The amoeba was always my favorite
I haven’t had my scopes out since I moved, but I was once a keen amateur microscopist. A pond dipper, mostly. Microscopy and astronomy are two areas of scientific study where a non-professional can make important discoveries (that’s the motto of Microscopy UK, which publishes the excellent free online mag Micscape).
I didn’t make any discoveries, important or otherwise. I made bowls of stinky hay infusions. And microphotography rigs that relied on duct tape, balance and the power of prayer.
I didn’t even really learn anything about protozoa. I spent hours and hours staring down the tube going, “ZOMG! That hairy thing just ate that blobby thing!”
I loved every minute of it.
If you want to see some spectacularly good pictures of hairy things and blobby things, check out the Flickr page of Proyecto Agua — the Water Project. It’s a pond-dipping and photography project of the Laboratory of Natural Sciences of the Institute of La Rioja in Spain.
I particularly recommend the videos (why, yes, there’s an amoeba proteus).
It took me an improbable number of years to find an amoeba, by the way. My dad was all, “amoeba? Pff! That’s the easiest one!”
We have really dumb arguments in my family.
September 8, 2010 — 10:45 pm
Comments: 30
21st Century rag pickers
Huh. I should’ve known. You can go onto eBay and buy a flipping IBM AT if you have a mind to, so I can surely find a motherboard and CPU to match the six-year-old machine that died on me. Or match as near as dammit.
Yeah. I decided now is probably not the time to splash out on a specialist Photoshop rig.
It’s amazing how much old tech is out there for sale — some of it new in the original boxes! Mostly scavenged, though.
It’s a market that eBay has made huge, but there was always a grubby dumpster-diving ethos to personal computing. At least down at my end of the market.
When we were in London, there was a regular computer fair at Crystal Palace, with some very dodgy characters selling very dodgy gear. I loved that.
But I’ll never forget my very first computer fair. Must have been 1985 or so. The smell of several hundreds of geeks in a conference room was indescribable.
And there was a cluster of nuns waiting in line to go in.
I thought, “Nuns! Computing! That is so awesome!”
Anyhow. Excuse me. Somewhere out there, there’s an MSI MS-6788 with my name on it.
September 7, 2010 — 11:26 pm
Comments: 8
Bad, BAD dog!
“Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true,” he told a crowd largely consisting of union members.
Any idea what President Sissybaby is on about here?
September 6, 2010 — 9:42 pm
Comments: 30
A train and his blankee
Uncle B snuck into the engineering shed and took this picture. The blanket, he says, really is to keep the little sucker warm.
Today we rode part of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch line. Which really ought to be called the Hythe, Dymcurch and Romney, because Dymchurch is in the middle. Or, actually, the Hythe, Romney and Dungeness, as that’s the two ends and the middle, but the Dungeness part was added later.
Whatever.
The RHDR is a giant train set built in the Twenties by two eye-wateringly rich men: Captain J. E. P. Howey and Count Louis Zborowski (who built and raced the “Chitty Bang Bang” Mercedes). Zborowski wrapped himself around a tree in the Italian Grand Prix of 1924, before the first two engines were delivered, but Captain Howey soldiered on.
The trains are one-third full size locomotives, built to run at 25mph on rails 15 inches apart, from Dungeness to Hythe — which is maybe twenty miles. They’re butt-punishing miles — the coaches are tiny things with wooden seats — but it’s a great run. In addition to the usual sheep and cows and fields of ripe wheat, a large part of the route runs right past row after row of back gardens.
An Englishman’s back garden is an intensely personal space, so it’s fun to see a bunch of them (the ones that weren’t fenced off, anyhow), from the scruffiest to the manicured. There was one huge train set (natch). In some, people sat out on the lawn and waved as the train went by (a think I can totally see myself doing with a cup of coffee or bottle of beer).
The line was requisitioned during WWII and ran up and down — I shit you not — a tiny armored train with an anti-aircraft gun mounted on it — they have a reproduction in the yard. It was there to protect workers on Operation PLUTO, which was itself a pretty remarkable thing…for some other post, perhaps.
Our engine today was the Hurricane. But the one in the picture is The Bug, which started life on the RHDR but found its way to a scrap heap for many years. And then back again. Hurrah!
Have a good weekend, everyone!
September 3, 2010 — 10:40 pm
Comments: 18
At midnight, my brain turned into a pumpkin
Yes! This could be my lamest Photoshop EVARRR!
What happened was, I spent the evening working on a P’shop, and it just never really gelled. And midnight rolled around and there I was, stuck.
Doesn’t happen to me very often. Usually, I celebrate my crappiest work right up there with my…somewhat less crappy work.
Hey, recognize that brain? It’s the same brain from yesterday. It turns up at the bottom of the first page of hits on a Google image search of “brain.” It’s sort of my go-to brain for P’shops: nice big three-quarter view set against an easily maskable black background.
Oh, lord…I have a favorite internet brain photo. Somebody pour me a gin and tonic.
September 2, 2010 — 11:30 pm
Comments: 11
Quantum of stupid
I don’t know why Cindy Sheehan popped into my head this afternoon (her presence somehow made it emptier up there). Turns out, she’s got a radio show. And, while I’m sure it’s full of all kinds of comedic gems, I got as far as Tommy Chong and my brain exploded.
Cindy Sheehan interviews Tommy Chong.
BANG!
I kind of hate myself for posting this. I feel more than a little sorry for both these characters — two fundamentally damaged people who were badly and very publicly used (if not quite in the way they believe they were).
On the other hand — Cindy Sheehan interviews Tommy Chong.
BANG!
Transcript here. Or listen here (skip ten minutes in; the first lady has a voice — no shit — even more annoying than Cindy’s).
Or — you know what? Don’t. I don’t want a bunch of nukular cerebrums on my conscience.
September 1, 2010 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 20
Bedtime story
This creepy dude is from the church of St George in Brede, where yesterday’s creepy box came from.
Things we know about him that are probably true: his name was Sir Goddard Oxenbridge. Known as the Giant of Brede, he was a powerful but a pious and peace-loving man. He was knighted by Henry VIII in 1509 and his daughter was the Princess Elizabeth’s governess. He died in 1531 and is buried in the church (presumably, right here under this thing).
Things we know about him that are probably not true: he was seven feet tall and he ate children. He had a crow for a familiar and was enormously strong. He could not be harmed by metal weapons.
Children from all over Sussex disappeared without a trace for years and reappeared on his table, but Oxenbridge was so powerful that no-one dared complain to the king.
So one day the children of the county took matters into their own hands. They rolled a huge barrel of mead (or perhaps beer) to the Groaning Bridge on Stubb Lane and lay in wait. The giant loved him some booze. He found the barrel, drank it up and passed out dead drunk in the middle of the bridge.
Then the children leapt out with a special saw they had made out of wood — the children of West Sussex took one end, the children of East Sussex took the other — and sawed that sonofabitch right in half. You can see the blood stains to this day.
Mmmmm…okay, it’s rust. And the story probably comes from the smugglers who used Oxenbridge’s old estate, Brede Place, to store contraband when it fell into disuse in the 18th Century. They put it about that Goddard’s ghost still haunted the place to keep people away.
But there he is in the church. And the Groaning Bridge is still there. And Brede Place is still there, and persistently reported to be haunted over many years. So hold a happy thought…
August 31, 2010 — 10:22 pm
Comments: 7
I think the vicar sleeps in it
An old chest in a church we visited today. No idea what they use it for or how old it is, though this is an old, old one. Parts of this church are apparently Anglo Saxon — the parish was mentioned in the time of Alfred the Great (848-900) — but most of it was merely Norman. Ha!
It’s a three-day weekend here in Limeyland, so today continued our rounds of the Summer festivities. In addition to village fêtes, there’s also a tradition of church flower festivals, and some villages may have both a fête and a flower festival as separate events. Today we went to a flower festival.
This is an odd one. The church picks a theme — the one we saw today was “nursery rhymes” — and the ladies (presumably) make little tableaux and flower arrangements on the topic all around the inside of the church.
You’re handed a program explaining what’s what and by whom, and you walk around the church eyeballing stuff. Then you sit in the pews and drink tea and eat cake.
The cat and the fiddle on the high altar and fruitcake on somebody’s grave.
The English are weird.
August 30, 2010 — 9:43 pm
Comments: 24
Satan’s Circus is back in town!
Okay, okay…it’s really Santus Circus. Still, it’s awfully Bradbury.
Went tonight. Loved it.
This funky little troupe tours all over Southeast England in Summer. Has done for more years than we’ve been here. We go when it reaches Rye, which is always late August. It pretty much heralds the end of Summer for us.
As the circus hardware has gotten scruffier, the acts have gotten better. It’s the opening up of Eastern Europe and the Far East, I think — they have powerful circus traditions and lots of people looking for work.
This year, the stars were a troupe of acrobats from China, and man did they earn their billing. They did, like, six different performances in between the other acts.
Adorable little monkeys. I really, really wanted to take them home as pets, but Uncle B said they eat too much.
Poor Uncle B. He’s having a shit time of it lately. This morning, he woke to find his laptop computer had fallen six inches off the foot-stool and his brand new hard drive seized up tighter’n a tick. Stone dead. That’s his second new one this month; the first was faulty. (Yeah. You remember how much fun it is to reload your operating system from scratch).
Don’t get me started about the exhaust system falling off the car.
In conclusion — SQUEEEE:
Have a good weekend, everyone! Hey, our friend Monotone the Elderish has started a blog. Go pester him for a while.
August 27, 2010 — 10:29 pm
Comments: 19
Join us, won’t you?
Here you go — courtesy of Uncle B — six minutes of our adventure on the Kent and East Sussex. All the good video editing software was on the desktop machine, so he had to cobble this together using free crap. There was much growlings and swearings.
The videos in the YouTube sidebar aren’t ours, but there’s lots of good locomotive porn in there if you’ve a mind to see more of the K&ESR.
Not into trains? No problem! How about this adorable orphaned baby stoat raised in captivity and then released in the wild?
Yes, putting in all these text links was a huge pain in the ass, but WordPress auto-embeds the video if you don’t.
August 26, 2010 — 9:41 pm
Comments: 23