Typical British Bank Holiday

In England, there are certain "Mondays" in each year that are deemed "holidays". Examples are Easter, Jan 2nd, late August and Late Spring. The two last ones were laid down for Man to "enjoy" either what was left of summer, or the prelude to it.

It is the opportunity for many people, especially older ones, to get away for four days to warmer climes.

However, the British Public know better, and the words " Bank Holiday"{ have become synonymous with the words "windy, rainy, cold".

Many scientists see it as proof that Britain really has a climate called "Cool Temperate Western Margins"

Yesterday was a fine example. Cold weather, high winds and rain were prevalent throughout these Isles, and yet, the British, stiff upper lip never wavering, went on a mini-holidays in droves. The picture shows a family in Cornwall having a "lovely day out" on the side of a small hill overlooking th Atlantic. To say these people were optimistic is like saying Muhammad Ali was "The Worst.

...and as the afternoon waned, it heralded the return of the parties in question to the homeland. The writer was actually in a pub (-lic house), when all of a sudden the skies went really black and we were treated to a lightning storm complete with hailstones (Yes, hailstones, after having the warmest April on record). In the middle of this, a coach pulled up and out straggled (and soon to be bedraggled) several severals of Wiser Guys (old men past 80) to plunge into our pub.

Six sat down at my table.

Oh the travellers' tales! But none of this "Grumpy Old Man" attitude, for each one was as happy as can be, and all with smiles on their faces regaling me with tales of "that pub in Leamington Spa" and the suchlike. We all got talking and it seemed that Spring and Autumn has married well, at least until the hailstones stopped. It seems I was very popular to talk to until a reminder about "getting home to the wife" came about.

All in all, a Typical British Bank Holiday!

Calculus – such a complicated-sounding word!

This is the Akiko take on the calculus, a subject very dear to her heart as she has used it almost every day of her life since about 18.

What is it? Basically, it is a way to express quantities very accurately in the mathematical sense. For instance, what is meant by the simple word “speed” (and I am not talking Keanu Reeves here, nor even a “Keanu” coke)? Well, “speed” is a measure of how fast some thing is going. In other words, how fast the distance is changing in terms of time.

NOW, we got that started, we can move it swiftly on, with some Speed (and not even a hint of Coke or any other addictive substance). .
Physics, and mathematics, are very demanding in terms by what is meant by what one says. To take an example, try that phrase above “how fast the distance is changing in terms of time”. We used this descriptive phrase to describe “speed”. But we need to be more precise so we can actually do some calculations on it (calculations such as what will the speed be in 2 seconds’ time, a weeks’ time, how long it will take to slow down, and any more you can think of). That is, we need to quantify it .

First we have to work out what we ourselves actually mean when we talk about speed. The word “speed” actually means how fast. The drivers in you, and indeed almost everyone, knows what kph means. “kph” means “kilometers per hour” and is a number giving us how many kilometers we have traveled in the last hour, up till “now”. The “now” is needed because we need to know when we made this measurement. Let us say it is 60 kph, to make things easy.

So , in the last hour , we have travelled, on average about 60 kilometers. I say ”on average” because half an hour ago we were in a traffic jam, and 20 minutes ago, the backlog finished, and we reached the end of it and were able to travel up to “80 kph”.

So, if we measure our “speed” over the last half hour, it still says roughly the same….or does it….? And what was this speed when we were in the traffic jam? Update coming soon!

Fusion, fact or fable?

As I intimated last month, there is another way to get nuclear power, and it is called fusion. Because of the way this ‘new’ force works, it likes to stick together protons and neutrons, but at a price – it only does this for very short distances, and if that separation is approached (as in a BIG nucleus), fission occurs, and the nucleus splits apart, giving a whole new meaning to ‘a Big One’. It is rather like a spring which, if stretched, suddenly ‘snaps’, and whatever was at either end, flies off.

If these particles get too close, however, the opposite happens, and they are ‘sucked in’ by the ‘new force’. Once this has been done, it is very hard to get them apart again, but when they are prised apart, a new and altogether useful phenomenon occurs: you get more energy out than you put in!!!

Simply put, if you ‘weigh’ four atoms of hydrogen, push them together, trying to overcome the mutual repulsion of the static charges, you will make an atom of helium. This is because if the ‘new force’ comes into range, it snaps in, and literally sucks them all in to make one atom of helium. Now if you ‘weigh’ what you have left, one helium atom, you will find that the mass is just less than the four hydrogen atoms you had to start with. So where has the mass gone?

This question of the ‘missing mass’ is very easily calculated by a well-known formula, E=mc2. That is, multiply the number for the speed of light by itself (’square it’). Then, take this answer and divide the energy input by it, and the numbers that ARE the missing mass are there. Where? Well, it has been radiated off as gamma waves, which have enough energy to ‘carry away’ the missing mass. If zillions of these nuclei do the same, the effect is enormous and if harnessed, could be very useful. You see, the only fuel you need is hydrogen (the commonest element in the Universe).

How is it that this energy appears to come from nothing? Well, it does not, as the particles needed are reluctant themselves to come together, so we need to put them together ourselves. It is a bit like a shy home-boy at his first party. You have to put him, albeit reluctantly, into the fray, for him to just realize how much fun it is, and then he will find it hard to leave once inducted!

So it is with fusion. Fusion is so terrific that many scientists are trying to overcome ‘ignition’ (See post 1), but is so hard, fission is the only option, or seems to be.

So…..

Fission? Fact.

Fusion? Future Fact.

Fission, fiction or fusion….?

Unlimited power and clean, green, CFC-free electricity. Sounds like a fermi story, but actually that reality is closer than anybody thinks.

Except for people like me, that is. Even though a student am I; a scientist I am and the future I build.

I am jabbering in Huttese about the so-called nuclear power. A lot of people are scared of this, and rightly so, it is DANGEROUS.

But in actual fact there are two kinds, the dangerous kind, and the safe kind. Mankind so far has only been playing around with the first kind, but has long been aware of the second kind. This is the kind that is completely safe.

So why don’t we use the second kind? Simple answer is, it is very difficult. Easy in principle, hard in practice. Bit like an oversexed spotty schoolboy, really.

So what stops the second kind being used? Simply put: The Engineers. No, I am not referring to the ancient soccer team who won the English FA Cup eight times in four years, but back when there were only three teams in it, sometime in the late half of last century somewhere. I am talking about that group of guys who make money out of the ideas that this group of guys come up with. The Engineers. WE are the scientists.

Nuclear Power (No 2) is so difficult that it has to generate the temperature of a star in the lab. Generating this is easy, our team do it all the time (albeit for around the fraction of time it takes Tom Cruise to change partners), but starting it and getting it going so that it does not uncontrollably stop (rather like an impotent priest) requires more energy than the mini-star puts out.

We call this bit “ignition” because it goes self-sustaining (rather like an impotent priest on Viagra).

Incidentally, both Nuclear Power types produce the “Atom Bomb”. The first is called the “fission” bomb, which causes energy by flying apart atoms, and the second, “fusion” or “hydrogen” bomb, which causes energy by “sticking together” atoms. However the second is far more powerful because it requires a “fission” bomb just to ignite it. (or, in the schoolboy’s case, to stop it).

Imagine if we could gather that energy and use it. It is not impossible, but very, very hard (no comment about schoolboys or priests).

The way each version of the Nuclear Power needs a certain knowledge of nuclear physics, so only those really interested will be looking at the follow-up to this – “Fission fact, and Fusion”.

Just what IS Quantum mechanics?

This is a question that has been been asked many, many times.

Now, let's get one thing perfectly straight - the "mechanics" bit up there bears no resemblance to the kind of mechanics we usually talk about, such things as engines, nuts, bolts, screwdrivers, wheel- balancing, etc.

True, it is the same word, but in physics it means something very different and quite specific: "mechanics" in physics is nothing more than the study of the relative movement of things, like apples dropping from trees, billiard balls moving on a snooker table, and the occasional hammer hitting someone's head.

Nothing to do with cars or anything Richard Anderson might say in "Forbidden Planet".

A lot of the time, mechanics just deals with things hitting each other. When I say "deals with" I mean we use equations to find out where they will go next.

For example, what happens when two billiard balls collide, head on? Well, if one is standing still, the moving one hits it and transfers the motion, and the second one moves off.

In an ideal world, yes, but this is not what happens. It so happens that both balls end up moving. "How can this be?" I hear you ask. The answer lies in the way the balls are put together and what they are made of, BUT that is the realm of materials science, not physics.

So mechanics is when things hit other things. Now we're getting someplace, as Ollie would say.

There are different types of mechanics, all of which use the basic "mechanics" laws set down by Isaac Newton. There is Celestial Mechanics (how large things like planets behave), Terrestrial Mechanics (hammers hitting heads), Car Mechanics (nothing to do with this discussion), and Quantum Mechanics (how very small things behave, things like atoms, etc). Oh and there is Relatavistic Mechanics, and Relativistic Quantum Mechanics, too, but both these only come into play when you are travelling just a tad faster than Richard Hammond did last year.

So, WHAT is Quantum Mechanics? We, like I said, it is "how small things behave" but there is more to it than that. Scientists thought terrestrial mechanics ruled ok, ino questions asked, including the very small. The fact is, we had to invent a completely new branch of Mechanics, so as to predict where things ended up after the charabanc. The reason was, the very small particles acted in very different ways to what we expected. They actually acted like "waves". Hard to believe , ain't it? Moreover this "quantum Mechanics" gave right answers for all the other mechanics branches as well.

Depending on the experiment you were doing , the very small particles act both like "waves" and "particles". It is very hard to imagine, and even to this day 99% of scientists don't really know what is going on, BUT, what they DO know is how to predict what will happen when two of these "quantum" billiard balls collide, and what happens afterwards. Very clever.

So where does that leave us? Well, to the ordinary layman, you or I, it means nothing, because we as people are never going to deal with things THAT small ( I am saying nothing about Marvin's brain here), but some scientists have to deal with this every day.

They are called "particle physicists" and live in very tall ivory towers in Geneva. I, the layman (or laywoman) deal with particles just as small, but I am only called a lowly "nuclear physicist".

However, I still find fun mucking about with the equations in our computer programs, investigating "Quantum Mechanics". It is almost all a little girl can do.......

So, when it comes down to it, we have a perfectly good representation of the world as we know it with "Terrestrial Mechanics", so why do we need "Quantum Mechanics"?

A good question, and one which deserves an answer. With no Quantum Mechanics, we would not have discovered Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation, or the LASER. There would be no nuclear or particle physics, ie neither the Atom bomb nor the Hydrogen bomb would have been invented. Is that a good or a bad thing (bad for me, anyway!) - one for the philosophers, I am sure.

Another thing is that wihout Quantum Mechanics, we would have primitive computer controls still, the most important of all would be - no DVD's CD's etc, Guided missiles would be out too, as would be supermarket checkouts. TV remotes. The road goes ever on.

Maybe the most important thing we would be missing would be the Josephson Junction in electonics, but I wll leave the reader to find out what is THAT by himself.

Shrodinger will never know what a Pandora's Box he opened!

Holmes, I have a sore neck....

Another wonder of the world is genetics.

Genetics appears to be the science of studying the very building blocks of life.

It involves this: all living things are made up of stuff called DNA. DNA is just an abbreviation for a very long molecule (molecule = collection of atoms), called De-oxy ribo-nucleic acid. The wonderful thing about DNA is basically that all DNA is quite similar.

DNA is made of only four different types of smaller molecule (Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine and Adenine, or C, G, T and A, called "bases") and it is the way these are combined that make each bit of DNA different.

Surprising thing is, the DNA is just like a line of these, all in a row, and it is the order of these four that determines what the DNA does. Trouble is, the DNA is very long, miles long, in fact if a hyperbole is needed.

So what's with this DNA? Well, it is just an ordinary molecule, except that it is very long.

One more thing, and this is the good bit, the scientists found that DNA could make other molecules of DNA, all by itself.


How can that be? I can hear the reader ask. Good question, I must say, because if a molecule is going to make another molecule, it could be anything and indeed, if statistics are anything to go by, physics says it WOULD be anything.

However, DNA is very special, in that the molecules it makes are exact copies of the sequence of bases it uses itself. In other words, DNA make copies of itself, the exact copy.

This is why things grow, because the "lifeform" makes more DNA for itself to add on to the original.

The Big Question is: why does DNA make a copy of itself and not some other useless molecule, and how does it do it?

This is a question asked by scientists ever since we discovered that DNA was the molecule of life.

The answer was provided by scientists Watson and Crick in the 1950's.

It was a code!.

What happens is this: The DNA sequence makes another molecule called an enzyme, and this enzyme gathers the correct bases to stick to one half of the DNA, which is divided into two. The whole process creates two molecules of DNA, which are exact copies of one another.

So how does the DNA know which enzyme to make? Simple, a code!

The sequence of the bases in any DNA molecule is a code to create the correct enzyme that enables a copy to be made.

Wait a minute! A code? Aren't codes a thing of design?

Hmmmm.

Here's us scientists thinking that evolution brought about all life by chance! But if that were so, how come a code got in there?

Maybe, just maybe, there is a designer after all, and the world have been calling HIM names from antiquity, names like Yahweh, Brahmin, Buddha, Allah without knowing why.

Makes you think, does it not?

Beware of the Phone!

In England, where I am based now (Oxford University, actually), there is a major Government policy towards people who DO NOT smoke cigarettes, cigars, pipes, etc in public placees.

It is now law for places like pubs and restaurants to have designated areas for those people who do not indulge.

The reason, which has only come to light because of research, is that cigarettes give off smoke, as does the smoker, which is pssively inhaled by those who do not smoke if they share the same space on a bus, etc.

It is a phenomenon called "passive smoking" and has been proven to cause death just like normal smoking does, but taking longer.

The late, great Roy Castle, who came from Liverpool and who was a great comedian, entertainer and dancer (he was once in the Guinness Book of World Records for recording a song during which the performer played the most solo musical intruments), died from passive smoking, having performed, in his youth, in many, smokey Jazz bars and clubs. His speciality was the trumpet.

However, he was diagnosed with lung cancer owing to smoking, even though he had never touched a cigarette in his life. A research center in Liverpool for this condition was built in his memory.

It is now a fact of life in some places and rules have been introduced to countermand the practice of "passive smoking".

Now we come to the strange effects that perhaps mobile phones have on us. Researchers claim that overuse of the mobile phone, or cellphone, will harm the brain, owing to the proximity between the head and the microwaves entering the units. Of course, effects will not become apprarent for another 25 years or so, just like smoking kills in that time. However, despite this, it hasn't stopped so-called "eco-aware" companies from selling us hands-free headphones/earplugs so that we can talk without the handset being close to our heads.

Far-sighted, or just plain politics gone mad?

Either way, this writer is willing to hazard a bet that there will eventually be areas designated especially for those who do not use cellphones, not because of the noise all these talkers produce, but because of the "passive radiation" they would be giving the rest of us.

What may they call it - - - - "passive personal microwaving"?

Persistence, Palindromes and 196

Here is a long-promised post - the "persistence of the intergers"!!!

"Peristence" is easy to define - just take a number and multiply all its digits together and continue until you are left with just one.

Example - 39. 39 becomes 3 x 9 = 27, then 27 becomes 2 x 7 = 14, and 14 becomes 1 x 4 = 4. Three steps, so the "persistence" of 39 is 3.

You can do it with any number you like. Obviously, numbers with a zero in have persistence 1, so they are not very interesting. Try finding the persistence of 6,788.

What IS interesting though is finding the SMALLEST numbers of a certain persistence. 39 is an example, and is the smallest number of persistence 3. 6,788 is the smallest of persistence 6.

That is, all numbers lower than 39 have persistence 2 or 1, and all higher than 39 have peersistence 3 or higher. For 6,788, all numbers LOWER than 6,788 have persistence 5 or less, whilst all higher have pertistence 6 or more.

Now, here's where it gets really interesting, because it is widely believed that there is absolutely NO number whatsoever with a peristence higher than 11. That, is, no number has been found to take more than 11 steps to reduce to one digit. I find this staggeriing, simply because you can invent any number as long as you like, say with 500 digits, and when you apply the persistence rule, it reduces to one digit in less than 11 steps. Try it!

Incidentally, this is just multiplicative persistence. The other one is additive persistence, where you add instead of multiply the digits, but is not quite as interesting.

Like I have said before, numbers facinate me. On a related topic, there are the palindromes, numbers like 121 and 3443 that read the same forward and backwards. If you take any number, and add it to its reversal, this produces another number. Do it again and again until a palindrome is produced. Example: 456: 456 + 654 = 1110: 1110 + 0111 = 1221 a palindrome. Try it with any number - you will eventually, after only at most 24 reversals, get a palindrome,

BUT NOT FOR 196 !!! Despite an enormous amount of computer power, 196 has still not produced a palindrome.

Nobody has the foggiest idea why 196 is special this way, but it is deeply fascinating to speculate why it is 196 and not 197 or 195, say. Try them! They both produce palindromes easily!

Watch this space for the emirps, Kaprekar numbers, and the Weird numbers!

England Soccer "Blues"!!!!!!

First, England Soccer Club had this:







He was called Emlyn "crazy horse" Hughes. (the seventies)








Then, they got this:



He was called "Gazza" and was famous for crying. (the nineties)



























NOW, in the "noughties", (or should it be said "Naughties"?) they have this:



HE is just known as "LOONEY", whoops, sorry, Rooney.

This man is almost entirely responsible for England's defeat at the hands of Portugal in the World Cup. He committed a foul by stamping on another player's Family Allowance, and then, in a fit of petulance, pushed another player out of his way so that he could argue with the referee, only a yard away!!! First foul - Yellow Card. Second foul, for just being too stupid to know better, the Red Card. I say well done referee. I bet Sven Goran had a few choice words afterwards, and maybe even a boot flew in somebody's forehead's direction. (Ask David Beckham about that one) .

The England Team consist of One Genius (Gerrard), 8 or 9 fools, and one Looney, Whoops! I meant complete Idiot! Sorry Mr Roooooney!

All in the in the Best POSSIBLE taste!

Anybody who susses all the allusions in this one gets a Green Card.

Maria Full of "Grace"? Purrlease!!!

"Maria Full of Grace"


Thursday, 29 June, 2006

...." Ever since she won Wimbledon two summers ago Maria Sharapova has become accustomed to first-class attention, even in the courts allocated for her to play on. Show courts most of the time, naturally.

Today she won her second round match against Ashley Harkleroad on Court Two, the notorious ‘Graveyard of Champions’ where many top names have crashed to defeat in the past. For Sharapova, it was more a playground than a graveyard as she romped home for the loss of four games and it brought forth a few sentimental memories.

On her Wimbledon debut as a wild card in 2003, Sharapova was beaten on Court 18 by Svetlana Kuznetsova in the fourth round. "People were walking back and forth, just like on Court Two today," she said. "But it's good, the fans can get to see up close and personal......"

....or so says journalist Ronald Atkin on the official Wimbledon website. In the picture, he says she is "trying to "suppress" her emotions" during a bout of sniffles.

What a laugh!

His Headline was "Maria full of Grace"

If it is grace she has, she ejaculates it with her every tennis shot, from her mouth, throat and her other "nether" regions. I would hardly call a pretty girl vomiting non-verbal abuse with her every "stroke" the least bit graceful.

But then again, I am just a girl myself, who cannot watch this "graceful one" because of the distrsaction she causes with the noise. I mean, it must rate close to a jackhammer on the decibel level.

Poor opponents, who actually have to face this across the net!

I must confess, I cannot recall any other sport abused in this mannner.


Give me Ping Pong anytime. I challenge anyone at that, and I don't so much as "regurgitiate" anything, not even between points, despite any sniffles!