Levitating fluffy animals, well ladybirds

Levitating animals seems a bit mean and pointless don't you think - especially for the fish which "did not fare as well, due to the inadequate water supply". But the YouTube video of the Nasa project is really pretty.

http://www.livescience.com/technology/061129_acoustic_levitation.html

Spray-on condoms

German sex educators plan spray-on condom

Dec 01 (Reuters) - German sex educators plan to launch a spray-on condom tailor-made for all sizes.

Jan Vinzenz Krause from the Institute for Condom Consultancy, a Singen-based practice that offers advice on condom use, told Reuters on Thursday the product aimed to help people enjoy better and safer sex lives.

"We're trying to develop the perfect condom for men that's suited to every size of penis," he said. "We're very serious."

Krause's team (spraykondom.de) is developing a type of spray can into which the man inserts his penis first. At the push of a button it is then coated in a rubber condom.

"It works by spraying on latex from nozzles on all sides," he said. "We call it the '360 degree procedure' -- once round and from top to bottom. It's a bit like a car wash."

Krause said the plan is to make the product ready for use in about five seconds. He said it would function more effectively as a contraceptive because it would fit better and not slip.

However, before the new condom can be sold in shops, the firm must ensure that the latex is evenly spread when sprayed, as well as optimise the vulcanization process.

Krause hopes the high tech condom, which will be available in different strengths and colours, will on the market by 2008.

He said the spray can would likely cost some 20 euros ($26) as a one-off purchase. The latex cartridges -- sufficient for up to 20 applications -- would cost roughly 10 euros, he said.

Krause said he had hit upon the idea when considering the difficulties some people faced using condoms, and drew inspiration from spray-on plasters now used in medicine.


Publish Date: December 01, 2006

-----------------------------

how do men feel about this mini car wash?
mmmm, the Institute for Condom Consultancy sounds like a fun place to work.

Chronic Armpit Rash Source of George W. Bush Swagger

This made me chuckle:

Avant News - armpit swagger

Using God to sell dubious health supplements

"Choosing a biblical lifestyle that emphasizes God-made, natural fruits, vegetables and whole grains as well as healthy habits and exercise will help you achieve a healthy body weight. But sometimes, that is not enough."

"At FaithMeds.com you will find biblically based answers to your health questions."

FaithMeds.com

Encouraging thought from Steinbeck

"It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again."

(Rockpooling in Log from the Sea of Cortez)

Open plan offices: a more friendly environment?

Why do we assume that open plan offices foster more friendliness and openness just because they are laid out like that? In fact I think that open plan offices are more likely to encourage the opposite behaviour because they allow people to hide in anonymity.

If you work in a small office, and your fellow colleagues give a cheery "hello" in the mornings, it is just downright unfriendly if you do not acknowledge them and wish them a "good morning" too. But the scale of open-plan offices is such that people can just keep their heads down and not reply.

Not having barriers is artificial because one cannot have a conversation without everyone, however unintentionally, listening in. Later on, when the subject is brought up again, for the sake of politeness you must pretend not to have heard already and greet the news with fresh interest.

Sad for the lost railings

As I walk to work I pass many house flanked by walls pitted by sad little dimples, a reminder of iron railings salvaged during the Second World War and largely never replaced.

The thing is I always wonder quite how this salvage was carried out. Was it a compulsory thing with a glorified rag & bone man from the home guard clearing a whole street of its railings at once? Did people object? Was it a more voluntary thing where you would donate your railings to the war effort? Would neighbours frown if you were sentimentally attached to your railings? Would they excuse you if a couple of your sons were off fighting the war?

Some of the surviving railings near where I live are fantastic. It makes me sad that there are so few Victorian railings left, especially as it appears that a huge number were never used and just went to waste. Although its true to say that the dimples that remain are a reminder of the history of the war effort and that remarkable collective sacrifice that we can't imagine today.




Links
BBC war memories archive Brief remark on this site suggests that the railings were collected in an organised way.
Some old duffer who sensibly hid his gates down a well

A modern tragedy

A week ago last Wednesday I came across a colleague in need of comfort. She'd had her bag nicked the previous weekend, losing her Oyster card and boyfriend's iPod. She was clearly very upset and I tried to reach out to her but she flinched in a "No, its too raw, please don't be nice to me" kind of way. "At least no-one got hurt," I said, deferring to a comfortable platitude. She shrugged, as if the damage had been at least that bad. She was wearing black.

This Wednesday I saw the boyfriend who also bemoaned the loss of the aforementionned iPod. "I'd always been really careful with it. I've had friends go through three or four iPods over that time, but not me. It was one of the first models, I got it before they were so popular. It [significant pause] could have been a collector's item [gulp]."

Its horrible having your bag nicked - granted - but while I was genuinely sympathetic during my encounters with the bereft couple but afterwards I found myself getting more and more indignant. More than a week in bereavement over an MP3 player! Its easy when you're feeling a bit self-righteous to counter this suburban overeaction with genuine day to day tradegies you've seen and experienced - death and illness, relationship break downs, unhappiness, depression - but honestly, get over it. Only having your stuff robbed once in five years of London life seems like a pretty good record.

As for the holy grail of having a genuine "collector's item", give me a break. Consumerism transformed with a higher purpose. That said, I've got a rare red vinyl 7" of Get Ready by the band Ash that I would part with at the right price. Anyone?

Idle thoughts and white noise of the brain

My brain throws me random images from time to time. By random images I mean a perfect picture of some scene or other I've encountered at some point. Never very exciting they range from the high street in Abagavenny to my mate's road in Crowthorne, Berkshire. Its like a polaroid of an instant. One is the back garden of a house in North Wales where I stayed when I was little. Its just after the rain, droplets running off the green green plants, snails and fat orange-fringed slugs are creeping across the steep steps, which are made of earth held in place by planks. The memory of the smell of wet earth and smoke from coal fires accompanies this one. I can feel the drops of rain brush off on my face and clothes as I walk past the shrubs.

There's no real narrative, these scenes are a glance through a window or the flash of an instant. None of the "scenes" hold any particular significance, but are coupled with a mundane activity like washing up or sharpening a pencil. They are on the periphery of my conciousnes and I hardly notice them. But sometimes I'm struck by the weirdness of this funny brain filing. Does this happen to everyone?

Slightly more concious, but also a consequence of this white noise of the brain are recurring obsessions which absorb me on the way to work, but then evaporate. I idly obsess about all the iron railings that were taken down and melted during the second World War, more of which later. But my top idle obsession of the moment relates to the poster for the new Merrill Streep film, "The Devil Wears Prada". It features a picture of a high heeled shoe, with the heel substituted for a diabolical trident. But I can't help looking at the ad, from the bus or wherever, and consider the praticaticalities of wearing such a shoe. It really bothers me.

The little tridents would mean you'd get stuck in the mud and have to walk around with grassy clods stuck to the bottom of each heel. But more troubling, the tridents couldn't bear the weight and would snap off! Its wrong and makes me feel itchy.

Once again I'm startled at the genius of Dickens

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously."

The first paragraph of David Copperfield

In my humble opinion...

...this is brilliant

http://www.myspace.com/thestreets

The Streets - Prangin' Out
(feat. Pete Doherty)

Some quotes from Catch-22

"Yossarian longed to sit on the floor in a huddled ball right on top of the escape hatch right inside a sheltering igloo of extra flak suits ... That was where he wanted to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddamn cantilevered goldfish in some goddamn cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddamn foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire."

"In the morning he stepped from his tent looking haggard, fearful and guilt-ridden, an eaten shell of a human buliding rocking perilously on the brink of collapse." re Hungry Joe

"The frog is almost five hundred million years old. Could you really say with much certainty that America, with all its strength and prosperity, with its fighting man that is second to none, and with its standard of living that is the highest in the world, will last as long as ... the frog?"

"Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There were no miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune tramped with equal brutality on the virtuous and the corrupt..."

Anyone for a cup of tea?

I have a primal need to put the kettle on everytime I get in through my front door.

It doesn't matter if I fancy a cup of tea or not, though usually I do, but I always go to the kitchen first, fill up my lovely shiny kettle, and light the hob. The kettle has a whistle and the interval before it whistles lets me go to the loo, look at my plants and wind down. When it has done its magic and whistled, I'm properly home. It marks the line between the outside world and my little domestic zone.

My kettle obsession is largely unshakeable even if I actually want a cold drink or a glass of wine. Once the kettle has whistled - like a hypnotist bringing me out of a trance - I am capable of judging whether I do want a cup of tea, which luckily, as I've already said, I generally do. I don't like needlessly wasting energy, but its like its not me doing it!

I'm sure its my inner cave woman speaking. May be there some ancient cerebral link between the kettle and the hearth or the fire in the middle of the cave. Its my little wifey bit in my character, which doesn't generally respond well to things like ironing, vaccuming and dusting.

I always turn to tea in a crisis. Its the least or the most I can do.

The day we told our neighbours we had to demolish half their house

So we're sitting there sharing a cup of tea and a chocolate chip biscuit with our upstairs neighbours and every minute the conversation is edging towards the inevitable.

"So how bad is it? What will you need to do to repair it?"

The "it", of course, is.... the blot, the £20,000 question, the end of the house of which we do not speak, the room behind the door which is shut where we keep boxes of rubbish CDs, old letters and lots and lots of guitars (don't ask). It is the small question of the far end of our home sliding millimetre by millimetre into the latent floodplain of the Thames. We are sinking. And no-one thought to tell us before we bought it.

"Well," says my Dad expansively, "one of the things they might try is to prop it up."

"And what would that involve? How would they do that" says our neighbour slowly, he's grasping towards it, the cat is sharpening its nails and getting bored of its brown paper prison....

"Oh well," says Dad, adding comfortingly skating over the real issue with technical phrases such as "steel joist" and "RSJ".

Tom and I are desperately trying to maintain a serious, graven expression of concern as if it's all news to us too.

Then suddenly, without warning, its out! "Worst case scenario is that all this has got to come down," Dad says, standing on the balcony gesturing at the floor and the kitchen. His hands gesture the wall of their house away, he sweeps aside the roof and we're all standing on the ground floor surrounded by rubble.

I'm biting my lip, you've got to laugh really... haven't you? "I wanted a new kitchen anyway," says Gillie (or Ginny, after a year we're not sure), laughing to make us all feel better about it. But Anthony (previously Patrick) looks white, showing no trace of amusement.

And then we're off, thanking them for the evening, like we've all had a jolly time and they're not going to dream of demolishing balls and dust and destruction of their lovely home. I feel wretched about it, but the moggie is well and truly out of the bag.

A man who went a very long way to prove a point

New Scientist press release

02 August 2006 The man who was both alive and dead under embargo until 02 Aug 2006 18:00 GMT

TO BE, or not to be? The question that tormented Hamlet also seems to have been an obsession with Ettore Majorana, the celebrated Italian physicist who disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the 1930s. An analysis of his letters suggests that Majorana answered the question with his own unique quantum mechanical twist, managing to achieve the illusion of being both dead and alive at the same time.

Born 100 years ago this week, Majorana’s genius was likened to that of Newton and Galileo by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, his supervisor at the Institute of Physics in Rome. Majorana is today credited with predicting that neutrinos have mass – something that was only confirmed during the last decade. And more of his prescient theories are now coming to light (see “Ahead of his time”, below), suggesting that Majorana’s achievements were underestimated when he was alive.

The young physicist’s promising career was cut short with his sudden disappearance at the age of 31 during a boat trip between Palermo and Naples in Italy. His body was never found despite several investigations, and opinion is divided on whether he committed suicide, was kidnapped, or changed his identity and started a new life.

Now, theoretical physicist Oleg Zaslavskii at Karazin Kharkiv National University in Ukraine is suggesting that the ambiguity surrounding his fate was part of an elaborate illusion engineered by Majorana himself to demonstrate quantum superposition. This paradox, in which a particle can simultaneously exist in two mutually exclusive quantum states, is exemplified by Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment in which the cat can be both alive and dead.

Majorana wanted to mirror this paradox with events in his own life, says Zaslavskii (www. arxiv.org/physics/0605001). The argument centres on a bizarre series of messages that Majorana sent to his family and to Antonio Carrelli, the head of the Institute of Physics at the University of Naples. First, Majorana sent a letter expressing his intention to commit suicide, which he followed with a telegram refuting the idea that he was suicidal. It was his third letter, however, that struck Zaslavskii as most odd. In it, Majorana describes his hope that Carrelli received both the original letter and the telegram at the same time.

“A sender should hope that the second message came first, to cancel the earlier one with the more disturbing content,” says Zaslavskii. Instead, Majorana wanted two mutually exclusive outcomes – his suicide or survival – to co-exist, making it the “quantum mechanical version of the Hamlet question”, he says. When Zaslavskii analysed other events surrounding the disappearance he saw the same pattern. For instance, Majorana is thought to have hired impostors to pose as himself during the boat trip. “I suddenly realised that all these separate and seemingly extravagant details are united by the same underlying idea,” says Zaslavskii. “It was very impressive.”

“Zaslavskii has quite consistently shown how skilfully Majorana could have implemented his knowledge of quantum physics,” says Gennady Gorelik, a science historian at Boston University. “His theory resolves the strange and crazy behaviour of a great physicist and shows that it could have been logically organised.”

But Majorana’s actual fate and motivations will probably remain a mystery. “It’s very difficult for any historian to know what is going on in the mind of another figure,” says Gorelik. “But perhaps it takes another theoretical physicist like Zaslavskii to be able to make the intuitive leap into Majorana’s mind.”

Author: Zeeya Merali.

Can my ipod read my mind?

Walking to work today I lazily left my listening choice to "shuffle" on my ipod, wondering what it would come up with to suit my gloomy mood and the overcast day. I was left, not for the first time, thinking the thing could read my mind. I'll think you'll agree this is the ideal gloomtastic playlist for a grey Tuesday.

"Fell on Black Days" Soundgarden,
"I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine" Beth Orton
"Time Has Told Me" Nick Drake
"Fake Plastic Trees" Radiohead (I had to skip this one it was too much)
"Panic" The Smiths
"In Bloom" Nirvana
"Something in my eye" Ed Harcourt
"Season" Ash (Nothing like their typical poppy fare)
"Fruit Tree" Nick Drake (I mean, Nick Drake twice, there must be something going on)

Names of characters for books not yet written

Shady Fishbane - a hard-bitten New York detective, who is in with the criminals as well as the goodies, and has to tackle his own dodgy past to solve the crime

Parvin Zolf - a friendly, colourful, space-travelling alien for a kids book

Toon Wilderbeek - probably a cartoon cowboy, but may be I just think that because of the "toon" and "wild" bits

Halgabron - probably the oldest of these names floating around my head. Halgabron is a beefy, Barbarian-type, man of the woods. I think Halgabron is the ideal man for a choose-your-own-adventure triology. He doesn’t need a surname or a first name, he’s heroic enough already. Although perhaps in the final chapter when his true identity as a lost prince or heir to the wealthy laird comes out, his proper name can be revealed (and go on for two pages).

Or perhaps Halgabron is a place where people live, a dark hamlet. It’s a wooded place on a nastily steep slope. Everything seems normal at first…

Halgabron comes from the name of a house near my parents. But I think “Halgabron” has a life of its own and it’s a shame to leave it in metal letters painted white on the gate of a surburban house with shingle drive. Appears to be the name of somewhere in Cornwall near Tintagel, but I think its bigger than that too.

Shifting picture

I keep thinking of the future, but the future is shifting.

In Back to the Future, Michael J Fox’s character has a picture which alters as he tinkers with the past, making the future less and less certain. His brother and sister disappear from the photo because it looks increasingly likely that their parents will never meet, fall in love and have children.

I have my own version of the photo in my head, but it shifts constantly. Sometimes I see a family photo with curly haired children and a doting, slap-stick father. Other times it’s me alone, probably fairly happy with lots of friends and interests, but with a job not a family. In the first I’m fat and baking cakes. Surely my cheeks will never look that ruddy? In the second I’m thin, surrounded by books, and, although you can’t tell from the photo, probably listening to opera. My greying hair is swept back into a severe bun, but is set off nicely by my black dress. Like Marty’s photo, as things shift – lonely spinster to family matriarch – things fade in and out of the scene. Possibilities and impossibilities swill around like clothes in a washing machine.

Usually the future is a half-done sketch. Places, circumstances are still to be sketched in, but the bare bones are there. It’s not even a work in progress, but a doodle on the back of a gas bill tucked in between the books on the shelves. In time I’ll find it and think it was strange I ever thought the future would turn out that way, but I don’t spend much time thinking about it in the present.

But now I am like an irritable painter with the easel set up, the light in the attic room just right, my pens and pencils set out before me, the floor is neat and tidy and there’s no more procrastinating to do… but the inspiration is nowhere. I keep starting something and tearing it up again. I need to get it get it right. I can’t just put it away and forget about it.

In Back to the Future, of course, Marty gets his parents to fall in love, saves the day, and his siblings reappear in the photo. I’m not sure what’s going to set in mine yet.

metamorphosis

The Tadpole by E E Gould

Underneath the water weeds
Small and black, I wiggle,
And life is most suprising!
Wiggle! waggle! wiggle!

There's every now and then a most
Exciting change in me,
I wonder, wiggle! waggle!
What I shall turn out to be!

Heavyweight postmodernists face off

I don't know very much about either Italo Calvino or Paul Auster, and although I (so far) like Calvino - I think his dissection of the process of writing and reading insightful yet funny - and I (so far) don't like Paul Auster - he is cruel, in New York Triology the readers and characters are pawns in an apparently meaningless game for Auster's pleasure alone, I think they have quite a lot of similarities.

In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Calvino imagines two writers obsessively watching the other while they write; and a third author frozen in writer's block because he can only think of a reader reading the perfect book he hasn't written. In Auster's Ghost Story in the triology, an author can only write when being watched by a character whose only purpose is to watch him.

So I was surprised to read Auster dismissing Calvino out of hand in this interview

(http://www.bluecricket.com/auster/links/secret.html).

Interviewer: Have you read Italo Calvino
Auster: A couple of books. I'm not a big fan ... I get bored with it.

Beware the adaptationist paradigm

The theory of evolution is one of my favourite things in the world. When scientists talk of an “elegant” theory, this is what they mean. People who deny evolution on religious ground without understanding it make me cross.

Evolution is not a belief, evolution is.

Part of the problem is that too many people don’t understand evolution – it doesn’t happen by chance, although variation, which itself is partly random, is a central part of how evolution works.

However, it is too easy to view everything as an evolved adaptation as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin wrote in their seminal 1979 paper “The Spandrels of San Marco” (http://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/wescourses/2004s/ees227/01/spandrels.html).

They called for a pluralistic view of evolutionary biology rather than for organisms to be broken down in constituents parts, like a box full of lego that was once a pirate ship. Although they were writing 27 years ago, I think their comments still have relevance. It may be easy to come up with an adaptive hypothesis without fully considering the alternatives.

They wrote that not every body part, for instance, has arisen for an adaptive reason, partly because the body evolved not discretely but as a whole, but this doesn’t mean that the particular body part has no role. In the sphere of architecture they point out that in St Mark’s cathedral in Venice one might assume that the richly decorated “spandrels” below the dome were designed as upside-down triangles on purpose. The fact is, they are actually holding up the dome! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel)

“One must not confuse the fact that a structure is used in some way … with the primary evolutionary reason for its existence and conformation.”

Further, using adaptations as an explanation appeals to the human mind, because we like stories. But telling stories is not scientific and a new explanation can always be invented if an old one turns out to be unsatisifcatory. “Since the range of adaptive stories is as wide as our minds are fertile, new stories can always be postulated.”

“Often, evolutionists use consistency with natural selection as the sole criterion and consider their work done when they concoct a plausible story... The key to historical research lies in devising criteria to identify proper explanations among the substantial set of plausible pathways to any modern result.” They called for a more holistic approach which “could put organisms, with all their recalcitrant yet intelligible complexity, back into evolutionary theory”.

Living language

“Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can only be lived, second by second, which cannot be recorded or remembered? First comes this wordless language of living bodies … then the words books are written with, and attempts to translate that first language are vain…”

From “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” by Italo Calvino

hairy legs, men don't know

This is something that has been really bugging me for a while. People [men] who say that the hair on women's legs can't physically grow thicker after shaving because it's dead cells.

Well I disagree, but please don't imagine my legs.

Surely as hair is rooted in a living cell it can respond to external stimuli? Anorexic girls are known to grow more hairy which is partly the body's response to getting colder after losing body fat (although maybe this is also a response to altered hormone levels). Surely it you chop off a hair at the root the cell the hair comes from can sense this through the reduced amount of pressure on this, and come back thicker to try and counteract this in future...

I admit my eureka moment needs a little more work, but surely, is this not at least possible?

top ten views in the UK

In Japan I visited the "third best view in Japan" which is Miyajima, a bright red torrey gate to a shinto shrine set in the sea near Hiroshima. Japanese sightseeing was a bit like that. "I went to see an amazing castle at the weekend, but shame it didn't make the top three." "Did you like the nightingale floor in Nijo Jo?" "Not as good as the secret passages in Matsumoto, mate."

But who thinks that in England? I went to Hever Castle, but I wish it had been Hampton Court. I climbed up Pen-y-fan but I reckon Cader Idris has a better view....

So what are the top ten views/vistas in the UK & Ireland? Here are some suggestions: the Giant's Causeway (N Ireland), a white horse in Wiltshire (which one?), view from Parliament Hill/Primose Hill across London, the white cliffs of Dover/Purbeck, Stonehenge, Avebury stone circle, Tintern Abbey, Big Ben/Westminster, Fort William/Loch Lomond, St Paul's Cathedral (from the millenium bridge), Battersea Power Station (well I can see it from my flat), Hay Tor Dartmoor, Loch Nevis/Glen Nevis & Glenfinnan viaduct (featured in the Harry Potter films), Arthur's set in Edinburgh, all of the Lake District, Clifton suspension bridge (for industrial chique). And probably some really obvious ones I missed.

That's more than ten, and not many are suited to the pre-requisite of Japanese tourism - one perfect and easily reachable viewing spot with photographer. You may as well superimpose yourself on a postcard.

quietly breathing

Quietly breathing. Sung in an erotically charged with faux threatening tone by indie limp boys Menswear. That's not really the image I'm thinking, more toddling on, just breathing. That's it for now.