photography

The Moon and Venus

December sunset sky yesterday looking almost due south from outside our house. This was taken on my point & shoot and handheld so it isn’t ideally sharp!

The Moon and Venus
The Moon and Venus
Greenford; 3 December 2016

ramblings

Advent 2

An Advent Calendar
Old London in Paintings and Photographs
Samuel Scott; The Thames and the Tower of London; 1771

Note: this image is not mine and may be copyright the original photographer/artist;
please click on the image for further information

ramblings

Advent 1

An Advent Calendar
Old London in Paintings and Photographs
WH Fox Talbot; Nelson’s Column under Construction; April 1844

Image © The Patrick Montgomery Collection

amusements, environment, history, links, medical, science

Your Monthly Links

Here’s this month’s instalment of links to items of interest, or amusement, you may have missed he first time round.
Science & Medicine
Who thought leprosy was only a biblical and medieval affliction? Well it ain’t, ‘cos it seems British red squirrels carry leprosy — only the third known species after humans and nine-banded armadillos.


Who’d be a scientist’s cat? Not content with abuse by Schrödinger, scientists continue to drop cats in aid properly understanding their self-righting mechanism.
Trees do it in secret. Communicate, that is. Ecologist Peter Wohlleben thinks he knows what trees feel and how they communicate. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.
The Guardian has a very interesting page which (goes some way) to showing you how visually impaired people see the world.
So why is it that French mothers don’t suffer from bladder incontinence? It sounds deeply dodgy, but it does appear to be a thing.
So there was this contemporary of Isaac Newton who produced the foundations of the current Information Age. Yes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Sexuality
So here’s yet another article suggesting that women don’t actually know what orgasm is. I had hoped we’d got past all this by now!
Environment
So here are ten things about our cutest invasive species: cats. If they weren’t so cute they’d not get away with half what they do.
There’s an interesting new theory about how the brown rat has conquered every city around the globe.
Language
Oxford University Press have recently published a massive new dictionary. It lists every surname found in the UK (including imported ones like Patel) which is held by 100 or more people. That’s almost 50,000. Not just that, but the OUP and academics have done deep research into all these names to determine their origins, often finding previously unknown documentary evidence. Want a copy? OK, well it’s four volumes and will set you back £400. But they reckon there will be an online accessible version.
Art & Literature
Prepare to be amazed. Artist Charles Young has created a complete animated metropolis from paper.
History
It seems the Romans really were ahead of the game. Researchers have discovered metallic ink used on some of the scrolls from Herculaneum (neighbour of Pompeii). That’s around 500 years earlier than previously thought.
Birth by C-section is rather (too?) common these days. But in days of yore, before modern medicine, C-sections were only performed in order to save a child by sacrificing the mother. It was rare for the mother to survive. But new evidence suggests that Beatrice of Bourbon survived a C-section as early as 1337. The previous record was of a Swiss case in 1500.
London

London blogger IanVisits walks the route London’s Roman Wall.
In which Diamond Geezer considers becoming a London cabbie.
Many pubs have dutiful dogs to look after them, but there are London pubs with characterful cats too.
Lifestyle
Just in case you hadn’t realised, there are actually good scientific reasons why you should always be naked. What’s more I can vouch for this from personal experience.
It seems we have it all wrong about addiction. We need to build “rat heaven” for humans rather than prison cells, as this video explains.
To quote poet Philip Larkin: They fuck you up, your mum and dad / They may not mean to, but they do / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you. So yes, here are 30 ways in which your childhood can affect your success as an adult. Which explains a lot.
I have a dream that one day the medical profession will make up their minds about alcohol consumption. Now some new research suggests a beer a day helps prevent stroke and heart disease.
Not content with London, Diamond Geezer takes an away-day to Lowestoft, Mrs M’s home town.
Shock, Horror, Humour

And finally … it seems that in the Middle Ages witches stole penises and kept them as pets or even grew them on trees as fruit. [The mind boggles over whether the fruit would be sold by the butcher or the greengrocer!]
More next month …

beliefs, current affairs, sexuality

No Sex Please …

OK, so here’s another nasty, not so little, piece of legislation from the UK government.
The new digital economy bill, which is currently going through parliament, intends to block websites hosting “unconventional” sexual content. So who decides what is conventional, and who will implement and police such a ban?
There’s a piece in yesterday’s Guardian (yes, again!) which tries to explain the What, how and why?
Now whether you like so-called pornography or not, this is worrying. The legislation is ill-conceived and appears to be not just draconian but also potentially arbitrary and ill-defined.
Worse, my personal belief is that it infringes freedom of speech (and belief) and I would agree with critics of the bill who say it is not the government’s place to police what kinds of consenting sex (or indeed anything else) can be watched by adults.
I continue to believe that pornography (unless violent, coercive or involving minors) has a valuable place, just as does the rest of the sex industry. You, personally, may find it distasteful — just as I find the idea of male-male sex distasteful — but that doesn’t mean either should be banned and I would always defend your right to indulge should you choose.
The whole of the English-speaking world has a history of drawing its rules of censorship much more tightly than continental Europe. But that changed with the internet allowing information to be streamed direct to our homes without restriction. And the English-speaking, puritan, nanny state doesn’t like it.
It’s time we started treating people like adults and allowing them to make up their own minds. But to do that requires us to invest in sensible education of our children, and isn’t it easier to keep them in ignorance and subjugated?
So-called pornography is not being forced down people’s throats. It is complete myth that the internet is awash with porn at every turn and it’s being gratuitously feed to every child in the land. Yes, it is there, but you (whatever your age) have to look for it. My systems have every available filter turned OFF and still I do not get a continual stream of emails offering me penis enlargement (surely fairly tame?) nor does every Google search bring up 27,000 pages sex videos and bestiality.
It is worrying enough to have the state control our sexual predilections but the fear is that this will go way beyond pornography; it is the first example of any liberal democratic country creating an internet censor. The fear is what such a framework could go on to be used for.
Yes, this is censorship and as such must be resisted.
Wake up, the coffee pot is bubbling on the stove.

current affairs

Doomed. We're all Doomed.

There was a very depressing piece in yesterday’s Guardian from George Monbiot under a headline: The 13 impossible crises that humanity now faces.
Surprising as it may seem, given the frequency with which I refer to Monbiot, I don’t agree with everything he writes. And I don’t agree with all of this.
For instance I don’t buy his item 7: Job-eating automation. Automation never has reduced the demand for people and the number of jobs available. This was said about the industrial revolution and about computerisation. And in my view it has not turned out to be the case. What has happened is that the jobs have changed.
Notwithstanding the article is a worthwhile but sobering read, especially if you feel like you want to be depressed — or feel in need of a paradigm shift.

science, thoughts

Thinking Thursday: Kaprekar's Constant

Another in our very occasional series “Thinking Thursday” …
The number 6174 is known as Kaprekar’s constant after the Indian mathematician DR Kaprekar. This number is notable for the following property:

  1. Take any four-digit number, using at least two different digits. (Leading zeros are allowed.)
  2. Arrange the digits in ascending and then in descending order to get two four-digit numbers, adding leading zeros if necessary.
  3. Subtract the smaller number from the bigger number.
  4. Go back to step 2 and repeat.

The above process, known as Kaprekar’s routine, will always reach 6174 in at most 7 iterations. Once 6174 is reached, the process will continue yielding 7641 – 1467 = 6174. For example, choose 3524:

5432 – 2345 = 3087
8730 – 0378 = 8352
8532 – 2358 = 6174

The only four-digit numbers for which Kaprekar’s routine does not reach 6174 are repeated digits such as 1111, which give the result 0 after a single iteration. All other four-digit numbers eventually reach 6174 if leading zeros are used to keep the number of digits at 4.
In each iteration of Kaprekar’s routine, the two numbers being subtracted one from the other have the same digit sum and hence the same remainder modulo 9. Therefore the result of each iteration of Kaprekar’s routine is a multiple of 9.
the equivalent constant for three-digit numbers is 495.
For five-digit numbers and above, there is no single equivalent constant; for each digit length the routine may terminate at one of several fixed values or may enter one of several loops instead.