Tuesday, 25 December 2012
Sunday, 23 December 2012
Thursday, 20 December 2012
Saturday, 15 December 2012
Things that happened today:
I mostly poked numbers and failed to book more than one appointment. People don't want appointments so close to Chrifsmas.
Rich was at his work's do, so I mooched the reduced price shelves, found nothing interesting (other than asparagus for 80p) and came home in the rain.
My umbrella folded itself up on me twice, somewhat comically. Stomped in a large puddle. Deliberately.
I ate slightly stale crumpets for dinner, having found nothing better at the shop.
Hyphen dribbled on me. You've never met such a drooly dragon.
Jac tried to bite me twice, so I have given him the carpet cutout and a toughened glass mirror. He needs to burn off that aggression and develop a better attitude. I will not tolerate a vicious lizard.
Sandy and Mocha dozed, and I found Tsam asleep and chilled through by the kitchen door. Silly bugger.
Wrapped some more presents. I love gift wrapping.
Rich was at his work's do, so I mooched the reduced price shelves, found nothing interesting (other than asparagus for 80p) and came home in the rain.
My umbrella folded itself up on me twice, somewhat comically. Stomped in a large puddle. Deliberately.
I ate slightly stale crumpets for dinner, having found nothing better at the shop.
Hyphen dribbled on me. You've never met such a drooly dragon.
Jac tried to bite me twice, so I have given him the carpet cutout and a toughened glass mirror. He needs to burn off that aggression and develop a better attitude. I will not tolerate a vicious lizard.
Sandy and Mocha dozed, and I found Tsam asleep and chilled through by the kitchen door. Silly bugger.
Wrapped some more presents. I love gift wrapping.
Thursday, 13 December 2012
Badass Animals of the Year 2012
No, this isn't a scene from some weird computer game, nor is it a still frame from a horror movie.This is a live action photo taken by Donna, of a giant preying mantis jumping to attack. In her own words: "They're not huggy pets. Those suckers have sharp claws."
I'm fairly sure this is Hierodula membranacea, badass for not being picky about what it eats - and famous for giving all mantids the "man-eater" reputation due to this habit!
WARNING: SPIDER POST!
IF YOU DON'T LIKE SPIDERS, STOP SCROLLING NOW!
IF YOU DON'T LIKE SPIDERS, STOP SCROLLING NOW!
It is found in Europe and Asia, from the UK to Siberia, and lives in ponds, slow moving streams and shallow lakes, building an underwater retreat from silk, filling it with air it carries from the surface by trapping air bubbles in the hairs that cover its body and legs.
The bubble is bell-shaped with a silvery shine, hence the spider’s latin name Argyroneta - “silvery net”. The spider spends most of its time inside the bell, and only has to replenish the air once in a while. It feeds on whatever aquatic invertebrate they can capture, including backswimmers, water striders and diverse larvae; they also hunt tadpoles and small fish occasionally!
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
The first chapter of "42".
There are a lot of theories to the big questions - many with a LOT of evidence to support them. So, rather than go through the pros and cons of them all, I'll take you through the theories I feel are most accurate, theories based on the works of some of the greatest minds on the planet, past and present.
I must point out at this point that I am no expert - I'm merely an interested amateur with a thirst for understanding; clearly you are too, or you wouldn't be here. It is important to note that we do not have all the answers at this current time. This is not to say we will not have the answers, and it certainly doesn't necessarily mean "God did it!". It could be, but we don't have proof for this yet.
For example, we don't fully understand what gravity is - but you don't hear people going "Well, duh! God personally holds us to the ground!", do you? (Unless you're a Pastafarian, obviously! But even so, the Pastafarians understand not to take things utterly seriously...)
The other side of the table of course is that, if we accept "God did it!" as our answer - well, we risk still dying of bad smells and curses! It is only by trying to find answers for ourselves that we actually find answers.
I'm also aware that some of the answers we find are highly technical - and I don't know about you, but I'm no physicist. So, I'm going to try to explain them as clearly as I am able. After all, Albert Einstein himself famously said "If you can't explain something simply, you don't know enough about it. You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."
So, where do we start with such diffiult questions? Well, naturally, we'll start at the beginning!
*******************
The dawn of the first day...
Energy.
Batteries. In your phone, laptop, anything - a battery stores energy in a chemical format. You can then use the energy from that chemical format to emit photons (light beams), another energy format, from your computer screen. You can use it to make sound come from your speakers and some of that energy is turned into vibration by your fan...
Energy comes in lots of "flavours", each of which can be wildly different from the others.Sound is very different from light which is very different from heat. And they're just three examples, in this universe, in your "local" dimensions. They've recently proved that photons work in both wave AND particle form - imagine if water was water waves and then icecubes, all at the same time. Icecubes that flow. Kinda screwy, right?
Welcome to physics.
Someone, and I can't put my finger on whom at this moment, said something along the lines of "If it doesn't scare you a little, you're not understanding it properly." Our little bubble of universe has a big mix of flavours in it - but there could be even more that we haven't even begun to get our heads round.
Anyway, long story short, the upshot of this theory is that prior to, and around the universe, is a different flavour of energy - dimensions are just other versions of flavour, if you will.
The "bubble universe" theory starts out as a transmutation of energies - the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago. Some people understand it as a fissure that spews out amazing amounts of energy - like the back end of a black hole from another dimension, if you could imagine such a thing... (Stephen Hawking does some interesting writing on the types of potential universes in "Universe in a Nutshell: http://www.hawking.org.uk/)
When that fissure originally opened, all kinds of crazy energy suddenly slammed through the hole, converting into the dimensions we're now familiar with (and the ones we ain't! Physics joke also.) and roaring out at amazing speeds. At this point, things are all kinds of crazy and all the fundamental forces are thought to be just one unified force.
Now, Mr Higgs came up with an idea for how these very first energies worked. http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/ And just recently, CERN and the LHC found the particle Mr Higgs has been looking for, for so long.
The Higgs Boson.
I'm going to have to grossly oversimplify here. The Higgs Boson created a field, acting as the "fences" of a garden - all this energy was roaring in through the "gate", the fissure, into the garden. Like a garden party, only so many people fit in before they get squished up against the fences - the people behind have to slow down to get in, and then the fence will give way once everyone has jammed in, slowed down and is pushing against it.
I'm guessing you already know the law of states, but just in case, more energy = more excitement. Water is a great example of this: less energy, it becomes ice. More energy, it turns from solid to liquid. Hotter = turn to water, hotter = turn to gas, hotter = turn to plasma...
The fences allowed this quark-gluon plasma to slow down and cool off enough to turn into "liquid" universe, if you'll excuse a physics pun.
We end up with an amazing abundance of photons, and then a whackload of stuff that starts sticking together as it's all cramming through the "gap". The fences collapse and the matter has been expanding ever since, pushing the boundary of the universe ever outward. (You might also be interested to know that this is called the Planck epoch, zero to approximately 10-43 seconds from the event.)
We know this expansion is a fact because of a phenomenon called "microwave background radiation" (leftover heat from this early, extremely hot and dense universe) as well as "Red Shift phasing". That's also pretty tricky to explain in laymans terms - but I'll give it a go.
If you know what the "Doppler effect" is, then you can skip this point to the next set of asterisks - the Doppler effect doesn't just work on sound, it works on light, too. If you don't, please read on as normal.
*******************
"Blue" light travels very VERY fast. The "bluer" it gets, the faster and tighter the waveform.
As it happens, sound does the same thing - when something comes towards you, the soundwave gets pushed forwards, compressed, so the pitch rises. The "Nnnnnnneeeeeee" as a racecar comes roaring towards you, it always goes up in sound.
Light does the same thing, technically - as it not only behaves like particles, it also behaves like a wave.
The tighter the compression, the "bluer" the light, all the way up into ultraviolet, xrays and stuff. The wider the frequency, and the light goes red - all the way to infrared (that's heat to you) and beyond... Or "Yooooowwwwwwwnnnng!" as the pitch of the engine note from the car now hurtling away from you goes - dropping in tone.
*******************
The Red Shift properly applies to "the standard model" - the universe in "liquid" state, a few picoseconds after the beginning.
And after the beginning... came the early universe. Though it took over 400,000 years for everything to calm down enough for nuclei to capture electrons!
Once atoms started to form, the universe really started to evolve....
I must point out at this point that I am no expert - I'm merely an interested amateur with a thirst for understanding; clearly you are too, or you wouldn't be here. It is important to note that we do not have all the answers at this current time. This is not to say we will not have the answers, and it certainly doesn't necessarily mean "God did it!". It could be, but we don't have proof for this yet.
For example, we don't fully understand what gravity is - but you don't hear people going "Well, duh! God personally holds us to the ground!", do you? (Unless you're a Pastafarian, obviously! But even so, the Pastafarians understand not to take things utterly seriously...)
The other side of the table of course is that, if we accept "God did it!" as our answer - well, we risk still dying of bad smells and curses! It is only by trying to find answers for ourselves that we actually find answers.
I'm also aware that some of the answers we find are highly technical - and I don't know about you, but I'm no physicist. So, I'm going to try to explain them as clearly as I am able. After all, Albert Einstein himself famously said "If you can't explain something simply, you don't know enough about it. You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."
So, where do we start with such diffiult questions? Well, naturally, we'll start at the beginning!
*******************
The dawn of the first day...
Energy.
Batteries. In your phone, laptop, anything - a battery stores energy in a chemical format. You can then use the energy from that chemical format to emit photons (light beams), another energy format, from your computer screen. You can use it to make sound come from your speakers and some of that energy is turned into vibration by your fan...
Energy comes in lots of "flavours", each of which can be wildly different from the others.Sound is very different from light which is very different from heat. And they're just three examples, in this universe, in your "local" dimensions. They've recently proved that photons work in both wave AND particle form - imagine if water was water waves and then icecubes, all at the same time. Icecubes that flow. Kinda screwy, right?
Welcome to physics.
Someone, and I can't put my finger on whom at this moment, said something along the lines of "If it doesn't scare you a little, you're not understanding it properly." Our little bubble of universe has a big mix of flavours in it - but there could be even more that we haven't even begun to get our heads round.
Anyway, long story short, the upshot of this theory is that prior to, and around the universe, is a different flavour of energy - dimensions are just other versions of flavour, if you will.
The "bubble universe" theory starts out as a transmutation of energies - the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago. Some people understand it as a fissure that spews out amazing amounts of energy - like the back end of a black hole from another dimension, if you could imagine such a thing... (Stephen Hawking does some interesting writing on the types of potential universes in "Universe in a Nutshell: http://www.hawking.org.uk/)
When that fissure originally opened, all kinds of crazy energy suddenly slammed through the hole, converting into the dimensions we're now familiar with (and the ones we ain't! Physics joke also.) and roaring out at amazing speeds. At this point, things are all kinds of crazy and all the fundamental forces are thought to be just one unified force.
Now, Mr Higgs came up with an idea for how these very first energies worked. http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/higgs/ And just recently, CERN and the LHC found the particle Mr Higgs has been looking for, for so long.
The Higgs Boson.
I'm going to have to grossly oversimplify here. The Higgs Boson created a field, acting as the "fences" of a garden - all this energy was roaring in through the "gate", the fissure, into the garden. Like a garden party, only so many people fit in before they get squished up against the fences - the people behind have to slow down to get in, and then the fence will give way once everyone has jammed in, slowed down and is pushing against it.
I'm guessing you already know the law of states, but just in case, more energy = more excitement. Water is a great example of this: less energy, it becomes ice. More energy, it turns from solid to liquid. Hotter = turn to water, hotter = turn to gas, hotter = turn to plasma...
The fences allowed this quark-gluon plasma to slow down and cool off enough to turn into "liquid" universe, if you'll excuse a physics pun.
We end up with an amazing abundance of photons, and then a whackload of stuff that starts sticking together as it's all cramming through the "gap". The fences collapse and the matter has been expanding ever since, pushing the boundary of the universe ever outward. (You might also be interested to know that this is called the Planck epoch, zero to approximately 10-43 seconds from the event.)
We know this expansion is a fact because of a phenomenon called "microwave background radiation" (leftover heat from this early, extremely hot and dense universe) as well as "Red Shift phasing". That's also pretty tricky to explain in laymans terms - but I'll give it a go.
If you know what the "Doppler effect" is, then you can skip this point to the next set of asterisks - the Doppler effect doesn't just work on sound, it works on light, too. If you don't, please read on as normal.
*******************
"Blue" light travels very VERY fast. The "bluer" it gets, the faster and tighter the waveform.
As it happens, sound does the same thing - when something comes towards you, the soundwave gets pushed forwards, compressed, so the pitch rises. The "Nnnnnnneeeeeee" as a racecar comes roaring towards you, it always goes up in sound.
Light does the same thing, technically - as it not only behaves like particles, it also behaves like a wave.
The tighter the compression, the "bluer" the light, all the way up into ultraviolet, xrays and stuff. The wider the frequency, and the light goes red - all the way to infrared (that's heat to you) and beyond... Or "Yooooowwwwwwwnnnng!" as the pitch of the engine note from the car now hurtling away from you goes - dropping in tone.
*******************
The Red Shift properly applies to "the standard model" - the universe in "liquid" state, a few picoseconds after the beginning.
And after the beginning... came the early universe. Though it took over 400,000 years for everything to calm down enough for nuclei to capture electrons!
Once atoms started to form, the universe really started to evolve....
Saturday, 1 December 2012
Maubles.
I love this time of year. Everyone I know knows that I am mad about decorations, in particular, baubles.I've hardly bought any new ornaments this year... Well, I get told off if I buy more. I do have five big suitcase sized boxes, each with a different colour colour collection, after all. In fairness though, they're usually bought when the sales start, and tucked away carefully for another year.
I confess to buying a couple including these rather beautiful 2 for 3 gems I discovered hiding in Marks & Spencers. And yes, that is a big handful of loose sequin stars floating round in there!
(UPDATE: It was kind of lucky I did - apparently people go MENTAL in the sales- there were NONE left when I went out the day after Boxing Day! I mean seriously, the shelves were literally empty and Marks and Sparks staff were dragging empty units out!)
Ooh, and these were another bargain at 50p for a box of 12.
I mean, yeah, they're only plastic, but they're nice space fillers in bright metallic red and matching glitter red, which go well with my black and red theme this year.
Your "icicle" bauble is traditionally glass or crystal (and I confess, I have got some long glass ones in silver sparkle tarnish stashed away somewhere!) and I don't normally buy plastic - but seriously, they're actually pretty nice. I bet you wouldn't have known if I hadn't told you!
Pastafarians have the fortune of having one of the longest festive seasons of all religions, going throughout December AND January - and believe me, I have been making the MOST of it. First of December, these suckers went STRAIGHT on our £3.50 summer bargain jet black tree along with some cherry globe LED lights.
Funky!
Yes, it does have a spiked base under that wide bell and there's something very... sexy about this shape, especially when it's been crafted in this darkly lustrous red glass. Opaque, glossy, decidedly metallic under the deep red glaze, it has a certain sense of class!
I've always preferred glass baubles for the craftsmanship that goes into them, and for their fragile, fleeting nature. It adds to the preciousness for me, knowing that once they're gone, they're gone!
Actually - I think I have more baubles than items of jewellery for myself...
Worth it.
And then sometimes, you find something that's just deliciously tacky. Alright, I know I said I prefer glass baubles, but you don't find quite so many peculiar glass ones in funky designs, and c'mon, you can't deny it in all honesty - that's just adorable, isn't it?!
After all, it's the perfect counterpoint to the very grown up, sensible "Onions" - they were so kooky, I couldn't resist; especially when they were on sale at 99p for a box of four!
The rest of the black tinsel tree was decorated with some space filler gloss plain black baubles and matching glitter ones to add a subtle dimension to the reds, sparkly silver stars decorated the room, and my summer bargains provided a nice surprise...
Those ones are clear roundy onions - that pop open in half. Luckily, it happens to be that Thornton's Cherry Kirsch chocolates come in red metal foil and are the perfect size to pop just the one in the middle of each little bauble.
Chocolate baubles with a difference!
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