As It Was In The Beginning, Word Without End...

This version with slightly annoying Spanish subtitles is the best I can find of what is possibly one of the finest closing sequences of a TV series.

Alice's Restaurant - The Original 1967 Recording

Macro or micro?

Scientists Stephen Young and Paul Kelly have taken or processed these remarkable images. Stephen specialises in the extremely small. Paul takes the larger, landscape views. As this article in Smithsonianmag discusses, it isn't always as obvious which is which as one might think! The image above, for example could be fields in a countryside of interesting crops. It's actually a dragonfly wing, viewed through an electron microscope.

So, their competition is this. Can you tell which of the following are macro or micro? There are answers at the end.

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Answers:

1. Macro: Lakes surrounded by steep sand dunes in the Gobi Desert in China’s Inner Mongolia (Data downloaded from the European Space Agency. Additional image processing by Stephen Young.)

2. Micro: A polished mineral surface (Imaged and processed by Paul Kelly)

3. Macro: The Matusevich Glacier in East Antarctica (Original image: NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team. Additional image processing by Stephen Young.)

4. Macro: Sand dunes in Algeria’s Sahara desert (Landsat Thematic Mapper data downloaded from the Global Land Cover Facility. Image processing by Stephen Young.)

5. Macro: Cumulus clouds over the South Pacific Ocean (Image created by Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC, additional image processing by Stephen Young.)

6. Micro: A rotten human tooth (Imaged and processed by Paul Kelly)

7. Micro: The surface of a snake eggshell (Imaged and processed by Paul Kelly)

8. Micro: The interior of a leopard frog’s small intestine (Imaged and processed by Paul Kelly)

9. Macro: The Ganges-Brahmaptutra river delta in South Asia (Raw data downloaded from the Global Land Cover Facility and processed by Stephen Young)

10. Micro: A polished sample of boron (Imaged and processed by Paul Kelly)

11. Macro: White lines cutting through China’s Gobi Desert (Image downloaded from Satellite Image Corporation and cropped by Stephen Young)

12. Macro: Sea ice forming around Shikotan Island, at the southern end of the Kuril Islands, north of Japan (Image created by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon using data provided by the NASA EO-1 team. Downloaded and cropped from NASA’s Visible Earth website.)

13. Micro: The surface of a leopard frog’s tongue (Imaged and processed by Paul Kelly)

14. Macro: A Landsat thermal image of western Australia (Raw data downloaded from the Global Land Cover Facility and processed by Stephen Young)

15. Macro: A Landsat image from North Africa (Raw data downloaded from the Global Land Cover Facility and processed by Stephen Young)

All the images and answers reproduced from, and acknowledgements to: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/artscience/2013/10/macro-or-micro-test-your-sense-of-scale/#ixzz2iTAditUZ 

Test

Andrew Hill

X Factor UK

X Factor USA

American Idol

Fifty Sheds Of Grey

The novel “Fifty Shades Of Grey” has seduced women – and baffled blokes.

Now, Fifty Sheds Of Grey, offers a treat for the men. The book's author Colin Grey recounts his love encounters at the bottom of the garden. Here are some extracts...

Fifty Sheds Of Grey

We tried various positions – round the back, on the side, up against a wall...but in the end we came to the conclusion the bottom of the garden was the only place for a good shed.

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She knelt before me on the shed floor and tugged gently at first, then harder until finally it came.
I moaned with pleasure. Now for the other boot.

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Ever since she read THAT book, I’ve had to buy all kinds of ropes, chains and shackles.
She still manages to get into the shed, though.

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“Put on this rubber suit and mask,” I instructed, calmly.
“Mmmm, kinky!” she purred.
“Yes,” I said, “You can’t be too careful with all that asbestos in the shed roof.”

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“I’m a very naughty girl,” she said, biting her lip. “I need to be punished.”
So I invited my mum to stay for the weekend.

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“Harder!” she cried, gripping the workbench tightly. “Harder!”
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the gross national product of Nicaragua?”

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I lay back exhausted, gazing happily out of the shed window.
Despite my concerns about my inexperience, my rhubarb had come up a treat.

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“Are you sure you can take the pain?” she demanded, brandishing stilettos.
“I think so,” I gulped. “Here we go, then,” she said, and showed me the receipt.

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“Hurt me!” she begged, raising her skirt as she bent over my workbench.
“Very well,” I replied. “You’ve got fat ankles and no dress sense.”

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“Are you sure you want this?” I asked. “When I’m done, you won’t be able to sit down for weeks.”
She nodded.
“Okay,” I said, putting the three-piece lounge suite on eBay.

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“Punish me!” she cried. “Make me suffer like only a real man can!”
“Very well,” I replied, leaving the toilet seat up.

Fabulous 'video' view of Earth from the ISS

All you had was this one simple job to do...

Test post (to view an About.me link)

Slartibartfast would probably know

I am having trouble with measurements. I probably shouldn't think about these things too much but this has been on my mind for a while now. It's this business of how long something is. So the distance between some marks on my ruler is an inch or a centimetre - that's OK, I can cope with that for now. It all started with maps.

I looked at a map of the British Isles and wondered how long the coastline was - the bit around the mainland. It could have been any island - just happened to be the one I live on.

I used to have one of those smart wheel things that you could roll around a line and it would tell you how long it was. That would have been useful. A piece of string would be useful too. But there are quite a few wiggly bits. Not as bad as Norway, of course, but pretty bad none the less.

Walking around the coast with some gadget or other would provide an answer. But that misses out quite a few little ins and outs. Even if I could go around each of the little ins and outs, how far should I go up a river? OK, there could be a rule for that - up to the first crossing.

This gets tricky, though - not the rivers, I am reasonably content about them - the fiddly bits like rocks, stones, pebbles, small pebbles, tiny pebbles. Lumps on pebbles. Even if they all stayed in the same place and even if I could measure around them. The more 'accurate' I try to be, the higher the perimeter becomes. It's not the satisfying outcome of a figure that homes in towards something - these measurements just get wildly bigger and bigger the closer you get to what it is you're measuring.

I had hoped that you could have a triangle (or some other polygon that you know how to work out a perimeter for) that sort of fitted inside our national perimeter and then another that sat just outside it. Logically one would jump to the conclusion that the length we want would be somewhere between the two but no. the damn line in the margin between them wiggles around and gets even longer the longer you think about it.

There, something like that would have been nice. The answer would have been somewhere between the two. But no - all those wiggles cause so many problems.

Here's another example. A line looks simple and straight. But look closer and you see it has a bump. Look even closer and it has bumps on the bumps. Travel along the first line - say 3 units.

Travel along the second one and, if the bumps are even and a third of the line length, you'll go 5 units.

Go along the next iteration and you've got 25 bits, each say a third of the previous one, so you go 8.33 units.

I am guessing but I expect this just keeps rising rather than heading for some pleasant and mutually agreed figure. With even bumps like this it's all nice and fractal so there'll be a formula too. That would be nice to know if anyone cares to share it or I suppose I can work it out.

All this tells me, though, is that it is not possible to be very sure about how far it is along things. The numbers seem to get bigger and bigger. And yet we know that the Earth is only so big so there has to be a limit somewhere or we'd be talking about things that fall off the edge or make rockets redundant for Moon visits.

Am I missing something terribly obvious or is this measurement business just some convenient approximation we make in this Age and will one day be looked upon as a bit silly.

Surrealistic Pillow - the full album

With White Rabbit and Today likely to be permanent entries in my all time top 40 tunes, I always thought I had this album but it was The Worst of Jefferson Airplane that I bought in 1970. So I've just found a whole new bundle of their earlier, and possibly best before the drugs and breakdowns and chaos of music in the 70s took its toll on Grace Slick and friends.

A marvellous way to spend half an hour if you have one to spare.

1967 links

There is something quite special about this performance from 1967. One of the great tracks of the time that wasn't a big time hit. The girl singer with them is PP Arnold who had had her own hit a little earlier with The First Cut Is The Deepest.

This then took me to PP Arnold's hit and then Billie Davis' version of Angel Of The Morning on which Kiki Dee and PP Arnold were the backing singers.



Don't you just love music? And that was all caused by Wendy James tweeting the Small Faces in the first place.

Propaganda²