My overdeveloped spirit of enquiry

Having been told by my doctor that putting anything in your ear to clean them (like cotton buds, fingers etc) makes them get blocked more easily (see here), I tested it out. I didn't really consider it, or decide to do it, but almost immediately after getting my ears unblocked last time, I started cleaning out my right ear using said "bad" methods, and following doctor's orders on my left ear. The doctor was right! My right ear is much more blocked than my left one and I am worrying that it'll block completely like last time! I have suspended all activities relating to the inside of both ears indefinitely. If only I could just take the doctor's advice, maybe I'd be healthier...

A silly sign

I won't turn this site into a novelty picture site, because there are enough of those already. But just today I'll treat you to a novelty sign (there are plenty of those on the internet too) because it's in my village.


I could make you guess what it means and why it's there, but it's probably better if I just tell you. It is there to encourage people to park half on the pavement and half on the road. The pavement is very wide at that point because people are supposed to park there, but people found that cars made it difficult to walk past. So they put up the sign in the hope that drivers would leave more space for pedestrians. It's well-intentioned, but if I was parking there I wouldn't have a clue what the sign meant. And I'd probably park as much on the pavement as possible to avoid parking on the main street through the village

Mercury is Retrograde

That's the title of a new Bloc Party song. I haven't decided whether I like it or not. It's a kind of "bangin" track that I would sometimes jump around violently to in my room, and sometimes be utterly bored by. After all, it has a heavy beat, good rhythms, but only 3 words. In fact, put in those terms, the song Count Five or Six by Cornelius is similar. It has five and a half words in the entire song (those being "one, two, three, four, five, si...") and it's amazing because of the repetition and the good beat.

Another thing that those two songs have in common is that they are educational. I knew how to count to five or six. However, I was not entirely sure what retrograde meant. Well, I had some idea, but having found it on wikipedia, it turns out that retrograde motion is simply motion that is the opposite way to normal. So planets can spin in a retrograde way or move in a retrograde way relative to each other. Maybe it would make it clearer if I explained. If you are looking down on the solar system, you can see a planet going round it either clockwise or anti-clockwise. You can also see it is spinning on its axis either clockwise or anticlockwise. If these motions are different to each other, it is called retrograde spin. If the planet goes in the opposite direction round the sun to most of the others, then it is a retrograde orbit too.

I might be wrong, but Mercury is not retrograde in either sense. However, it can appear to have a retrograde orbit from Earth, because the motion we see is its motion relative to us, and we are moving too. Sometimes the stars can move across the sky from East to West, while Mercury will move from West to East. This looks like retrograde motion. But sometimes Mercury will go with the stars from East to West. It just depends where our orbits are relative to each other.

I think I might have complicated things so I apologise if I have... my conclusion is that saying Mercury is Retrograde is describing a temporary phenomenon as viewed from Earth.

I had hoped that it would be a universal truth. A song would be a wonderful way of remembering and spreading scientific knowledge. It's successful because the words sound cool. The question I'd like to ask you is this: if you could have any fact immortalised in a song so that people would remember it forever, what would it be? It should have cool words like "retrograde" and be an interesting fact. My initial suggestions would be

Atmospheric pressure is one BAR
Put your balls in a box to case harden my metal
Coke contains phosphoric acid
Martensite is diffusionless
Coble creep is along grain boundaries
Tungsten is amazing

PS sorry they are all materials science related and a bit obscure, maybe you have better ones

!EDIT! Apparently the song is called "Mercury's in retrograde" !EDIT!

That'll tell them!

I won't stand for any more dilly-dallying with your higgledy piggledy jiggery pokery round here, thank you very much

More evidence of long-term damage caused by living with girls

I was in the toilet when I noticed that the colours of my tie and pants clashed. My thought process was like this:
-Oh no, the colours and even the patterns clash
-Should I be making an effort to avoid that when I get dressed in the morning?
-Who for?
-Well, I suppose the only one to see my pants is me... do I care if they clash?
-YES [this worried me, I'm not supposed to care, I'm a man!]
-Do I care enough to spend time selecting pants in the morning instead of picking up the one at the top of the drawer?
-No
-- Breathes a sigh of relief, masculinity is at least partly maintained

You can always say that summer had its charm...

[title from The Cardigans - Sick and Tired]

I returned to 4th-year house in Universityland for the final time last week. I had to clear out the house so that we could give it back to the letting agent. The house had to be empty of our possessions and clean, and both emptying and cleaning took a lot of time and a lot of tea to get done. I can report that despite the huge numbers of cookies produced in our kitchen throughout the year, only one of them got dropped irretrievably behind the cooker. I can also report that fridges have little pots on the back of them. Any liquid mank collecting inside the fridge somehow makes its way into a mank-pot. Jo and I were left wondering whether emptying the mank-pot is a normal household task to be carried out periodically, or whether the mank-pot was expected to sit there gathering mank for the entire useful life of a fridge. Please send your suggestions on a postcard, with a stamped addressed envelope enclosed for a reply.

I was completely phased by the amount of stuff that turned up on my bedroom floor after my trip to 4th-year house. It turns out that I have a lot more stuff than fits in a room. So Uncle Val came to help tidy up, even if only to stop me going berserk in panic. I found it really helpful having someone else there. My instinct on finding something that doesn't have a 'home' yet is to leave it where it is and move on. But with someone else there, it's suddenly obvious that leaving most things just sitting on the floor doesn't really solve the problem I'm trying to solve. The actual solution (just to clear up any confusion) is to find a home for all your possessions or make a home for them if one doesn't already exist. In the end, I cleared out most of my drawers and cupboards, dispatched my kitchen things to the attic and my coin collection to the garage, and now everything fits. Hurrah!

Comfortingly, the laws of room-sorting were adhered to:
1) Some things were found that had been lost for years
2) Some things were lost that had been treasured for years
3) When dividing possessions into sensible categories to go into drawers, the amount of possessions in a single category is always slightly bigger than the drawer available
4) Some things that should be thrown out are retained for the next good clear-out in five years' time, even though they could probably go now. And you know exactly which ones they are and STILL won't throw them out
5) One item just crops up again and again. For me, it was photos. I had photos from different holidays over the last decade and it seems I had spread them evenly through all the drawer and cupboard space available. Now they have their own drawer. I am proud of my Organisation Skills
6) Some things appear that have never been in your room before. Where that pair of sunglasses appeared from I shall never know
7) You have more juggling balls, silly hats and T-shirts than you thought
8) There is something there that recalls ambitious plans that never came to fruition. This happened so often in the sorting procedure that it's not worth boring you with all the sordid details
9) It looks worse before it looks better
10) Having decided which drawers are for which objects, something extra-large turns up and spoils everything. And I don't mean Chris Moyles. I'm thinking of that logic puzzle that wants to be a Rubik's cube but just isn't good (or cubic) enough to manage it. It didn't fit in the drawer that was intended for 'games, puzzles and novelties' and destroyed the whole system
11) You give up at the end and have a 'random stuff' drawer just to clear the mess

Not posting means I have been existing more and not less

Hi, haven't written in a while, and you can tell because this post is going to come across all rambling and nonsensical, like some letters I write. I read letters like that back through, give up on understanding what I meant by them in the first place... and then send them anyway. Sorry if you have received any like that, or if you do receive any like that in the future.

Anyway, I didn't come on here to tell you about letters. After all, I am a bit busy and it's late at night. I started writing with the aim of telling you all why I haven't written much lately. Well, I have some news.

I'm a graduate! Graduated on Saturday in a wonderfully traditional ceremony and stupid clothes. It kind of feels like it set me free a bit. I don't want to leave Universityland, but the time came anyway. Before the end I had to pack in loads of experiences because it was my Last Opportunity, and now I can actually do things that are about the future and not the past. I hate planning the future, but sometimes you gotta do something and it's worse if you put it off.

So, I have been applying for jobs. My wonderful Aunt-person found me a summer job with a materials-based company. My temporary work won't allow me to use my materials knowledge too much, but still, it's nice to know that materials science will be all around me. AND, I have applied to lots of jobs, got further in some applications than others, but I feel like I'm actually making progress.

So life is hectic but good. I feel like some things are getting neglected such as tea research and blogging, but they will intensify again when the evils of future-planning have gone away

More about me and the environment

I am fiercely independent. If someone tells me to do something I get defensive; I don't automatically do the opposite, but I certainly have a good look at the options to see whether it would work to do something else. I want to be absolutely sure that I am my own person. And I do it obsessively. When someone says they can predict how I'll react to something or what I'll say, it throws me into a kind of panic and I don't know what to do. I cast about for new ways of being unpredictable. I don't want to be weird, but I certainly do want to decide things myself and I pride myself on having original ideas and new ways of doing things.

It's perhaps because of this that I am a man of short term obsessions. I have had my hatred of umbrellas, my love of cheese, my love of the cardigans, my love of tea, my obsession with cacti, and many more. When someone finds me out, or, worse, is more obsessed than me, it shocks me and I flee in panic!

But slightly contradictorily, I like to take up the same opinions as my Dad. You could probably say that the time when I was gaining all my background of opinions and way of thinking was a time when I listened a lot to my Dad. He was a Quaker, he was slightly anti-establishment, he was an environmentalist and a scientist. Everyone has beliefs and values that are unquestioned, and these are some things that are firmly ingrained in me.

A wonderful thing about university is that there are a lot of people with carefully considered opinions. I don't discuss life, the universe and everything too often, but certainly over a few years you get through most things. So you start to question your ingrained values. That's important to me, because then I get to be that little bit more independent in my thoughts.

I realised only recently that environmentalism was something that I should question too. My Dad died before everyone believed in global warming, so I can't just steal his ideas on that. It brings up lots of problems that he probably thought through but I just accepted.
What kind of world are we trying to save?
Do we want to stop seas from being filled with fertilisers that kill off local fish populations?
Do we mind that a land filled with people, our houses, infrastructure and agriculture is unnatural?
Is the destruction of sea habitat somehow more important or more avoidable than the destruction of habitats on land?
Is biodiversity very very important? It's not so natural either. After all, if you leave land to do its own thing, nettles could cover it and squeeze out anything else. Or bracken in the highlands.
If we will be able to survive the problems of global warming, is that enough?
In terms of importance, if you give a human life a value of 10, what's the value of a frog?
If there is a huge swarm of insects is it more justified to kill them rather than a lone bug?
Can we even define the state of the Earth environmentally?

I'm not planning on abandoning my environmental views, because I think they are important. But it's something to think about, because unquestioned views are dangerous no matter who you are.

Advice #26

Before and during crossing a road, Stop, Look and Listen
And when I say "look", I mean, look right, look left, and look right again
(or left right left if in a foreign place where people drive on the right)

Fractal Fripperies

Rachel's boyfriend has a new company called Fractal Fripperies. You can browse and zoom around fractals and then choose a pattern and get a T-shirt with it on. It's great! Fractals are infinitely detailed, and the whole concept of that scares me slightly, but it also amazes me. It just blows my mind slightly. But they are cool, so next time you want a new T-shirt, get your own personal fractal!

Your Favourite British Coins

The results are in from the survey:

It's a tie between 50p and £1 coins, both receiving around 43% of the vote. I haven't seen any of the new ones yet, but they should be in the mint already

Excuses excuses...

In my department at university they set everyone exams to work out which grades to give. But to make sure that everyone has the right grade, they give some people a viva (oral exam). They interview a few people to work out the quality of the year as a whole and also some people who are near grade boundaries so they can decide which side of the boundary to put you.

I figure I need to talk like someone who tried his best and has excellent knowledge but somehow didn't show it in the exams. And that got me thinking about excuses I could use.

1) We went to the tea shop after each exam and so I was really distracted thinking which tea to have.
2) I have been in a state of worry and tension because the fridge taunts me with noises that I can't respond to. And it does that really loudly and at me, even if there are other people in the room.
3) I have been in a state of worry and tension because some people managed to get a balloon tangled in the telegraph wires near our house back in spring and it bothered me. I moaned incessantly to my housemates about the fluttering of them in the wind, the problems of littering and how they were in my field of view when I worked







Until eventually, a man from BT came to get them down (right hand picture)












4) I understand everything, there was just too much to learn
5) I'm a slow eater and I shouldn't be persecuted for it.
6) My Gran died
7) I was troubled about the lecturer I mentioned here and couldn't possibly work
8) Living with girls clouded my brain
9) My shoelace kept coming undone because it was in need of repair
10) I spent too much time writing silly blogs like this instead of revising

Anyway, with the viva in only a few hours, I'd better do some work...