile loop and not really being able to run all of it and now I can run 6 miles and not really think much of it. I do get some joint aches and pains if I run much more than 5 miles at a time but I think that’s to be expected.
Sometimes it takes me 2 miles just to feel warmed up! Crazy.
As an ex smoker and overweight person I am very happy with the outcome of my diet and training over the last 9 months. I have various health benefits which far outweighs the pain and starvation I have experienced!
Slow Worm
Here’s a picture of a slow worm I found in the garden. It was hiding below the wheelie bin and then basked in the sun for a little while before wandering off.
UXB
There were interesting times in Eccles over the summer. WW went for a run one evening around the sports field but was stopped by some youths claiming they had found a bomb. She was rather incredulous about this but they insisted and said they had called the police. She decided to run elsewhere.
When WW got home she explained what had happened and we didn’t really think much more of it until . . . .
About 9 that evening there was a LOUD bang. It shook the windows in the house. It didn’t wake the children though which was good.
WW ran back down to the sports field to see half the village looking at nothing and asking the police what had happened. When asked why we weren’t told that they were going to detonate the bomb the police replied “because you would all have come to watch and it would have been far more dangerous.” Fair point.
This bomb wasn’t as loud as the two I heard when I lived in London. Check out this post here.
Wow
WW and I went for a meal last night (14 August). It was the first time we had used a proper babysitter and left the kids at home, sleeping soundly.
We headed to Pizza Express in Maidstone as WW wanted a goats cheese something. She has been needing goats cheese for a while and supermarket bought stuff doesn’t make her taste buds flower!
I ordered whatever I wanted but was shocked when I came to enter this information into my food tracking app.
Il Padrino Pizza – 922 kCal
Chocolate Glory – 691 kCal
Glass of red wine – 191 kCal
Shared tomato and mozzarella salad – 243 kCal
My dinner came to 2047 kCal. This was quite a shock. Even with a 10km run in the morning I was way over what I consider my daily calorie allowance! Much more running going to happen over the next few weeks to normalise my intake!
The Limits of My Tolerance
After a day spent at a major theme park near London (Thorpe Park) I have to announce that I am officially disappointed with my body’s physiological reaction to rides. I have known about this reaction for many years (since I was about 14) but I have never really analysed it much before.
Many years ago I spent lots of time in the Air Training Corps and during that time I got some Air Experience Flights in a DeHavilland Chipmonk. After my first go the instructor always asked if I wanted to do aerobatics and, of course, my answer was yes. Every time my reaction was to turn a gentle shade of green and feel very sick and disorientated for about 3 hours afterwards. Eventually I would become very hungry and then finally I would be ok.
When on a trip to the Kennedy Space Centre in 2004 I experienced time in a multi-axis spinner designed to throw the best of the best out of kilter. With me I experienced about 4 hours of green and sickness with clammy skin and finally I grew extremely hungry.
The most recent trip to Thorpe Park confirmed that I am useless at roller coasters and similar rides. It’s such a shame as I do enjoy myself, it’s just that I feel like crap for ages.
Shame.
Poor Design
Here’s a picture of my toilet seat. It’s a special one with two seats. A seat for adults and a seat for children that attaches to the lid via a magnet.
This communication regards the poor design of this seat.
After my children’s bath I sit on the seat lid to dry #1. If you see the supports that transfer my weight force through the seats onto the toilet you will notice that they are NOT aligned. This results in a moment affecting the adult or lower seat. Over time and with my weight force this results in the lower seat bending and breaking at the point indicated. It’s a lovely seat, but it doesn’t take much to design it properly.
Reptile!
This communication was going to be called Snake! but it turns out this would have been very incorrect. Last night once my boys were in bed we noticed a “snake” in the garden.
It’s a shame that my boys weren’t awake to see it. I think they would have been fascinated. WW took these photos and then I looked on a website to see what kind of snake it was. Turns out it’s a slow worm and not a real snake. Just a lizard that has evolved in such a way as to remove its legs.
Just love living in the countryside.
Clematis
Here’s a picture of our clematis. Looks lovely. Also, given the dog ate all but one of the main stalks three years ago I’m surprised in got this far.
Change
I started gaming just after I persuaded my parents to buy a Commodore 64 for “educational” reasons. We’d had an Atari in the house before then and so I could play pong and tennis but the C64 was my first proper computer. I remember buying games on cassette tape for £1.99. These games must have been below 32kB as that was all the RAM on the C64 and it was tape drive.
Since then I have progressed from the Sega MegaDrive through all versions of the Sony Playstation. I was a little shocked but not really surprised that the latest GT Academy came in at a 3GB download! Wow, we have moved on so much. [yes – I know that Blu-Ray disks hold about 50GB but its just amazing to see this in real numbers]
Rare Thing
Here’s a rare lenticular cloud that formed over Kent.
Making It Look Easy
Recently I have taken up jogging. This is a normal summertime hobby with the aim of helping lose my winter blubber and get fit. This year is slightly different as ww has decided to do this also. There is a little bit of competition there but it is rather unfair at the moment as ww has slight activity-induced asthma!
We have found a 5Km route around the vineyards and fields surrounding our village. There is a bit of vertical work to do as we live at the base of the North Downs and there are ups and downs on the route!
At the moment I can run the 5Km in about 32 minutes. Let’s say that this is about 6 mile per hour. Which would give a pace of about 10 minutes per mile. Now for the scary bit. . . . The current world record for the mile is under four minutes. If we take the four minutes as the correct time for ease of calculations then that is 15 mph or 2.5 times my current speed. An athlete I am not!
The London Marathon was recently run in a time of just over 2 hours. Assuming it to be about 2 hours you get a speed of 13 mph which isn’t that much slower than the speed for the mile and yet these athletes keep it up for 2 hours. VERY impressive. The human body is quite stunning! An athlete I still am not.
I think this is part of a bigger social phenomenon that professional people make things look very easy because they do it all-day every-day. Professional footballers make playing in the premiership look easy (although for £50,000 a week I’d make sure I could hit the net EVERY time). Professional athletes make it look easy, professional sports drivers make it look easy.
Even in my profession (teaching) I think we make it look easy. I have had people come and observe my lessons and I think they think it looks easy. Then when they get the chance to do it themselves a lot of them are rubbish and have no idea and to be honest won’t be able to do it after lots of practice. It takes the right kind of person with the right kind of practice to be good at their chosen profession. Not everyone can do it. The following is a misnomer:
you can do anything you set your mind to
Unfortunately this was said by Ben Franklin whom I would normally hold in high esteem. Perhaps it should be re-phrased:
you can do anything you set your mind to as long as you have the natural ability