Feeling warm today, even my Galileo thermometer says it’s hot. Expanding water means slightly less dense and so very specific masses displace less water and so sink to bottom at particular temperatures. Ingenious.
Frank and Dave
Here are Frank and Dave. I bought this cactus from the Fresher’s Fair at Imperial College in Sept 1991. They are named after the two main astronaut characters from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I have only had these twins in my possession for around half of their lives though. In 1996 I left them in the flat at 9 Daver Court, Ealing, where I lived while doing my PGCE. I then moved to Kent. Lost and gone but never entering my thoughts so not lost really. Then in 2004 I moved into my current home and a friend came over. She brought Frank and Dave with her as they had been living in her mum’s bathroom since 1997!
Frank and Dave now live in my dining room and occasionally get watered and hoovered! The spines catch quite a bit of dust.
More about another Frank and Dave another time.
Salad Cream
I’m slightly worried. For the last 24 years I have preferred mayonnaise to salad cream. This has even gone so far as to be happy eating a steak with mayonnaise. I thought this meant that I was sophisticated and grown up. Having mayo seemed like the continental, better thing to do. I was happy with this for many years and always shirked the idea of having either salad cream or, worse, tomato ketchup. It is only since I have been with my wife that I have grown to accept that HP brown sauce is ok (but only on breakfast).
But all of a sudden things have changed.
Over the last month I have wanted salad cream with my chips and on the side with my pizza. I’ve not had steak yet so I don’t know what will happen then (it won’t be gravy though, that is even more wronger than ketchup). Does this mean I have regressed? I still feel intelligent and sophisticated (you might not be able to tell from this blog) but I like and even yearn at times for salad cream. I am worried, what if my other tastes revert back to a time when I was spotty and uncomfortable? Will I suddenly have the urge to buy a Madonna album or jump on a push bike and just cycle around all day? I never hang out at the corner shop with mates smoking and drinking but is that about to happen? Like headlines that are questions the answer is no. I am going through a blip and I can blame it on my wife. Her recent pregnancy hormones have infected me somehow and now I just have to wait for my senses and tastes to return to normal.
If you are interested it’s Heinz Salad Cream, Hellman’s Mayonnaise and HP Brown Sauce. Never ever any type of ketchup.
iPhone Apps
Here are some of my favourite iPhone apps and why:
General apps:
- Podcaster – I listen to lots of podcasts! There’s a list here.
- Tunein Radio – when I do the washing up I listen BBC Radio 4 via the internet as the FM signal in the kitchen is a bit iffy. I also listen to Radio Rock – Helsinki
- Met Office – Get the weather and rain maps. Just great.
- WordPress – for editing this site on the move and when I am away from a computer.
- Wolfram – for maths stuff and finding out things that require time series or comparisons.
- Flickr – puts my family photos onto the Flickr site.
- Twitter – I can follow my favourite people and occasionally tweet about the aero-fauna I see.
- IMDb – ever recognise someone in a film and wonder what else they have been in? If so then you need IMBd. I remember it when it was based in Cardiff (that’s a long time ago).
- GTPlanet – I use it to check out interesting things about the Gran Turismo series.
Sport apps:
- WTCC – keeps me in touch with the World Touring Car Series.
- William Hill – I can place my usual amount on the sporting outcomes on offer.
- Spurs – just to keep up to date with the score and Premiership table. Football on the whole bores me as a sport.
- ECB Cricket – because cricket is a sport that matters.
- NFL – after motorsport this is probably my favourite sport.
- F1
Games:
- F-Sim Shuttle – in top 3%
- X – Plane – 4G
- RC Plane 2
- F.A.S.T.
- Real Racing 2
- Slayer Pinball HD
- Angry Birds – in the top 9%
- Sailboat Pro
- Flick Golf
My GameCentre name is Kurtz72
Random:
- Wind Tunnel – as an aero engineer (by degree) this is fascinating.
- Star Walk – it’s always good to know what stars you are looking at.
- Fractile – zoom into the Mandelbrot set which is just lovely and fascinating.
Jumping the shark?
This is me jumping the water sprayer. It was a cold day, hence the fleece. I was quite worried that I was going to slip on landing and end up looking the fool. Maybe I look the fool anyway!
Icons
Just put new icons on the mobile version of my website. They are from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I like them and many thanks to the person who made them. When I remember I’ll link to that site. Link here.
Going to try and find some way of having the icons on my main site, I think that’ll look really cool. At the moment I am still bothered by time out errors and 500 errors. I think my server shares its time with other sites or it spends a long time doing site maintenance. Will try to find out.
I secretly hope that this site will take off and be very widely read but in reality I don’t want that responsibility. I could, of course, post stuff that isn’t well written and doesn’t make sense but in reality I want to use this to improve my writing skills which are currently poor.
Here’s to the web allowing me to indulge myself and make writing feel like fun, even with the iPhone touch pad.
Yellow flowers
More nice stuff while walking the dog. Isaac Asimov has been mentioned twice in my day. Once by me, once by the SGU. What are the chances?
Dualit Toaster!
Ahh. British engineering and design. Mine at last.
How do you washup a sieve?
The short answer is: you don’t get it messy in the first place
A sponge or cloth is not very good at getting the food detritus from the sieve. You wipe and just move the particles around. A running tap might work if the upturned sieve is washed through with running water but you have to ensure that the whole surface area has been douched. The bristles from a brush might be pushed through the grill on the sieve, but this is somewhat tiresome and tends to move dirt from one place to another.
Ultimately it is a lengthy job and not one that need be done. Drain the veg with the saucepan lid. Maybe use coffee filter inserts but never use a sieve. It’s just not worth the cleaning effort. That’s why you never see them in Star Trek.
TV volume settings
This post is based on a tweet. Perhaps this’ll happen more often. I find something pithy to mention and then I’ll expand upon it in a blog post.
My wife was changing the TV volume the other day and making sure she could see the number it was set on (the amp is perpendicular to where we sit, so quite hard to read). I asked whether she was being fussy about what volume the amp was on. No, was the reply, you are the fussy one.
This is correct as I would prefer the TV volume (actually the amp volume) on either a multiple of 2 or 5. Given that for normal TV viewing the ideal volume is somewhere between 20 and 30 this gives plenty of choice: 22,24,25,26,28. The other volume settings are incorrect to use and even if they create the best listening conditions I would find it hard to settle on one of those.
I do not consider this to be weird behaviour, I consider it to be remarkably sensible although I would probably end up with many logical fallacies should I attempt to explain how this obsessiveness can be justified.
A friend will only get out of bed if, when he looks at the alarm clock, it is a multiple of 5 minutes. If not he will stay in bed until the next multiple. Now that’s weird!
The worst waiting room
I’d like to know if there are worse but the waiting room I am currently sitting in is pretty poor. A row of chairs placed against the wall in what can only be described as a corridor, probably because it is a corridor.
I don’t think there are any magazines or books. The only entertainment is trying to guess why people are here. The noises of muffled chatter, trollies laden with removals going by and clacking over the bumps between tiles along the floor aren’t enough to keep my Internet crazy brain entertained. Just to add to potential humiliation the corridor isn’t off the beaten track either. It’s the route to the three main treatment areas. I’d often walked past these chairs and wondered about what it feels like to sit there. Now I know.
I have to sit up. If I slouch then the people walking along the corridor will have to walk single file, I can’t even cross my legs as my foot would stick out too far and inconvenience a great many people who gave business further along the way.
I’m keeping my head down and typing this to pass the time. Ignoring all that pass. A quick glance along the line of bored patients indicates they have the same tactic as me. There are no posters to wonder about, no collections of leaflets and no flyers for made-up alternative treatments just three tone walls (I kid you not).
I’m going to read a book on the Kindle app. That might pass the time. Could do with a coffee too. Let’s discover the crazy of the Congo with Mister Kurtz!
More adventures!
It turns out I’m pretty tired and reading or playing on the iPhone are out as I’ll fall asleep. I’ve just realised my chair doesn’t even have arms I can rest on. The chairs either side of me have arms and I’m sandwiched starting to feel as though I’ve paid economy. I can’t lean forwards, backwards or take my elbows from my sides.
It looks like the appointment is going to be delayed. All the people before me haven’t been in and I’m losing the will to live.
How to eat an apple
Apart from using a knife (or not) and cutting up an apple I can think of predominantly two ways of eating an apple. This does matter because one way is correct and the other is not so correct.
Circumferential or the Segment method?
A circumferential eater will take a bite, rotate the sphere using the core as the axis and take another bite. This will result in a curve of apple exposed around the great circle of the apple. Then another line of bite is taken from each end (assuming that the eater has a big enough mouth to bite to the core)
A segmental eater takes bites out of the apple from stalk to opposite pole. This results in a segment being eaten and then the apple being rotated to start the process again.
The problem is exposure of the flesh of the apple to the air to turn brown and this needs to be minimised. In the segment method the area exposed for significant time is constant. For the circumferential method the area exposed increases with time.
Which leads to:
The analysis shows that if your bite radius is greater than 0.140 of the radius of the apple then you should eat in segments. Apart from small mammals the bite radius is going to be more than 14% of the apple radius, unless there is a huge apple variety waiting to be discovered.
This post was necessary because every time I eat an apple my wife tells me I am eating it the wrong way.