Look at the nail on your pinky finger: Every second, about 65 billion neutrinos pass through it. Almost all were produced inside the giant nuclear reactor in our sun’s belly.
From: “Strange Effects: The Mystifying History of Neutrino Experiments” at www.wired.com/2012/03/strange-neutrinos-experiments/.
Category Archives: uncategorized
Weekly Photograph
This weeks photo is one I took a couple of weeks ago. We were driving south on the A11 somewhere around Wymondham in Norfolk in the late afternoon, on the way home from seeing my mother; the sun was setting and creating some interesting silhouettes of the roadside trees. This isn’t the best of photos as it was taken through the windscreen from the passenger seat of a moving car — it was a case of snap what’s there and see what comes out; sometime you do get some good and/or interesting images.
A11 Tree Study
February 2014; Norfolk
Your Interesting Links
Another catch-up on items you may have missed.
Before delve into the depths of science-y things, let’s start with a mystery … A couple of scientists have come up with a possible way of interpreting the mysterious Voynich manuscript — and it is all based on the illustrations.
Well what a surprise! January was England’s wettest winter month in almost 250 years. December wasn’t far behind and it is looking as if February will follow suit!
So how should you cover your mouth when we sneeze? Hand? Hankie? Or Elbow?
More strangeness of animal genetics. Cells in females shut down one of their two X chromosomes at random.
Synesthesia is a very strange affliction. Here one young lady talks about what it is like.
Confused by all the different ‘flu viruses that appear in the media? Scientific American tries to unmuddle you.
What’s the relationship between what we eat and how well/ill we are? Basically scientists think they know, but actually nobody does.
Why do so many of our best spices come from very low down on the evolutionary tree of plants?
Well who would have guessed? Clearly not scientists. Birds can smell!
Hands up: Who knows what a thylacine is? Who thinks it’s extinct? Who would like to find out?
Just like we trust our doctors, we trust our vets to know what medicines work on our pets. But maybe they often don’t know.
Ever wondered what your cat thinks about you? Maybe you don’t want to know!
Here’s the story of how we get ever more clever at defining the the length of the standard metre.
At long last! Let’s leave all this geeky science stuff behind …
A London cabbie looks at the history and development of Waterloo Station.
English has always borrowed words from other languages. How good is your knowledge of English’s borrowings?
The discovery of a secret Viking message … sealed with a kiss?
Going even further back in time, some 850,000 year old footprints have been uncovered in Norfolk.
So time to relax with a few interesting facts about tea.
And finally as a prelude to Valentine’s Day … Many people no longer expect passion to last a lifetime. And yet some couples stay in love to the last. What’s their secret?
Oddity of the Week: Larks & Owls
Seriously, though, people vary in the times they like to sleep and wake—this has been the case throughout history. What’s new, however, is the recent discovery that the tendency toward being a lark or an owl is genetically determined in a similar way to the tendency to have blue or green eyes. The gene that governs sleep/wake predisposition is called Period, or PER for short. Like the gene for eye color, it comes in two different types (let’s call them PERI, which causes people to have larkish tendencies, and PERo, which causes them to have owlish tendencies). You probably know that we have two copies of all our genes, which means we have two copies of PER as well. The trick, however, is that these copies don’t have to be the same: If you have two copies of PERI, you’ll be a lark. If you have two copies of PERo, you’ll be an owl. But if you have one copy of each (which is what 50 percent of the population has), you’ll be somewhere in between. This works for eye color too, by the way: If you have two copies of EYE-COLORg, you’ll have green eyes. Two copies of EYE-COLORb you’ll have blue eyes, and a copy of each you’ll have brown eyes.
From Penelope A Lewis, The Secret World of Sleep (2013)
Be Pushy, Get Drugs
So according to all yesterday’s media — see for example the Guardian and the BBC — we patients need to be much more pushy with our GPs to get the best drugs.
Prof. David Haslam, chairman of the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and himself a former GP, said that patients need to see themselves as “equal partners” with doctors to get the treatment they need.
He went on to say that patients should demand the drugs they need and only be refused NICE-approved drugs if they are actually unsuitable. He says, inter alia:
When products have been approved for use by the NHS by Nice, patients have a legal right to those drugs — as long as they are clinically appropriate. The take-up should be much higher than it currently is.
Patients have a right under the NHS constitution to these therapies, so I really hope we can improve this.
The fundamental point is, it’s your body.
And the more you understand about the drugs you are taking, or what you might be able to have, the better you are able to work with your doctor.
Several things strike me about this.
Firstly, I cannot disagree with Prof. Haslam’s sentiments. There are drugs which people aren’t getting, for all sorts of reasons including the so-called “postcode lottery” of care provision.
And I applaud his stance that we take responsibility for our bodies, understand them and how they work. This has to be good — as regular readers will know I am a vocal advocate of being comfortable with, and talking about your body, as a route to improved medical care.
But there are several things which worry me here.
We have to be realistic and accept that, sadly, many people are not able to understand even the rudiments of how human physiology works and how drugs work. Unfortunately these are mostly the very people who are going to latch onto some drug/treatment they think they should have and be abusive with their GP when they aren’t given it. Doctors are already under enough pressure, and get enough abuse from patients, that they don’t need more.
And then there are the people who really don’t want to think about these things and want to just trust their doctor to give them the best treatment. Not everyone, regardless of intellectual capability, wants to be engaged in the way Prof. Haslam would like. Yes there is still too much of the doctor as demigod who knows best, but there will always be those who treat any professional this way.
Finally I worry about who will pay for all this. I wouldn’t mind betting that many of the drugs we should be demanding are more expensive than the ones we are being prescribed now. So Prof. Haslam’s approach is going to see the NHS drugs bill increase, perhaps dramatically. You watch in a year or so the NHS will be squealing because the drugs budget is out of control.
But perhaps the biggest problem is how we patients actually find out about which drugs are best for us. I reckon I’m pretty good at ferreting out information and have research skills, but even I find it hard to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to drugs — especially when so much drug trial data has never been published.
Something for the Weekend
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?
Weekly Photograph
Our photograph this week is of the nave roof of Chipping Norton Church, taken with an ultra-wide angle (fisheye) lens.
There’s apparently been a church here since before 1066 and the current church dates from the 12th century. Like many churches in East Anglia and the West Country it was built on the proceeds of wool. The current structure is though to have been built by the same “architect” who built Eton College chapel. But of course it has been much altered over the years and completely wrecked by the Victorians. That bright, light, open clerestory is quite something though.
Church Roof
Chipping Norton, September 2011
Chipping Norton is definitely on the list of places to go back to this year. Noreen has ancestors, from Chipping Norton, indeed they were stonemasons who probably worked on the church and her ggg-grandfather (as I recall) is buried outside the church door. I too have have now found I have ancestors from only a handful of miles away.
Welcome!
In the words of the late lamented Frankie Howerd: “Welcome, my friends, to the Eisteddfod”.
Welcome to all our old readers who’ve made it over from our previous home on Blogger.
And welcome to all our new readers.
What you’ll find here is the same eclectic mix as previously: things which interest and enthuse me — or which I think are too important to ignore.
I have, I hope, imported all the old posts from Blogger, but in case I haven’t they are all still in place should you be benighted enough to want them.
So there you are … Normal service will now resume in our new home!
We're Moving
Yes, the time has come to move.
No, don’t panic, Noreen and I are not about to up sticks and decamp of the wilds for Nether St Nowhere.
This weblog is going to be on the move.
I’ve been toying with the idea for some time and have resisted it because I didn’t want to move yet again. But the time has now come to move onto WordPress hosted on my own, already existing, domain — to integrate the blog and my personal website more closely.
Yes, that means I have to do everything for myself, which in some ways is a pain. But in other ways it gives me far more control. And means I am not beholden to Blogger’s, Google’s or “central” WordPress’s ever more restrictive T&Cs.
I don’t yet know exactly how soon I’ll make the switch over as I’m still refining and testing the new blog. I hope it will be sometime in the next week or two. But you can already set up your access to the new site if you wish. The new weblog will be at
There’s not much there yet except a few test posts, but that means you can also have a play and try to break it. And you should be able to set up your new subscriptions etc. — I hope not to have to change anything more in that area.
When I do the switch I hope to be able to import all the posts from here onto the new site. And I will post a notice here, with a dynamic redirection if such works on Blogger (I think it does). The look and feel (aka. branding) of the new weblog should be very similar to this.
Meanwhile normal service continues here.
Watch this space for updates.
And thank you all for your support so far.