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.
amusements, food+drink, memes, people, pleasures

Listography – Inventions

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This week’s Listography is all about inventions. Specifically Inventions I Wish Were Real. Kate seems to think it’s easy. Huh?! No, I found this quite hard actually. But here are my five choices:

A Self-Cleaning House. Yep this was Kate’s first choice and I’ll go along with her on this. In fact I’d suggest that everything should be self-cleaning. Nothing (including us!) should be allowed on the market unless proven to be fully and properly self-cleaning. Instant improvement in just about everything.

An Off-Switch for Kids. I’ll go along with Kate’s second choice too. There has to be some way of silencing the plethora of screaming, whinging brats which infest everywhere. And while we’re at it let’s have an off-switch for the screaming and shouting parents too.

Zero Calorie Yummy Food. I like my food. I eat too much of it. So I get fat, very fat. We need a way to remove the calories from food without removing any of the texture, flavour, appearance and overall attractiveness of the food. Instant diet. What’s not to like?

Money Tree. Sorry, Kate, you can’t have the only one — I demand one as well. Why shouldn’t money grow on trees. Not just anyone’s trees. My trees. A guaranteed lottery win every week. Now that would change everything! Easy. Deliver me three today. Thank you.

Magic Carpets. Finally I want a magic carpet. Well better have several so I’m never without when they need servicing. Everyone should have a magic carpet. I’m not greedy. I don’t ask for teleportation. But a magic carpet that can transport you from anywhere here to anywhere there in no more than an hour. And without all the cost, effort and hassle of airports, check-in, buying tickets, hours on a plane or in a car or coach. Just be there in under and hour. You still get some fun from the travel with a fairly minimal investment of time.

And I haven’t even got round to thinking about instantly refreshing sleep, elastic walls to houses, the pause knob for time and non-puking cats.

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amusements, music

Carol Of The Belts

This has to be the most hilarious and ridiculous thing I’ve seen in ages. Ensure you’re sitting down and not drinking anything …

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDiXPx2OqPI&w=560&h=349]

music, people, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

Hmmm … doesn’t seem to be much happening in general this week, and that includes fodder for “Quotes of the Week”, so here’s only a short selection entitled “The Way Things Are” …

Science is a way to teach how something gets to be known, what is not known, to what extent things are known (for nothing is known absolutely), how to handle doubt and uncertainty, what the rules of evidence are, how to think about things so that judgements can be made, how to distinguish truth from fraud, and from show.
[Richard Feynman quoted in Lawrence M Krauss, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science]

The Beatles music is really some of the best music we’ve had in the last century. Children continue to rediscover the music, generation after generation. It’s like saying why is Gershwin timeless? Their music is part of history, it will last forever.
[Sir George Martin, the Beatles record producer]

There are two descriptions of reality: either reality is the bulk of spacetime surrounded by the boundary, or reality is the area of the boundary. So which description is real? There is no way to answer that. We can either think of an object as an object in the bulk space or think of it as a complicated, scrambled collection of information on the boundary that surrounds it. Not both. One or the other.
[Leonard Susskind; Scientific American; July 2011]

beliefs, science

Speeding Lemons

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I came across a very curious thing yesterday. The way in which we associate qualities with things and thus develop intuitive beliefs.

As an example, look at these two shapes.

If I tell you one is called Bouba and the other Kiki, you can probably intuitively know which is which. Yes, that’s right, apparently the vast majority of people will agree that Kiki is the star-like one and Bouba the more blobby one. No-one can tell you why they think this, though, beyond statements like “Bouba goes more appropriately with that shape”.

Nor can anthropologists yet agree why this is so. Although it seems it is something to do with belief systems, and may have some relationship to synaesthesia — that peculiar trait where people associate colours with words or smells with sounds: Monday is always red; the note C# always smells of rubber.

Let’s try another one.

Is a lemon fast or slow?

It’s a curious, almost nonsensical, question. But think about it for a minute … and most people will intuitively conclude that lemons are fast.

And for me (I have no other data on this) it seems possible to intuitively rank citrus fruit by speed: grapefruit are faster than oranges but slower than lemons, while limes are faster than lemons.

WTF?!

Find out more about such intuitive beliefs and synaesthesia.

beliefs, books, memes, pleasures, thoughts, topographical

Listography – Travelling

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Unlike me, many who responded to last week’s listography about decision they’re glad they made included some item of travel. So this week Kate is asking us to nominate five places we would still like to visit.

For me this is quite easy as I have some places I know I would like to see. But it is sad because I know I likely never will see most of them: I don’t much like the actual travelling to get to these places (too much stress) and at 60 and living on my pension I’m unlikely to be able to make myself afford (even if fit enough) the cost of getting there. Quite a number of the places I won’t visit on principle because of their lack of respect for the environment or the people. But leaving all that aside, here is my choice of five places I would love to see.

Japan. I find Japan a fascinating country. I’d really love to see all those Buddhist, Taoist and Shinto temples; Kanamara Matsuri, the annual Shinto fertility “Festival of the Phallus”; the koi carp farms; the unspoilt mountainous country; zen gardens; Mount Fuji; and the bullet train. What a photographic experience it would be. We have friends in Japan, so we should be able to do this easily; and as our friends are in topical Okinawa islands we’d get some great music and wonderful beaches too. But I won’t go to Japan on principle because of their intransigent stance on whaling. And I don’t much relish a 12-14 hour flight.

Iceland. Land of glaciers, volcanoes, geysers and geothermal hot water. The country looks frighteningly beautiful; Earth in the raw; new land still very much being built by plate tectonics. Visiting should be easily achievable (there are endless package tours) and a wonderful photographic experience, but again it’s a land I won’t visit because of the whaling issue.

Norway. Like Kate I’d love to see the Aurora Borealis. The midnight sun. The fjords. And to go to Hell. (Yes, there really is a place called Hell). And Noreen has friend who lives on a tiny island off the south coast. Again it should be easily achievable. But again it is off-limits for me because of the whaling. (Why is it that my top three picks are all off-limits because of whaling? It really wasn’t designed that way!) Although we could achieve a lot of that by visiting (friends in) Sweden; which we might yet manage — at least do keep talking about going to Sweden!

Tibet. It must be one of the poorest countries on Earth, but it’s hard to find out because it has been assimilated into China. But it’s a land of rugged mountains, high plateaus and curiously interesting Buddhist monasteries. But it is another place I’m unlikely ever to visit: it is so hard to get to and I won’t go on principle because of the way China has occupied it and largely destroyed the culture and the people. Again it would be just such a wonderful photographic experience. One really should have done this when young and fit.

The Amazon. I’d love to see the Amazonian fishes and parrots (not to mention Jaguars) in the wild. And for once I have no moral objections to going there other than tourism beginning to impact the environment, although nowhere nearly on the scale of Africa. Again I can’t help feeling this is travel one should have done when young and fit.

So they’re the five places I’d probably most like to visit. But there are so many others which should be more achievable: Bruges, Kyle of Lochalsh, Ireland, Italy, the pyramids, the Alhambra, ride the Orient Express, travel from Thurso/Wick to Penzance by train, Scilly Isles.

So much to do, and so little time to achieve it.

current affairs, medical, natural history, science

Foxy Magnetism

As one of those filial duties I pay for my mother’s subscription to BBC Wildlife magazine, and once she’s read it my mother passes the copies to me. So it was that last evening I was reading the May 2011 issue and came across this amazing report of foxes using the earth’s magnetic field. I hope I might be forgiven for reproducing the short news item here as it doesn’t otherwise appear to be online.

Magnetic foxes

Scientists reveal the otherworldly talents of red foxes.

The hunting skills of the red fox Vulpes vulpes are out of this world — literally. According to new work, this hunter taps into the cosmos to pinpoint prey.

The fox feeds mostly on small mammals such as mice and voles, and has a clever way of going about it. It often performs what is called mousing — leaping high into the air in an arc and landing on unsuspecting prey from above. Remarkably, it can pull this off in 1m-high grass (or, in winter, snow of that depth). It’s assumed that, under these conditions, the fox relies solely on hearing to locate its quarry.

But when a team led by Hynek Burda, from the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, scrutinised the hunting habits of wild foxes at various locations in the Czech Republic, they noted a peculiar trend: hunters tended to catch dinner most often when they were facing north. This was especially true if their prey was snuggled under vegetation or snow – the foxes then had a 75 per cent hit rate with north-facing strikes. Attacks in all other directions were mostly futile.

What’s so special about looking north? The researchers believe that the foxes use the Earth’s magnetic field to home in on prey.

Some other mammals, and also birds, are known to sense magnetic north — and some are thought to actually see it, when looking northward, as a bright (or dark) patch in their field of vision — a little like a sunspot in a camera lens — due to special receptors in their eyes. If foxes have this ability, they could use its fixed position to gauge their distance to prey.

Think of it as a circle of light from a headlamp aimed, say, 1m in front of your feet. No matter where you go, the circle is always 1m ahead. Thus, a northward-facing fox that has located prey with its hearing needs only to creep forward until that location is within the circle of light. At that point, it knows it’s exactly 1m away. All that’s left to do is pounce.

It’s the first evidence of an animal using the Earth’s magnetic field as a hunting tool.

Animal Magnetism
» This is the first case of an animal using the Earth’s magnetic field to judge distance rather than direction.
» Except for jump direction, no other factor — from an animal’s age/sex to the season, wind direction or time of day — affected the observed pattern.
» Animals that sense magnetic north probably also sense magnetic south to a degree. Indeed, 60 per cent of fruitful attacks that were not northward faced due south. Overall, 90 per cent were along the north-south axis.
» Cattle and deer tend to line up along the north-south axis – except near high-voltage power lines that disrupt the field.
» When foxes could see their prey they had success in all directions.

memes, personal

Ten Things – June

Number 6 in my monthly series of “Ten Things” for 2011. Each month I list one thing from each of ten categories which will remain the same for each month of 2011. So at the end of the year you have ten lists of twelve things about me.

  1. Something I Like: Roses
  2. Something I Won’t Do: Wear Jacket and Tie on Holiday
  3. Something I Want To Do: Have a Nudist Holiday
  4. A Blog I Like: Aetiology
  5. A Book I Like: John Guillim, A Display of Heraldrie
  6. Some Music I Like: Carl Orff, Carmina Burana
  7. A Food I Like: Avocado
  8. A Food or Drink I Dislike: Green Tea
  9. A Word I Like: Vespiary
  10. A Quote I Like: The covers of this book are too far apart. [Ambrose Bierce]
quotes

Quotes of the Week

This week’s collection seems to be a slightly skew-ways look at people …

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed be doing at that moment.
[Robert Benchley]

I grew convinc’d that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.
[Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin]

Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
[George Carlin]

We are each of us angels with only one wing, and we can only fly by embracing one another.
[Lucretius]

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
[HL Mencken]

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but can not remember her age.
[Robert Frost]

… isolated cabins on chilly mountains, whose only mark on history is to be the incredibly ordinary place where something extraordinary started to happen. Often there is no more than a little plaque to reveal that, against all gynaecological probability, someone very famous was born halfway up a wall.
[Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites]

You’re not 40, you have 06:00 with 22 years of experience.
[Anonymous]