Category Archives: ramblings

personal, ramblings

Screwing Up the Time Zone

Apologies for the silence, excepting the usual regular posts. No excuses; I just plead life (ie. too much to do) getting in the way. But onward to today’s topic …

So today is one of the two days a year, when we bugger up our time zone – something I’ve written about before in 2008, 2009 and 2012 and probably elsewhere.

Yes, last night the UK switched to British Summer Time and put the clocks forward an hour.

Why? For no good reason that I can understand, and contrary to a lot of scientific research.

Basically what this change does is to mirror the effect of jet lag from flying east. And we know this is much more disruptive than flying west.

But it’s more than that. The disruptions to our circadian cycle can be profound, and possibly last for weeks. This should be worrying when nationally and globally we appear to be more sleep short, and with worse quality sleep, compared with pre-Covid (see, inter alia, here).

There’s a recent short article in The Conversation which summarises much of the evidence on the effects on our circadian cycle. The conclusion is:

These findings suggest the spring transition can have a ripple effect that lasts for weeks. It also suggests we are more finely tuned to the natural world than we might think.

Spring DST may seem like a simple one-hour shift, but for many, it’s much more than that.

We don’t need to keep changing the clocks. We’re not (yet) at war – which is where the clock change originated – and we have much of the technology to manage our working environments; extending, if necessary, to changing the hours we do work.

This whole charade is daft on just so many levels – see my earlier posts.

current affairs, ramblings

Leadership

James Timpson (Chief Executive of the Timpson Group, Chancellor of Keele University, Chair of Prison Reform Trust) has been appointed Minister for Prisons, Parole and Probation in Sir Kier Starmer’s administration.** It is excellent that the new PM is appointing people who have some knowledge of what their departments are supposed to be about.

Even better is the fact that Timpson (who, by the way gets a peerage to be able t be a minister) also knows something about leadership and management – a skill which recently appears to have been woefully lacking. A couple of years ago he posted his guiding principles online, and of course the internet has just resurrected them.

handwritten note
Click the image for a larger view

We need a lot more of the appointment of specialists and people who know how to manage. Now let’s have it applied throughout the NHS.

** I was going to say “government” but I was once ticked off by the late Lord Gowrie for this usage. The administration is the monarch’s government, not the Prime Minister’s.

photography, ramblings

Bits of Spring

It was actually sunny today, on and off, although quite windy. And Spring is definitely beginning to burst out all over. So I thought we’d have a few quick snapshots caught between gusts of breeze.

a single yellow celandine flower
The early celandines are still flowering; there’s a goods scattering
all across the garden (which shows how wet our garden is).
[Click the image for a larger view]
a single yellow dandelion
Of course there is also a good crop of golden dandelions
coming along for the early bees.
[Click the image for a larger view]
bright pink blossom all over our ballerina apple tree
Our columnar “ballerina” ornamental crab apple tree has been a mass
of bright pink flower for the last week.
[Click the image for a larger view]
delicate white & pink blossom on the Pinova apple tree
Meanwhile the Pinova eating apple has burst into bloom;
I’ve no great hopes of a good crop as there seem to be no pollinating
insects abroad and the compatible Falstaff tree is only just starting to flower.
[Click the image for a larger view]
how did this deconstructed bird feeder end up in the middle of the lawn?
Strangest of all, how did this deconstructed bird feeder get from
it’s hanger to the middle of the lawn?
The fox was seen on the trail camera playing with it one night,
but I can’t think a fox managed to get up and dislodge it.
[Click the image for a larger view]
personal, ramblings

Meta Dreams

Now that was weird. In my waking dream this morning I dreamt that I was dreaming.

It started off all about dressmaking/tailoring shears! In my inner dream I was thinking about, and I think seeing, some (female) colleagues buying older-style, heavy dressmaking shears, and how the trim on the handles and blades was in various different colours; and why would they be different colours, was there some underlying reason apart from personal choice. The colours involved were gold and a turquoise-green. They were a bit like the ones below, only black enamelled with coloured decoration, much like an old Singer sewing machine.

a pair of large tailors shears

On coming up a level I met some of the same colleagues using said shears, and was telling them about the dream I’d had about them, and the colours of the shears. They didn’t know any reason for the different colours. They seemed to be using their shears to remove pills from woollen fabric.

The dream then went on to me leaving work – finally leaving after having retired and returned as a contractor – and clearing out my desk/cupboards. There were several colleagues involved – some identifiable, some not – and a variety of locations including my childhood home and an office I worked in 30+ years ago. Plus some convoluted nonsense with Payroll/HR.

Like all dreams it was highly convoluted, and many of the details have now escaped.

But I don’t recall ever having had a dream within a dream before. It wasn’t lucid in that I couldn’t control it and didn’t know I was dreaming. Just weird.

environment, ramblings

On Paper Tissues

Having had a filthy cold twice in recent weeks (no, not Covid, either time) I fell to thinking about the resilience of paper tissues and their propensity (or not) to fall apart when wet.

Tissue-type paper (the sort that’s designed for personal use) that we generally encounter seems to come in four basic qualities:

  • Paper Hand Towels (as in many communal toilets)
  • Kitchen Roll
  • Tissues (eg. your bog standard Kleenex)
  • Toilet Roll

Their robustness when wet depends on the quality of the paper, and the length of the fibres from which they’re made. The longer the fibres, the more robust the final product.

While paper can be recycled up to seven times, it can’t be recycled infinitely. Eventually the fibres become too short to cling together and just have to be composted. The shortest fibres go into packaging like corrugated cardboard, egg boxes and toilet roll. Remember, the shorter the fibres the less robust the paper.

You can demonstrate this for yourself next time you have a runny nose. Wipe your nose on a paper hand towel and observe how well it survives – and that this is the same as when you use it to dry your hands. Repeat this in turn with kitchen paper, ordinary tissues and then toilet roll. Observe how when wet each is progressively less robust than those preceding.

paper strength experiment

You can actually do this more scientifically, as shown here and above. Yes, that site is advertising a particular brand, but you can use the method with any papers you choose. It’s a good experiment to do with kids.

This varying strength is deliberate design. You want the hand towel and kitchen paper to hold up: they’re intended for mopping up spills. Tissues a bit less so. Toilet paper, on the other hand is designed to fall apart when wet – if it didn’t the drains would pretty quickly get clogged. By the time your piece of toilet paper is 50 meters down the sewer it is nothing but mush, so it flows easily with the rest of the liquid. Also think about why a sheet of corrugated card packaging left in the road in the rain disintegrates so quickly.

This is why we are always told not to put paper hand towels etc. down the loo: they don’t break down quickly so they cause blockages.

There’s far more goes into paper production than we often realise. Just think of all the different types of paper you come across: from high-end glossy magazines, though artists’ drawing paper and copier paper, right down to egg boxes and loo paper. It is all deliberately designed to have particular characteristics for specific jobs.