Giger bugs

Saw these near Men-an-Tol on the Penwith peninsula. Found afterwards that they are the larvae of the Bloody-Nosed Beetle, or Blood-spewing Beetle, which feed exclusively on 'bedstraws' (I always called this goosegrass). The adult spits a red fluid when in trouble. - I wanted to identify the weird, leathery beasts and went to a specialist website; with a heavy heart, knowing how slim my chance of finding them among thousands. But they were the very first in the list of recent queries! Someone else had just seen them, and in Cornwall too.

Physics and the Cinema: notes from an excellent free lecture in the University of York programme

Earlier this month, Professor Jordi Miralda Escudé gave a public lecture at the University of York, which looked at the relationship between science fact and science fiction. In space, we know you can’t hear screams, but should you be able to see lasers and set things on fire? We know it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but how many billion light years away from Earth are alien invaders likely to be?

- You really notice the extraordinary number of casualties in sci fi films.

- Newton first described ‘escape velocity’. Anything over 5G for more than a few minutes has serious effects and can be fatal.Verne’s ‘gun’ method would have resulted in about 40,000G.

- Why did no one notice the ARMAGEDDON asteroid until it was 18 days away? Someone was lying down on the job.

- Number of errors in ARMAGEDDON logged by NASA inductees is 167 and rising. The asteroid was way, way, way bigger than you need to annihilate all life on earth. I think it was ‘size of Texas’. Dinosaur one was 6 miles. To blow it up today we would be able to assemble probably a 100 megaton bang, max, and you’d need two trillion megatons. Then all the bits would keep coming and annihilate all life on earth (in the film they all miraculously miss).

- Effects of weightlessness: you know these. 45% of astronauts vomit. Unit of vomit is a Garn Unit, Garn being the most profuse vomiter ever known in space. So your Garn score is a fraction of 1, as you can’t match one Garn. Also you fart a great deal.

- STEERING – imagine people swooping through meteor showers, dodging baddies etc. Can’t be done. You can issue a little puff of nitrogen to change your attitude or head off in another direction, very carefully, but there is no friction out there. Fictional spaceships behave as if they were fighter planes in air.

- STARSHIP TROOPERS is a favourite of Professor J’s. The enemies live on the other side of the galaxy and hurl asteroids at Earth, effectively ‘throwing rocks’. We saw the hero on their territory and radioing for aid. The aid would arrive after 120,000 years.

- If a real asteroid comes, it’s better to move away from the target area than smash the asteroid up and make lots of different target areas.

- INDEPENDENCE DAY: the baddies come from ’90 billion light years away’. It is only possible to come from 13 billion light years away, and how did Will Smith know anyway?

Useful notes

Citric acid powder aids bread

If a job's worth doing, it's better to do it badly than not at all.

Warm salt water kills infections: gargle, bathe, dab.

You can sprout things in a cafetiere.

Other people don't remember your embarrassing moments - you don't remember theirs

The future can't get at you

The future can't get at you.


MAN - a Passerby



To see:
Cragside House, Armstrongs, early hydroelectrics
Thornbury Abbey, North Lincs
Bowes House

Restaurants:
(v) Orchard, Sicilian Ave, Holborn
Food for Thought, Neal St, Covent Garden

Things I like to see

Goods trains
Goldfinches
Thespian howling children
Very tall trees
Barmaids and waitresses in black, with dyed red hair
Greyhounds
Clear rivers, streams and seas
Five-sailed windmills

Small post mills

Canal locks
Tower cranes
Coal fires

Hens in the distance

"The Sheepdog" - U.A. Fanthorpe

After the very bright light, 

And the talking bird, 
And the singing, 
And the sky filled up wi' wings, 
And then the silence, 

Our lads sez 
We'd better go, then. 
Stay, Shep. Good dog, stay. 
So I stayed wi' t' sheep. 

After they'd cum back 
It sounded grand, what they'd seen. 
Camels and kings, and such, 
Wi' presents - human sort, 
Not the kind you eat - 
And a baby. Presents wes for him 
Our lads took him a lamb. 

I had to stay behind wi' t' sheep. 
Pity they didn't tek me along too. 
I'm good wi' lambs, 
And the baby might have liked a dog 
After all that myrrh and such.

Concrete appeals to cats

Ian has finished laying new concrete in the back yard. Charlie mentioned next door's cat. Ian said cats are attracted to wet concrete. They walk on, stop - you think they'll reverse, but they always carry on. Once it was raining at the end of the day and he covered a conservatory-footing he'd just laid with plastic sheeting. In the morning they took the sheeting off and two cats had been across, under the sheeting, and stopped to have a fight in the middle.

This Russian family was cut off from human contact for forty years

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/For-40-Years-This-Russian-Family-Was-Cut-Off-From-Human-Contact-Unaware-of-World-War-II-188843001.html