lemon garden

As it has been a aeon since I last posted, I find that I must take refuge in a meme. This one has fixty-six questions, which is simply ridiculous. But what can a poor man do?

Unique

1. Nervous habits: You can tell when I’m nervous, because I talk unbidden. Whereas normally I never talk at all, in true reserved English fashion.
2. Are you double jointed? Yes. You should see the things I can do with my elbow.
3. Can you roll your tongue? Of course. Though I’m not sure what evolutionary advantage it is supposed to bestow upon me.
4. Can you raise one eyebrow at a time? Yes. But it’s an acquired talent. I can remember, as a small boy, being fascinated by the way Mr Spock could raise one eyebrow when Kirk said something particularly ridiculous. So I practiced in the mirror until I mastered the art myself. However, I can only do it with the right hand eyebrow. I seem to lack the relevant muscles on the left hand side.
5. Can you blow spit bubbles? Oh God no. Sounds absolutely disgusting.
6. Can you cross your eyes? Yes. Though I prefer not to because it’s a bit wierd and is not the most attractive look.
7. Tattoos? No thank you.
8. Piercings? No. Call me strange if you will, but I’m not all that keen on the idea of sticking bits of metal through my body.
9. Do you make your bed daily? Of course, it’s not rocket science. Pick duvet up off floor, put duvet on bed, job done.

Clothes

1. Which shoe goes on first? Either one I think. Well, I might favour the right one slightly.
2. Speaking of shoes, have you ever thrown one at anyone? No. That’s dangerous.
3. On the average, how much money do you carry? None. I’m in training to be King.
4. What jewelry do you wear 24/7? None.
5. Favorite piece of clothing? I have a red jumper that I love. Probably the best thing about winter is that I can pull out my red jumper and let it do its job of keeping me warm.

Food

1. Do you twirl your spaghetti or cut it? I’m not a great fan of spaghetti. I’m more of a tagliatelle man. But, when confronted with spaghetti, I usually make several attempts at twirling before giving up in disgust and cutting it instead.
2. Have you ever eaten Spam? No. It normally goes straight in the “junk” folder. Actually, while we’re about it, how come internationalised email clients don’t rename the “junk” folder to reflect British English? I want a “Dustbin” folder, or a “rubbish” folder, or a “wheelie bin” folder.
3. Do you use extra salt on your food? No. I use anti-salt on my food, as I don’t like a lot of salt.
4. How many cereals in your cabinet? I have some shredded wheat in the cupboard and a box of porridge oats sitting on top of the cupboard.
5. What’s your favorite beverage? A nice cup of tea.
6. What’s your favorite fast food restaurant? I don’t do fast food.
7. Do you cook? Yes. Every day. I love cooking.

Grooming

1. How often do you brush your teeth? Twice a day. Maybe more if required, but mainly twice a day.
2. Hair drying method? A vigorous rub with a towel and then I let the warmth of the air do the rest.
3. Have you ever coloured/highlighted your hair? No.

Manners

1. Do you swear? Fuck no.
2. Do you ever spit? No, I swallow. Oh, hang on. I didn’t mean it like that. For goodness sake, you have a filthy mind. I’m shocked.

Favourites

1. Animal: Homo Sapiens. For all its faults, I’m still rather fond of the poor creature.
2. Food: My mum’s lemon meringue pie.
3. Month: May. Because my birthday is in May, all the trees are full of beautiful spring blossom and we get two bank holidays!
4. Day: Sunday. Because I usually do some baking on Sunday and I like baking.
5. Cartoon: I’m not really a cartoons kind of guy.
6. Shoe brand: Shoes come in brands?
7. Subject in school: English Lit. and Chemistry. Blowing things up and then writing about it afterwards. That’s what schooling is about.
8. Colour: Red.
9. Sport: Cricket.
10. TV shows: I’m rather enjoying the new series of Battlestar Galactica at the moment.
11. Thing to do in the spring: Try and spot the first flower.
12. Thing to do in the summer: Sit in the stand at Headingley cricket ground and bask in warm summer evening air whilst watching England struggle against Pakistan.
13. Thing to do in the autumn: Pick blackberries.
14. Thing to do in the winter: Snuggle up with a certain pretty girl.

In and Around

1. In the CD player: “Fisherman’s Woman” by Emiliana Torrini, which arrived from the good people at Amazon this morning. An absolutely beautiful record.
2. Person you talk most on the phone with: Lately, a certain beautiful American girl. Historically, my mother.
3. Reading: I’m a bit stuck at the moment. I got four books out of the library, but I can’t seem to get into any of them. The last book I read was “Absolution Gap” by Alastair Reynolds, which I enjoyed a lot but it does have a bit of a damp squib ending.
4. Do you regularly check yourself out in store windows/mirrors? Of course. How could I possibly resist.
5. What colour is your bedroom? Er, I’ve no idea. Hang on, I’ll check. It seems to be some sort of innocuous cream colour.
6. Do you use an alarm clock? Yes, I would not wake up in time for work without one.
7. Window seat or aisle? Depends entirely on how much leg room the window seat has. I like to look dreamily out of the window, but I have long legs so it isn’t always feasible.

Dumb

1. What’s your sleeping position? In bed.
2. Even in hot weather do you use a blanket? Yes.
3. Do you snore? Not as far as I know.
4. Do you sleepwalk? Not as far as I know.
5. Do you talk in your sleep? Not as far as I know.
6. Do you sleep with stuffed animals? No. Taxidermy and bedtime do not mix.
7. How about with the light on? No. I like the darkness…
8. Do you fall asleep with the TV or radio on? No. Well, I suppose it has happened that I’ve fallen asleep in front of the TV. But it’s not something I usually plan to do.
9. Last interesting person you met? Well, everyone is interesting if you give them the time and attention. So the last person I met would be the lass working on the till in Morrisons’ supermarket.

Visiting a website earlier today, I was confronted with one of those annoying javascript adverts that slide over the top of the article you are reading. I was in a good mood at the time, so I didn’t curse it or ignore it as per usual. Instead I actually read the thing. In this case, it was asking me to complete a short survey. So I thought, why not, and clicked the link to participate.

In the course of the survey (about my awareness of various petrochemical companies’ commitment to the environment - a null result from me as I was completely unaware of such) I was confronted by a question that I could not answer:

The mode of transport that I mainly use for business is my feet. I walk to work everyday. On the rare occasion I need to visit another site, they are usually within walking distance so I walk to them too. But the options offered me are “car” or “public transport”. Am I the only person in Britain who walks to work?

The planet Saturn, has many moons. One of these moons is called Iapetus, and is a little odd.

For one thing, most of Saturn’s moons orbit around the plane of Saturn’s own orbit about the sun. The orbit of Iaptus doesn’t. In fact it is tilted by about 15 degrees. This is unusual. It is also very dark, reflecting less than 5% of the rays that hit it from the sun. It has a wierd 13km high ridge going just about all the way around the equator. Iapetus is a wierd shape too, not so much spherical as walnut shaped. It’s a strange moon.

Now, just suppose a large spacecraft had been parked around Saturn a billion years ago by some space faring species, then forgotten about. So it sits in its strange orbit for all those years, its hull gradually being peppered with meteorite collisions. Wouldn’t it look a bit like this:

Note the remains of the radio telescope assembly towards the top of Iapetus and the large circular access to the docking area in the centre of the “moon”. Obviously, you’d build your spaceship out of some dark material so it both absorbs all energy from nearby stars (waste not want not) and provides full camouflage against the darkness of space.

The Cassini spacecraft is currently whirling around Saturn, investigating the planet and its moons. What the odds that it will swing just a shade too close to Iapetus this year and trigger the autonomous defence systems … ?

What do you think?

Here’s a little Thursday meme, spotted over at Dina’s.

3x Thursday: From your point of view, name 3 things that are wrong with this world and how you might go about fixing them.

From my point of view, eh? It might be more interesting to ask, from the point of view a Chechen separatist huddled over a smouldering fire in the Caucasus Mountains, name 3 things that are wrong with the world…

But the meme asks for my point of view, so here it is. Three things that are wrong with the world:

1. There is a marked lack of personal teleportation devices allowing instantaneous travel to wherever you wish on Earth. Such things would be really useful. You could set your device to a location, say, Machu Picchu. Watch the patterns of blinking lights for a few moments. Appear in a puff of smoke at your destination, have a poke around the ruins, yet still be home in time for tea. It’s about time these so-called scientists pulled their fingers out. In terms of fixing this, I can only think of writing to my MP and asking him to raise the issue in Parliament. Perhaps I’ll do that.
2. Big mean (if rather cute) Grey Squirrels are trampling all over the territory of our native Red Squirrels, driving them to the brink of extinction. That’s not very nice. As a first step to fix this, I think we need to get talks going with the political representatives of the Grey Squirrels. See if we can’t get some sort of peace process going.
3. There’s nothing worth watching on TV tonight. I quite fancied sitting down in front of the TV this evening, but no, it’s all a load of rubbish. To fix this I’m going to take a cunning, lateral approach. I shall read a book instead.

Bonus question: Can one person make a difference (good or bad)? Why/why not?
Yes, clearly. Look at Adolf Hitler. Starts out as a failed Austrian painter with a silly moustache. Ends up massacring swathes of peoples and starting a catastrophic global conflict that cost millions of lives. We bankrupted our Empire fighting him - so it brought about an end to the end of the age of empires, which had all sorts of consequences for just about everybody on the planet. It lead to the founding of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The grotesque evils he unleashed upon the world had profound and lasting consequences in all sorts of areas. Definitely not a good example to follow, but definitive proof that one man can change the world.

Merry Christmas!

Ok, I know it’s Boxing Day so I am a bit late in my Christmas wishes. But my domain has been intermittently disappearing from this world, due to DNS troubles at my hosts. It was down pretty much all day yesterday, but I suppose I can give the support team Christmas Day off; being the magnanimous fellow that I am.

I’ve gone to the sea-side for Christmas, to stay with family. We’ve just got back from a walk in the cold, cold wind on the beach. I think the word I’m looking for is “bracing”. And now there are grey clouds building in the northern sky, this could well be the snow they’ve been forecasting. Whoever is running the weather is clearly lacking a sense of theatre, to send the snow just one day too late.

When I got home from work today, there was a letter from NPower (my electricity supplier) waiting for me. It was addressed like this:

So they spell my surname wrong, they imply that I may be thrown out of my home and they reckon that I live in a jobcentre! Way to go NPower.

Now, how do I go about changing my electricity supplier…

Listen to I’m sorry I haven’t a clue on Radio 4 tonight at 6:30pm GMT. It was recorded yesterday evening at the Harrogate International Centre, and I was there! A careful listener may be able to pick out my tears of laughter from the amongst the audience’s roaring good humour. An excellent evening.

I was quite excited to see a story on the BBC about the discovery of some 700,000 year old flint tools on a site in Britain. I thought, wow, we’ve been on this beautiful island for at least 700,000 years!

Then I realised that, whilst neothilic man was skinning a water vole down in Suffolk, the future location of my house and good area south of it was buried deep beneath a glacier. Oh.

I see that the Guardian is also now reporting about an asteroid that might actually hit the Earth in 2036. There is currently thought to be a 1 in 5500 chance of it hitting. The asteroid is by no means big enough to cause any mass extinctions, however it is big enough for things to be rather unpleasant should it hit. New Scientist have previously covered the story.

In that light, can I draw your attention to an image that plots the orbits of many currently known Near Earth Objects, along with the orbit of the Earth. Interesting, eh?

I mentioned earlier that I was thinking of buying a Mac Mini. Well, last week, I bit the bullet and ordered one from the Apple store. I went for the 1.5GHz model with 1Gb of RAM. It arrived on Monday, delivered to my workplace as I wouldn’t be in at home to sign for it. Everyone in the office gathered round to look at my new toy with envious eyes. They couldn’t believe how small it is. I find it difficult to believe myself. The Mac Mini is just 16.5cm square and 5cm high. Into this tiny and beautiful package they managed to cram an 80Gb hard disk, the aforementioned processor and memory, a DVD/CD-RW drive, soundcard, internal speaker and video card. Amazing.

It is astonishingly quiet as well. I’m used to the racket made by my old box, with a fan in the power supply unit and another sitting over the processor. But, even sitting here with it on the desk in front of me, I can barely hear any noise from the Mac Mini. It doesn’t get noticeably hot to the touch either. God knows how they keep it cool. All in all, it is a very nice piece of hardware.

I’m also suitably impressed with the beautiful and well designed Mac OS X that runs on the box. It’s obvious that the designers have put a lot of thought into designing a usuable user-interface. It all hangs together very well. There’s lots of subtle visual touches to delight the eye: dialogs that slide in from the top of the screen; windows that fade away when you close them; icons that bounce up and down to attract your attention, and so on. The “Finder” tool, which pulls together views into crucial folders on your filesystem (Documents, Music, Pictures, etc) along with an “Applications” area where all your apps sit, makes for a nice way of interacting with your system. Immeasurably better than, say, the Start Menu and Desktop Icons that Windows relies upon.

I also like the fact that I can fire up a console window and find myself back at the familiar unix prompt. The best of both worlds.

It’s nice to have a new toy to play with.

(Here ends the advertisement on behalf of Apple - can I get some money back now Steve?)