All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
personal

Five Questions, Series 5 #2

So here I’ll give you an answer to the second of the Five Questions in Series 5 that I posed at the beginning of the month.


Question 2: Describe your fantasy girl.
Oh dear. Whatever I say I’m on a hiding to nothing here, being married (for half a lifetime) as I am! And also knowing that Mrs M will read this.
I suppose I could just hide behind the old response to this question: Come naked, bring beer”! For as Tiffany Madison says in Black and White:

It is assured that men of all ages imagine a woman naked when they first meet.

Which is not entirely true, though I’m sure for many not far from the truth.
But maybe I’d better be a bit more open, although to tell the truth I’m not at all sure I can conjure up an ideal girl. There are just so many variables and so much is down not to looks but to personality and even that simply unknown chemistry.
Mia SolisWhat sort of things to I find attractive physically?
Pale ginger hair and freckles is a good start. Blonde can be good although I’ve noticed over the years I seem to think more generally of brunettes.
Small perky breasts. Yes, really. Unlike most men (or at least what most men will tell you) I have never been one for big tits.
Average (or slightly above) height. I don’t go for very tall girls, or for very long legs — somehow they always seem to be out of proportion.
Slim figure but not thin. I hate the half-starved look.
But possibly more important is personality.
I like my girls intelligent and amusing; they need to share my warped sense of humour and be able to hold a meaningful conversation.
Sharing (at least some) interests makes things work well too.
Good in bed? Well yes, that’s good too.
And of course on top of that there is the indefinable chemistry that some how makes it work, or not. No, I don’t understand it and I don’t think anyone does.
How does this match up with Mrs M?
That, as they say, is for me to know and you to find out. So, no, I’m not going to tell you.
Ultimately the mental can (and, arguably for a successful relationship, should) outweigh physical looks and even practical skills. Besides, as I imply above, I think the whole thing is down to chemistry, which at rock bottom will overpower both the physical and the mental. Why else would we succumb to lust and the erotic? As Jean-Luc Godard allegedly observed:

Eroticism is consenting to live.

food+drink, uncategorized

Milky Bar Waste

A few days ago diamond geezer wrote about the amount of milk which gets wasted in cafés, restaurants etc. when one orders tea (or in some places coffee).
Milk appears in a jug which almost always contains far more milk than one will ever need in tea, even if you are of the “half a cup of weak tea with half a cup of milk” persuasion.
(It doesn’t work so well for coffee as the barista is often adding the milk as part of the coffee-making process.)
I’m not like that — I dislike milk — preferring my tea strong and with a minimum of milk. Typically I put no more than a thimbleful of milk in a cup of tea. I’m the same with coffee on the rare occasions I drink it.


When I was working I used to buy tea from the in-house coffee bar. I’d order a large strong tea with just a splash of milk. The staff soon learnt that my splash of milk was just that, they went “plop” with the milk jug and that was enough. As a system that worked well as the staff dispensed the milk.
But go to one of the ever increasing choice of coffee bars and order tea. More often than not it comes with a jug of milk. A few days ago we were in a central London Costa Coffee and having time to kill I had a pot of tea, and then another. Each pot of tea held just one cup (which I consider a little mean) and was served automatically with a tiny jug of milk — about an eggcup amount. Even after two pots of tea I had still used only half the first jug of milk. There’s good odds that as a consequence 1½ jugs of milk were thrown away, as food hygiene rules say that once served food cannot be reused. OK that’s partly my fault as I should have thought to decline the jug of milk with the second pot of tea.
Indeed decline milk is what we often do. When we do our supermarket shop (usually early on Friday morning) we always stop in Waitrose’s café for a drink and a bacon roll to fortify us for the fight ahead. I have a pot of tea and Noreen has plain filter coffee. Each comes with a jug of milk. But we always say “one milk between us is enough”; and it is — my two thimblefuls for my two cups of tea and Noreen’s generous addition to her coffee and there is usually still a dribble left in the jug.
Yes, jugs of milk are a good; they allow us to control the amount of milk we each want in our tea/coffee. And they are infinitely preferable to the horrid little plastic pots of milk, the quality of which always seems dubious because who knows what’s been done to the contents.
Individually we are talking about small quantities of milk. But as diamond geezer says, multiply that across every customer and every coffee outlet and we are wasting horrendous amounts of milk. And even if everyone doubled the amount of milk they took in tea or coffee we would still be wasting huge amounts.
Please can we get places to dispense less milk? Ultimately it will save them money!
And while we’re at it can we please ban hot milk as well?

words

Words: Absorb and Adsorb

Absorb and Adsorb are two easily confused verbs which scientifically decribe different interactons.
Absorb
1. To swallow up.
2. To engross, or completely engage, the attention or faculties.
3. To suck in, drink in a fluid; to imbibe.
4. To take up by chemical or molecular action.
Absorption is essentially a macroscopic level effect.
Compare this with …
Adsorb
1. To undergo or cause to undergo a process in which a substance (often a gas) accumulates on the surface of a solid forming a thin film, often only one molecule thick. Mostly used in Chemistry and often descriptive of molecular level catalytic processes where a reaction is enhanced with one molecule sticking to the surface of the catalyst.
There is more than a subtle difference here. Note the use of the Latin prefixes ab- off, away, and ad- to, onto, towards.
Think of it this way in everyday terms: A sponge absorbs water, whereas a sticking plaster is adsorbed onto the skin. Alternatively, the man eats the pie (absorption) or the pie sticks to the man’s face (adsorption).

beliefs, books, science

Book Review

John Conway, CM Kosemen, Darren Naish
Cryptozoologicon, The Biology, Evolution and Mythology of Hidden Animals, Volume I
(Irregular Books, 2013)

This is strange book. It is one I wanted to read and I was given a copy for Christmas. It sounded as if it would be interesting.
What the authors set out to do, and they are up front about stating this, is to look at some of the myths of strange animals unrecorded by science and then to look at how plausible the myths are and what the animal might be. They write a couple of pages about each of the 28 creatures they choose. All of which is fine, if eccentric.
What they then go on to do is to speculate wildly about history, evolution and taxonomy of each creature as if it were real. They do say repeatedly that what they are indulging in is speculation, but they acknowledge that it will be misinterpreted by the wilfully minded.
As they say on the cover blurb:

Cryptozoologicon is a celebration of the myths, legends, evolution and biology of hidden animals. Always sceptical, but always willing to indulge in speculative fun, Cryptozoologicon aims to provide a new way to approach cryptozoology: as fictional biology.

And in their Introduction:

For each cryptid, our entries consist of three sections. We consider it important that people understand exactly what we have done. In the first section of text, we briefly review what people have said beforehand about the given cryptid. We refer to the key accounts and describe what the creature is supposed to look like.
In the second section, we present an evaluation of the reports, make a conclusion about the identity of the given cryptid, and decide whether the accounts refer to a real creature or not. Given that we have included quite a range of mystery animals in our book — some of which are fairly ridiculous and others of which have essentially been debunked — our conclusions range from the open-ended to the “case closed” type.
Finally, we include a third section of text in which we deliberately jump onto the bandwagon of speculation, and wax lyrical about the identity, evolution and biology of the cryptid concerned, tongue firmly planted in cheek.

Yeah, “fictional biology” is about the size of it. I had hoped that it might present some interesting new evidence for something. It doesn’t.
And I had hoped that even if it didn’t the book might be amusing. It isn’t that either.
I found it tedious beyond belief. There is nothing here except a regurgitation of the already known myths and their debunking with some wildly speculative and very tedious fiction. The text is extremely dull; not especially poorly written just unimaginative and not sparkling. On top of that I dislike the large colour illustrations; that’s down to their style rather than content; for me they didn’t add a great deal.
The book could, indeed should, have been interesting; and this could have been done with very little extra effort.
For me this book just didn’t work. I found it incredibly tedious and in fact gave up reading attentively no more than half way through and skipped through the remainder.
Unless you have to read this book for some reason, frankly I’d give it a miss.
Overall Rating: ★☆☆☆☆

amusements, food+drink

Oddity of the Week: Penguin

Penguin eggs were relished by the Vicomte de Mauduit:

Penguin eggs: greenish white … about the size of a turkey’s, should be eaten hard-boiled, cold with a salad. To hard-boil them takes about three-quarters of an hour; when shelled, the whites appear like pale green jelly … they are as delicious to the taste as they are attractive to the eye.
[The Vicomte in the Kitchen; 1933]


Penguin meat itself was served up by John Thompson, cook on Captain Cook’s first expedition to the Southern Ocean (1768-71); Cook described the flesh as “reminiscent of bullock’s liver”.

links

Your Interesting Links

Anther catch-up on items you may have missed.
If you were a medieval, what would you have called your dog or cat? No probably not Beyoncé!
Apparently dogs are sensitive to small variations of the Earth’s magnetic field. So sensitive apparently that they tend to prefer to shit in a N-S direction.


How do you get primary school kids interested in science? Grow the bugs they’re carrying around in their lunch boxes and on teacher’s shoes. Brilliant piece of science engagement from Rob Dunn’s group!
Feed a Cold and Starve a Fever. So we’ve always been told. Not so much, apparently.
The UK government are suggesting cutting down ancient woodlands to build new houses as long as the developers plant 100 trees for every one cut down. Who thought of this stupidity? The biodiversity of ancient woodland is not the same as any number of saplings. Gawdelpus.
So why was Tutankhamun mummified with an erection?
Following on from our link last time to George Orwell on British food, here he is on making tea.
So piranhas will destroy you at the slightest provocation. Well actually no, they won’t.
Christmas food is always tastier than food usually is. Is it? Or is it our perception? Why?
Making New Year’s resolutions is almost a guarantee of failure. So why do we do it, and why do they fail so often.
So just don’t tell other people how they should think. Right!?
OK, so open plan offices are inefficient and irritating. What kept you guys? We knew this 40 years ago!
So what price David Cameron’s great porn firewall now?
The globe is losing ice. But emerging from the wreckage there is a plethora of archaeology.
So 2,300 years ago the ancient Chinese had a decimal ready reckoner. Is there anything they didn’t invent two millennia before us?
Just ignore it, it might go away. How we are almost completely blind to the fact that we’ve actually not solved any of our catastrophic problems. Well actually, I’m not blind to them but politicians etc. are and it’s they who matter in this.
Allergic to eggs? Why not try ice-cream made with blood instead? What do you mean “Yeuch!”? It’s only black pudding!
So why does it go quiet when there’s snow falling? No, it seems absorption isn’t the answer.
How long does it take you to get a crab out of a jar? Here’s an octopus that can do it in under a minute! It takes me that long to read the “best before” date.

And on playing animals, the crow family are the champions of the avian world, and maybe up there with primates. Cunning, devious and fun-loving. What’s not to like?
And finally, wow! Have a peek inside the world’s largest cave, Son Doong Cave in Vietnam. Stunning!

photography

Weekly Photograph

This week I think it’s about time we had another round of pussy porn. So here are a few more recent shots of Tilly, who has now grown into a lovely small cat.
First up, here she is guarding my desk over Christmas to ensure that no work is done.

Slick any of the images for larger views on Flickr
Desk Guard
Desk Guard
December 2013, Greenford

And now two from this weekend. While enjoying a patch of sunshine on my desk (I swear that cats are solar powered!) Tilly decide it was time for a wash and brush up.
You Wanted Me for Something?
You Wanted Me for Something?
January 2014, Greenford
My these paws do taste good!
My these paws do taste good!
January 2014, Greenford

You would never think from these demure poses that she was an absolute little varmint! She’ll take almost anything she can carry as contraband to spear around the house; she specialises in pieces of paper, socks and her fish supper.

ramblings, thoughts

Five Questions, Series 5 #1

2 Comments

OK, so here we go with an answer to the first of the Five Questions in Series 5 that I posed about a week ago.


Question 1: What is time?
Well from a technical, scientific, point of view if I knew the answer I would have a Nobel Prize. Yes, this is one of the most intransigent, but most important, questions in the whole of physics. The answer is critically inter-related with our understanding of the whole of cosmology and the structure of the universe. If we knew exactly what time was, and why it appears to move only in one direction, we would likely have a theory of everything. Yes, scientifically it is that important. But despite the best efforts of the best brains in theoretical physics, we basically have very few clues.
At a more prosaic level there are all sorts of constructs around what time is. One of the best that I can come up with is that it is an artificial construct for distinguishing past, present and future in a vaguely, but also artificially, quantum way.
At an everyday level we divide time into years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds. All are essentially artificial, although years, months and days do have a more or less tight relationship with astronomical events. But weeks, hours, minutes and seconds are essentially arbitrary and historic divisions of time. Why are there 24 hours in a day, and not 10, 20, 25 or 100? And one can ask a similar question of weeks, minutes and seconds.
And essentially, non-scientifically, we treat these divisions of time in a quantum-ish sort of way. Either a second has passed or it hasn’t. Although we know that these time divisions are not really quantised at all. If they were we would never be able to time the 100m dash in the way we do.
That doesn’t mean that time cannot be quantised. Physicists think it may well be quantised, but at a much finer level that we can currently measure, ie. with quanta smaller than 10-15 seconds.
But time is even stranger than that. Scientists tell us that time ticks along at an absolutely constant rate, which is what our clocks tell us. But maybe this is only because scientists have defined it that way? And so our measuring systems reflect that.
At a very personal level we know that time does not progress linearly. Some mornings we get up, shower, dress, breakfast and are ready to leave for work at 7.30. Other days we do exactly the same only to find that it’s 8.00 and we’re half an hour late. We’ve all experienced this. We know intuitively that time does not pass at a constant rate.
How can this be? We don’t know. Some think this is a function of the way our brains work. But is it not at least possible — though scientists will deny this — that time really is non-linear and somehow these imperfections are embedded deep in the underlying structure of the cosmos? Well who knows? But quantum effects have found equally strange and unexpected effects.
So then, what is time? Well only God (who or whatever he or she may or may not be) knows. And she’s not telling us!
I’ll leave you with a couple of thoughts from greater luminaries than me:

Some people are old at 18 and some are young at 90 … time is a concept that humans created.
[Yoko Ono]

To us, the moment 8:17 AM means something — something very important, if it happens to be the starting time of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance — did not even exist. In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.
[Aldous Huxley]