Pligget

That title is to save you the trouble of reading any further if you disagree.

One of the things I am is a physics graduate, but, like, it doesn't define me OK? I'm not one of your standard nerds with a clip-on tie and a shirt pocket crammed full of pens. There can't be more than two or three of them in there at any one time. Well, never more than five anyway. Eleven, tops.
Aaanyway... I'm fascinated by how the universe works, and why certain things are the way they are. Even more, I take great pleasure in trying to find ways of explaining them to people who think it's all too complicated, whereas in fact it's just that no-one has bothered to use the right imagery to make it understandable. If, at the same time, I make myself appear incredibly clever and wise, that's purely incidental.

If anyone out there wants to understand some natural phenomenon, and have it explained in simple words, just send me a comment and I'll see what I can do. A couple of examples:

How do things stay in orbit (round planets etc)?

You know that gravity is a force of attraction between things, right? Gravity attracts the Earth to the Sun, and it also attracts us to the Earth (it's what keeps our feet on the ground and stops us from floating away). When you throw a stone, it is also attracted to the Earth and falls back down again.
Now, imagine you could throw a stone so hard that it went way over the horizon. Because the Earth is ball-shaped, the further over the horizon you go, the more the land curves "down" from where you are. If you could throw the stone far enough, it would still fall towards the surface, but the surface itself would also be curving down away from it, so the stone would never hit it. It would then be in orbit. In other words, the Earth is constantly falling towards the sun, but it's also going sideways so fast that it keeps missing. It just so happens that our sideways speed closely matches the strength of the Sun's attraction at this distance, so we travel along a stable, almost circular path.
Another way of looking at it is to think of gravity as being a "pull". When you swing a ball on a piece of elastic around your head, you can feel the "pull" that stretches the elastic. If you let go, the ball whizzes off. If you slow down, the elastic goes limp and the ball drops. But if you keep it spinning (i.e. keep the ball going sideways fast enough) the elastic stays stretched and the ball keeps going round in a circle. The trick is maintaining the sideways speed of the ball. That's why the space shuttle has to be so powerful - not only does it have to get up to a height of a few hundred miles (to get out of the atmosphere that would otherwise slow it down too much), it also has to get up to a sideways speed of about 17,000 mph - otherwise it won't miss.

Why is the Sky Blue?

You know that sunlight is made up of all the colours of the rainbow, right? Well, that sunlight gets to us through our atmosphere, which is a roughly 50-mile-thick layer of air covering the whole planet (held there by, you guessed it, the Earth's gravity). This air is made up of about 80% Nitrogen gas.
Now, normally light travels in straight lines unless it hits something. When it hits something it scatters. It just so happens that Nitrogen gas molecules scatter the blue part of the spectrum more than any of the other colours.
When you're looking up at the sky, but away from the sun, the light that enters your eyes hasn't come directly from the sun - it's light that was going to miss you completely and go over your head, except that some nitrogen molecules got in the way. While most of the light carried on in a straight line, some of the blue part got scattered in all directions - and some of that scattered blue light headed straight into your eyes. So the atmosphere (the sky) looks blue.
In the film of the Apollo astronauts on the Moon's surface, the sky is very dark. This is because there is no atmosphere to scatter the light, so there's no light coming directly from the sky, so it looks black.
So why do clouds look white? Well, they're made up of tiny droplets of water floating about in the air. I say tiny, but in fact compared with the gas molecules they're enormous. Billions of times bigger. Even though that water is clear and colourless, the light changes direction when it crosses the boundary from air into water and back out again. This scatters not just one colour, but all of them - so the light that is scattered towards your eyes is a mixture of all the colours - in other words, white. It's the same story with snow, sugar and salt. If you look at them under a magnifying glass, they're all made of clear crystals, but they've got so many surface boundaries scattering the light that they look white.

Why does the sun look red when it rises and sets?

Like I said, the Earth's atmosphere is a roughly even layer of gas clinging to the planet surface. When the sun is high in the sky, the light travels only a short distance through the air layer to the ground. The lower the sun is in the sky, the shallower the angle at which the light crosses the air layer, so the greater the distance it travels through the air to get to you.
As I said before, air scatters some of the blue part of the light. The more air the light travels through to get to you, the more of the blue part gets scattered away and doesn't make it into your eye. If you subtract the blue part from white sunlight, i.e. the part from one side of the rainbow, you're left with light which is dominated by the colours on the other side of the rainbow - i.e. the red side. So the unscattered light coming straight from the sun to your eye looks red.

Stone the crows - I never realised it would be so long-winded.

I know I'm not saying anything new here, but don't you find it bizarre that it should actually be illegal to cultivate and consume a particular plant? If a sane adult were to grow some of this stuff in their own greenhouse, harvest it, and add it to their food in much the same way as they might do with a chilli or a sprig of rosemary, they'd be breaking the law. If they persist, they could actually be carted off to prison or forced to pay large sums of money to the state, even though they're not impinging in any way on anyone else, and arguably doing themselves less harm than if they had accompanied their meal with a bottle of wine or lit up a post-prandial ciggy. Or even just pigged out at McDonald's.

And before you start listing the many health risks associated with the stuff, there's a huge difference between something being inadvisable and it actually being illegal, but people always seem to confuse the two. I know the arguments are all well worn, but I've never really seen the issue tackled in a logical way. It's always emotional. How can someone argue logically that it should be illegal to inhale one lungful of smoke from a joint, but only inadvisable to drink four bottles of scotch?

Most objections to de-criminalisation or legalisation suggest the following:

it is a precursor to hard drugs;
it is harmful to health;
there is evidence that it is addictive; and most ludicrously of all
it draws people into criminal activity.

There are lots of variations on these, but that's basically it.

The ripostes to the above are usually:

no more than are cigarettes and alcohol (C+A), or breast-milk for that matter;
but less so than C+A;
but nowhere near as much as C+A;
Isn't this an argument for legalisation?

It frustrates me that most proponents of the status quo concentrate on the harmful effects of smoking it [I remember a lovely rabid article in the Daily Mail which listed reasons for maintaining its illegal status, and one of them actually said that smoking it could be harmful because joints often contain tobacco, missing the irony that it was the legal ingredient that was doing the harm], and on the fact that it brings people into contact with suppliers of more harmful substances.

What about my home-grower who cooks with it? Can't we claim some sort of constitutional "innocent until proven guilty"-type argument in defence of such use (applied to the substance, rather than the consumer)? In other words, put the onus on the prosecution to provide evidence for the supposed harm being done, either to the individual or society?

What about a system of licensing (like for firearms) to control private use? Or are we saying that an ounce of cannabis resin is more dangerous than a shotgun? Surely there are smarter ways of going about this than applying a blanket ban on all forms of use.

Ever the intellectual, I read Ben Elton's High Society recently, and I find it very difficult to argue with the main character's views about legalisation (of all drugs for recreational use), apart from the problems associated with it being legal in one country but not others.

I'm still waiting for a grown-up debate about this - and in the meantime I can't even soothe my nerves without resorting to perfectly legal substances that do me all sorts of chemical harm.

I groggily reached out for the sleep button on my clock radio at 9:21 this morning (yet another jammy day off work thanks to teacher training) and after a few seconds came round enough to realise I was listening to Start The Week. There are occasions when they spout impenetrable "aren't I the clever one?" crap on these chatter shows, but I was rapt by pretty much everything that was said this morning.
I can listen to Shirley Williams all day any day, and Andrew Marr's other guests - David Frum, Eric Schlosser and Simon Baron-Cohen - were equally erudite. They had very differing views, but they all made sense (which is perhaps why I'm hopelessly LibDem). Not only that, they were talking about stuff that preoccupies a lot of my pseudo-intellectual rants. In the second half of the program that I heard, they covered:

cultural differences between the UK and the US
the part that religion plays in each of those cultures
the "free enterprise" economy of the US and how it exploits immigrant workers
the double standards applied to the US cannabis and porn industries

and a whole load of other stuff. If you can, I urge you to listen to the half-hour repeat at 9:30pm tonight, or better still the streamed audio (click on the link at the STW website), which is the full 45 minutes.

I just wish I could pick their brains some more.

Misty Moonset over Midsummer Common

This was taken at dawn just before Christmas. It looked as bleary as I felt.

I took some pictures from the top of the Beaubourg about 25 years ago, of a small Place full of newly-planted trees in their protective cages, throwing a beautiful pattern of diagonal shadows. Sadly those slides are lost. This picture (taken in Tenerife last year) captures a hint of the same pleasing symmetry.

"U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites"

I've just skimmed through this article in the Washington Post, with thanks to Avedon's Other Weblog.

As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites' organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.

Can the US Gummint really be that naïve? I can't put myself in the position of the Shi-ites, but maybe I can scale down the problem to a level I could imagine:
Let's say for a moment that I'm going about my normal daily life at home when, all of a sudden, thugs break in and hold me and my family hostage. They wreck the place, threaten us with extreme violence, and generally make life a living hell for us.
After many days, all of a sudden a Police SWAT team bursts in and, whilst they wreck a whole lot more of my stuff, they round up the thugs and cart them off to prison. I'm relieved, elated - I have an impromptu celebration with my liberators - handing out beers and cigars all round. I am incredibly grateful.
The question is: from then on, would I keep open house for all SWAT personnel? Would I envy their social habits and want to drop mine in favour of theirs? Would I aspire to become a SWAT officer myself?

Of course I bloody wouldn't. I'd want them to leave politely and let me get back to the life I had before the thugs arrived.

Cambridgeshire has a flat, boring landscape. This means that the land gets out of the way and gives us an unimpeded view of the sky. Sometimes it's like the Alps up there.

Practical Tips for Cyclists

The astute cyclist is always prepared for inclement weather. A handy tip, if you want to avoid uncomfortable damp patches on your trousers, is to keep your saddle dry with a simple plastic bag fastened over your saddle - like this Cambridge commuter I snapped last year.

Church Recruitment Campaign mired in controversy

The recent attempt by the Catholic Church to attract right-minded young men to the priesthood has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority, who are beginning to receive complaints from sharp-eyed parishioners concerning their recent foray into subliminal advertising. Theologians are studying a poster in the form of a stained-glass window for clues as to the intended message. Can you detect anything from this?

I took this picture towards the end of January. Winter skies have a quality all their own.

I'm pleased to report that as I look out of my window, I can see cattle grazing on Midsummer Common again. This is the first time they've been back since the Foot and Mouth epidemic, and I'm glad they haven't let the grazing rights lapse. Although I'm an out-and-out townie these days, it's comforting to see such things in the centre of the city - proper use being made of common land, and the looks on people's faces as their toddlers rampage through the piles of sweet-smelling poo.
Ahh - summer's on its way.

Paris in The The Spring

Just got back from a few days hard slog in Gaper Ree, to find this news about the end of the Innovation Catalogue - and civilisation as we know it.
OK, so I never actually bought anything from it, and don't know anyone else who did (although I have my suspicions about my late father-in-law's big electrically-heated double slipper), but am I the only person out there who secretly coveted some of those gadgets? Didn't you think it would be cool to have a clock that was as accurate as the radio "pips", and which automatically adjusted to the summer time change?
No? Just me then....

Metaphors from Student Essays

Just to counter the popular fiction that education is dumbing down, here are some examples that bode well for the future:

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two other sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a tumble dryer.
She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.
The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a paper bag filled with vegetable soup.
Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the centre.
Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55 mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the full stop after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
The thunder was ominous sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.
The red brick wall was the colour of a brick-red crayon.
Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.
The door had been forced, as forced as the dialogue during the interview portion of Family Fortunes.
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan might just work.
The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
"Oh, Jason, take me!" she panted, her breasts heaving like a student on 31p-a-pint night.
He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
Her artistic sense was exquisitely refined, like someone who can tell butter from "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."
She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.
The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Glenda Jackson MP in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Robin Cook MP, Leader of the House of Commons, in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the suspension of Keith Vaz MP.
The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a lamp-post.
The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free cashpoint.
The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.
It was a working class tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with their power tools.
He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a dustcart reversing.
She was as easy as the Daily Star crossword.
She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature British beef.
She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
Her voice had that tense, grating quality, like a first-generation thermalpaper fax machine that needed a band tightened.
It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.

Our Gift to the Oppressed

This article in the Grauniad, about the patenting by the Sony Corporation of the term "Shock and Awe™" just one day into the conflict, should serve to convince any Iraqi doubters of the merits of western democratic freedom. The freedom to register groups of words as a trademark, thus preventing anyone else from using them without paying for the privilege, is one that goes right to the heart of our culture. That this particular group of words symbolises diplomacy at its most crass, and reveals an almost adolescent sensibility towards the process of systematic destruction, lends a certain poetry to its final destination. After all, this whole jaunt has been little more than a virtual reality game for many US consumers from the start.

As Punt and Dennis said on the Now Show last week: generations ago, military campaigns were given codenames (Market Garden, Overlord) so that they could be discussed over vulnerable communication channels without their objective being revealed. These days they are given brand names which spell out, in the tritest possible way, the desired political spin. Can we expect the next bunfight (Syria? Iran?) to be called "Operation Sony Playstation 3" or "Operation Lockheed-Martin Kicks Ass, brought to you by MTV and Pepsi Max - the official beverage of the US Marine Corps. Go to the Max!"?

Just for the record - I thought of it first....

Not a corny title like "The Rhythm of Life"

Just been to see The BackBeat Quartet in concert. They had done an all-day percussion workshop with local schoolkids and rounded it off with this gig - supported by groups of the students (my son amongst them).
It was wonderful to see and hear such beauty being made simply by hitting things. It seems the more primitive the instument, the deeper the emotional impact - whether that emotion be joy, sadness or anger.
They also proved that you don't need masses of expensive classical gear to make art - just a spark of imagination, an ear for sounds and how they work, shedloads of talent, a sprinkling of wit, and no doubt countless hours of grinding practice. Their finale involved (between the four of them) four drumsticks, two tomtoms and two basketballs - and for their encore piece, they just hit parts of their own bodies to make the sounds. Scintillating stuff.

Off to bed now - got to get up at 3 (yes 3!) a.m. to drop my other son at school for his day-trip to Vimy Ridge.

There go my lofty intentions

The Best Optical Illusion... Ever!

Just as an experiment to see whether this image uploading thingy works:

If you don't believe it (and I didn't), cut a couple of strategically placed holes in a piece of thick paper to mask everything else out. If that still doesn't help, open it in photoshop and check the hue of squares A and B. It's just mindblowing.

For more, look here.

Update: Now that Iain's back on-line (thank God - we can call off the search helicopters now), I should give him credit for linking this first.

I read in my daily email from Channel Four News that the contracts for re-building the Iraqi oil-fields and the deep sea port at Umm Qasr have already been signed with American companies. Why am I not surprised?

Let's Celebrate America

*wipes away a tear*

What a beautiful sentiment. So restrained and classy.

My thanks go to Baz for this gift.

The Today program carried a report this morning about the imminent cull of hedgehogs on the Hebridean island of North Uist. Only in Britain, and possibly only on Radio 4 (and perhaps Newsround), would this compete for air-time with the war in Iraq.
OK, so I know that on the one hand they're cute, harmless balls of bristles with little scuttling legs and pointy noses, and on the other hand they do a useful job of eating slugs and other less-cuddly animals, but per-leeeze.

Are they an endangered species? No - we probably kill far more than the whole population of North Uist on Britain's roads every day.
Are they part of the established fauna of the island? No - they were introduced 30 years ago. The anti-cull lobby can equally argue that Snipe, Redshank and Lapwing aren't exactly rare treasures either, but I think they have the edge since the birds were there first.
Are they going to be hunted down and killed for sport? No.
Are they going to be inhumanely clubbed to death like those cuddly baby seals? No - they'll be trapped and lethally injected (the anti-cull campaign want to trap them too, but then transport them overseas to "safety").

The nub of the issue lies in the name of one of the organisations campaigning against the cull: St. Tiggywinkles Animal Hospital.
There seem to be two categories of animal: those about which lots of children's books have been written, and the rest. We've all grown up with images of Mrs. Tiggywinkle: little gingham apron tied round her ample waist, reading glasses perched on her snout. Nobody can remember any stories about Roddy Redshank or Sammy the Snipe's Egg.
To me the issue isn't the imminent slaughter of lots of cuddly toys, or the alternative of whisking them off to a hedgehog paradise (where they'll all grow old, whiskery and wise, and finally slip away peacefully in their sleep with their grandchildren round the foot of the bed) - the problem is the short-sightedness that introduced them to the island in the first place. They were brought there to get rid of pests, and they've now become a pest themselves - just another example of how we stupidly think we can solve a problem by intervening in Darwin's scheme of things.
Get rid of them as quickly and painlessly as possible, I say. Not by introducing rattlesnakes or komodo dragons, and not by "releasing" them into an environment somewhere else. Where-ever they would be taken would already have exactly the right number of hedgehogs appropriate to the conditions - a delicate balance between the amount of habitat and food available, the number of predators and the speed of local traffic. This balance would be restored in the long run, so any extra animals introduced would either have starved to death, been eaten by predators, got squashed under the wheels of a truck - or caused one their resident cousins to suffer that fate instead. I'd rather they went out on a morphine high.

Incidentally, I have to declare an interest in the plight of the birds whose eggs will be protected by this measure. I was out walking with friends at Wicken Fen last year. It was a beautifully still twilight in mid-May, full of birdsong. One of my friends, who is something of an ornithologist, pointed out a snipe performing its characteristic mating flight - vibrating its wings during a short dive to produce a throbbing sound like a distant Rolls Royce Merlin engine. He said "That's a snipe" and added, in his best David Attenborough voice, "which, of course, is an anagram of penis."

I've just shelled out some sponds to upgrade this blog to Pro Plus - so I can post photos and other stuff to it, and also make it look a bit snazzier. This should hopefully make it vaguely more interesting to visit. Given that I'm a complete novice when it come to this HTML stuff, don't be surprised if you never hear from me again...

Safe and Sound

Understandably the US media is going to town reporting the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch by US special forces. Here she is - young, female, badly wounded - saved from Saddam's clutches by a daring raid involving fire-fights, decoy ops, the lot. It seems that she had spent 9 days in captivity, and had 3 broken limbs and multiple gun-shot wounds. I can imagine agents all over Hollywood going ape-shit as I write this. I reckon it's going to be a toss-up between Mena Suvari and Christina Ricci.

Anyway, I read (towards the very end of this article) that some people had heard that there was a tip-off from someone else that she had limped to the hospital with just a gun-shot wound, and that whilst there she was tortured - the implication being that most of her injuries were sustained while in captivity. I find that very hard to believe, because if it were true it wouldn't be relegated to the closing paragraphs of the story. Imagine the propaganda value of such an outrage.

I suggest (and fervently hope) that she had actually been cared for sufficiently well to survive what sound to me to be life-threatening injuries. It would have been fairly straightforward for her captors to add another bullet-hole and turn to more pressing matters, so maybe decency still exists within the Axis of Evil. Perhaps I'm just an optimist.

A Milestone

I've just completed my first paid acting job.

OK, so it was only a tenner, and it was only a 20 minute two-hander in an intimate little "boite" in the basement of a cafe, but it was a biggie for me. Until now, my acting has been exclusively with Cambridge's foremost experimental drama group in situ: run by good friends Richard, Bella and Pete. I first took Richard's brilliant acting classes in '96/'97 and have enjoyed performing with them in weird and wonderful works based on Dante's Inferno, Bocaccio's Decameron, Shakespeare's Macbeth and other original devised pieces. For a nerdy geek like me it's been a revelation.

This latest job was a real departure for me. It was a last-minute thing, with people I didn't know, and with a conventional script I had to learn. I had to do an accent (my character was a flamboyant Brazilian), but the toughest job was trying to give the impression that he was saying things as he thought of them, and that was the biggest departure for me.

The work I've done with in situ: involved mainly improvised text, where what I said came from the situations my character found himself in - just like in real life. Whilst this may be anathema to most writers (since no-one actually writes anything), it connects so much more directly with the audience. I was really lucky that the piece I've just done was written in a natural, conversational style. Most written work is carefully crafted to convey masses of information, wit, emotion etc. in faultlessly eloquent prose. Characters take turns to speak in complete paragraphs, with beginnings, middles and ends, because that's the way a writer writes. The trouble is nobody actually speaks like that in real life. We pause, stumble, repeat, interrupt, lose our train of thought, fish for words, and generally bumble our way through conversations.

Because of this, I feel thrilled that people actually seemed to enjoy the piece. I've realised one of the biggest hurdles a conventional actor has to get over is the artifice of speaking someone else's words, and by all accounts I managed it.

Stone The Crows

Physics is Fun

How do things stay in orbit (round planets etc)?

Why is the Sky Blue?

Why does the sun look red when it rises and sets?

Dope on a rope

Start The Week

Misty Moonset over Midsummer Common

Lattice

"U.S. Planners Surprised by Strength of Iraqi Shiites"

Big Sky

Practical Tips for Cyclists

Church Recruitment Campaign mired in controversy

Sunset over Dulwich

Mooooo

Paris in The The Spring

Metaphors from Student Essays

Our Gift to the Oppressed

Not a corny title like "The Rhythm of Life"

There go my lofty intentions

The Best Optical Illusion... Ever!

Open for Business

Let's Celebrate America

Anthropomorphism

Oo-er!

Safe and Sound

A Milestone

Heard on Sky News last week