Sunrise yesterday, Tuesday 17 January, over west London as seen from our study window.

Click the image for a larger version
For those familiar with the Greenford area that’s Horsenden Hill just peeking over the houses on the right.
Links to a selection of the curious and interesting items you may have missed in the last week or so.
Do You Have Free Will? How can we know?
Heroes of the Hot Zone: pen portraits of some of the guys who are trying to clean up Fukushima.
Waterstones ditches apostrophe. English must be under threat when a bookshop ignores good grammar and makes it’s possessive Waterstones’s which is worse!
OK, here’s one for the mathematicians out there: 153 and narcissistic numbers. I want to know how they’ve proved what the biggest such number is.
Here are some seriously stunning 100 year old colour photographs of Russia (see right).
Difficult to work out here who is the madder: Amish men jailed over reflective triangle dispute.
Cats occasionally like all sorts of unsuitable things. Apparently some even like mushrooms.
And finally, just to prove it is worth goig to the gym … Scientists name rare horse fly after Beyonce “in honour of its impressive golden behind”.
I’m glad that Kate’s Listography this week has eschewed the temptation to ask about our New Year Resolutions — if only because I don’t believe NYRs!
No, this week Kate has asked us to choose our five favourite photos of 2011 from amongst those we’ve taken. This I like! I could easily do a lot more than five. So I decided that I’d give you my five favourite 2011 flower photographs from my Flickr photostream.
1. Crocuses (taken in our garden in February)
2. Jonquil (taken in our garden in March)
3. Peony (taken at Kew Gardens in May)
4. Hebe (taken in our garden in July)
5. Hollyhock (taken in Chipping Norton in September)

The Peony and the Crocuses appeared in my photobook (see on the right).
Enjoy!
![[52/52] Self-Portrait with Cat](https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7170/6587602401_b36c6c6e0d.jpg)
This is the final week of my 2011 52 weeks challenge of a photograph a week, and I thought I should end with a self-portrait. So here I am with Harry the Cat enjoying some quality time.
I’ve now done two years worth of “52 weeks” so it’s time to take a break from it and find something else to make me keep taking photos. There is no escape!