I’ve just posted the latest series of pictures from our trip to Germany in February. This set are all of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn which runs above the streets and the Wupper river for about 8 miles (13km). Apart from one in a German theme park, this is the only public suspended monorail in the world. More information in the Schwebebahn Wuppertal item on Wikipedia. And the full set of photos is at www.flickr.com/photos/kcm76/sets/72157604071758017/ — they’re not brilliant pix, more for illustrative purposes than intended to be arty, but hopefully interesting for those who like curiosities or railways..
All posts by Keith
Infinitely Boggling Science
Time to catch up on some Scientific American articles I’ve read over the last few weeks.
Remembrance of Things Future
An interesting article on how a writer in December 1900 thought things would be a century later. As expected some right:
- ready cooked meals will be bought from the equivalent of bakeries
- no street cars (ie. trams) in large cities
but mostly wrong:
- mosquitoes, flies, rats and mice will have been exterminated
- the alphabet will not longer contain C, X and Q
- all traffic will be below ground, consequently
- cities will be free of noise
- Nicaragua and Mexico would be part of the USA
Full article
Complete list of original predictions
Infinity
Hard question of the year: Does infinity come in different sizes?
Hard answer: Yes.
This back-page “Fact or Fiction” article from January’s Scientific American contains some interesting insights, and some interesting mathematical sleights of hand. We probably all accept that there are an infinite number of integers (the natural numbers 1, 2, 3 …). And between each pair of adjacent integers there are an infinite number of fractional numbers (2.1, 2.11, 2.111, 2.112112 …). That means there are infinity to the power infinity real numbers (natural numbers and fractions) – which is an infinitely different ball-game in terms of defining the size of infinity.
Full article
Love, Sex and Robots
Finally an item from the March Scientific American which considers the proposition that we might one day (soon) be able to have a relationship with, marry and even have sex with, a robot of the opposite sex. Scary? Probably for most of us. Fantasy? Probably not. After all go back 100 years and the idea of male homosexual marriage was absurd. Apparently there is a lot to be said for allowing the socially inept [my phrase] to gain some mutual comfort from a relationship with a robot. And there are already experiments showing that children (at least) will spontaneously treat a robot as (almost) sentient, for example by putting it to bed when its batteries run flat. I see the arguments, but I remain firmly skeptical.
Full article
Watch Our Backs, Mate
I’m still working through the photographs I took on holiday in German a few weeks ago. I’ve put the latest few online on Flickr. Some of the shots are pretty grainy (like this one) as they were taken in absolutely appalling light — in the case of this shot it was very grey and overcast and getting on towards dusk. Lots more to come which I intend to put up about 8-10 at a time over the next few weeks — and I’m keeping the best of the steam train shots ’til last (probably). I still have some 30% of the shots to look at in detail.
Thinking
Thinking, originally uploaded by kcm76.
Apologies for the long silence here; I’ve had a very hectic 3 weeks: a week’s holiday in Germany (pictures here with many more to come; I’m still working my way through the 1000 shots I took!), a business trip to the enticements of Manchester, a really filthy headcold and mountains of work. But with luck normal service will be resumed RSN.
I actually took a day off work today, and apart from a doctor’s appointment, I’ve done almost nothing. The most creative enterprise of the day is this self-portrait. It really is about all I’ve got to show for the day!
I have Monday off as well, so if the weather is good I might take myself off on a photographic trip somewhere. If I can get myself out of the sloth of lying in bed that is. 🙂
QED
I came across this book today.
Unintended Consequences
The Law of Unintended Consequences is alive and well! Diary of a Nudist has blogged about the reaction to recent attempts to clamp down on perceived indecent images. In two cases, ABC being fined for showing female buttocks before the watershed (see here and here) and the charging of a store for using almost revealing photographs (see here), the result has been that the images in question are now far more widely spread that they otherwise would have been. Moreover some parts of the US are also cocking a snook at their “stripper” laws. Such activity is always one of the possible outcomes of censorship. Great that the officious have had their bluff called. Let’s keep it up chaps and expose this stupidity for what it is!
Open Government
There’s an excellent short post over at Evolving Thoughts which succinctly addresses the need for open government. In fact it is so good I’m going to quote the key two paragraphs here:
Whenever a government […] wants to be free from oversight, the motivation, whether they are aware of it or not, is empire building and control. No government activity, not even those pertaining to that hold-all of rights denial, national security, should automatically be free from supervision. Democracy only works when government is done in the open. Otherwise it simply becomes a matter of who can rort the system most effectively, as we see with the Bush administration today.
No special powers are required to prevent terrorism, just good old fashioned police work. No special acts of parliament are needed to prosecute them, for insurgency and murder are already crimes. And no special politicians are needed to “lead us out of this mess”, because either every political authority can do this, or we have no hope. And a democratic government, legislature or judiciary knows this already, and will act to protect our rights in a time of stress.
Precisely what I’ve been saying for years.
Going to the Dogs
Going to the dogs is what a lot of children in Shropshire might be doing today. Why? Because Shropshire County Council have apparently closed a lot of schools today because it might snow later in the day. For heaven’s sake what are these people on? We now have disruption because it might snow – not even because it’s the wrong type of snow.
In my school days (1956-1969) school was never closed, and, unlike now, we were guaranteed snowfall every winter. Even during the very bad winter of 1962-63 my school didn’t close. For almost the whole of that winter term we had up to 2″ (5 cm) of ice on our playground, but school never closed; we came very close to being sent home (within 2-3 hours) as we were running out of heating oil but were saved by the arrival of a tanker at the 11th hour. Boo! Hiss!
How have we got to the situation where things are shut down “because it might snow”?
Mammal Senses
There was an interesting article in last week’s New Scientist about the strange anatomy of the brain. It contained this quote:
No matter how bizarre a vertebrate is, it receives only three types of incoming sensory data: chemical (smell and taste), electromagnetic (light, and electric and magnetic fields) and movement (touch and sound).
I’d never quite looked at it this way before, but of course it is right. The only bit I don’t understand is what organ we use to detect electric and magnetic fields. Maybe we don’t. Maybe this is the preserve only of pigeons, which have been shown to have lodestone like sensors in their brains. Interesting though.
US TV Network Fined $1.4m for Nudity
BBC News reports that US television network ABC may have to pay a fine of $1.4m for the 2003 screening of an episode of NYPD Blue which depicted female nudity before the watershed. What was so offensive? Multiple close-up views of a woman’s buttocks.
Pleeaase! How pathetic can this get? Get a life!