Bluebeard

Thanks to all of you who sponsored me to have my beard dyed blue in aid of Practical Action. This charity was called Intermediate Technology and was supported in the 1980s by some of my heroes. It works to use sensible technology to make life better for poor people in remote places. As such, it is a good outworking of Physics principles. I'm raising money for solar powered wells.
The dye experiment has been problematic. We put on three lots of dye but I was left with a pale turquoise "blue rinse". Beard hair is too strong. I've been told that peroxide bleaching would break up the hair allowing it to absorb more dye. I've tried the chemists but you can't buy it any more following high profile bomb plots. However I have learned a lot about Chemistry in the process. I'll keep you posted...

Water meter

It hasn't rained very much in the south for months. Funnily enough, the only day of rain coincided with our visit to Oxford! It has become common to have a water meter if you don't have many people living in your house. I was interested to note that the volume was measured in cubic metres. Note from the photograph that it measures to the nearest 1000th of a cubic metre, which is actually a litre. You are not billed to that precision though.
The booklet that came wih the metre alarmed me. The number of people is a discrete variable and so this data should really have been plotted as a bar graph. Whereabouts should one person read their typical usage volume??

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

Here is a link to a BBC programme. The warning is that it could be considered to have a left-wing bias, but if you are aware of that and think clearly, you are quite capable of making up your own mind.

What I liked was that he goes through the history of the idea of ecosystems. The Physics link is that some people modelled the feedback mechanisms using electronic circuits. Later it was discovered that the systems were far more complex than imagined. Though they didn't say in the programme, this would bring it under the topic of Chaos Theory in Physics.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011rbws/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_of_Loving_Grace_The_Use_and_Abuse_of_Vegetational_Concepts/

Listen to this Guardian podcast

Matty Hoban is a former student of mine at The Becket School, Nottingham. He is currently doing a PhD in Physics in London. I have just found out that he appeared on the podcast of the Science section of the Guradian newspaper's website back in January. Amazing!

Here's the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/audio/2011/jan/31/science-weekly-podcast-supercomputer-ikea-archaeology

Tensioning weights for railway cables

This photograph is from the high speed line to the Channel Tunnel just north of the River Thames in Essex. You can see similar on the viaducts in Carlisle. They are to put tension into the cables to keep them taut. They are made of concrete and you put on different numbers, just like the slotted masses we use in the lab. Notice the intricate system of insulators to stop electrical conduction. And in this case you can call them weights, not masses, because gravity is pulling them down. I came across a fantastic quotation from Sir Patrick Moore: "Gravity is the force that gives weight to mass."

I think we've found coal

We went to stay at the highest pub in Britain, set in bleak moorland just over the county boundary into Yorkshire. As you can see from the photograph, it was a mining inn. What was odd was that they were mining coal. I am struggling to think of a coal mine that high up. We walked along the Pennine Way for a couple of miles and found this black outcrop of rocks. I guess it must be coal. Closer inspection revealed poor shale not really good enough for burning, but look at the think layers of sandstone between the shales. This would suggest episodes of flooding washing sand across the swamps that would have provided the mud and vegetation for the black shales. Not really physics, I know, but I love geology too.

Cairngorm Mountain

We drove through the night on Friday to see rare wildlife in the woods at dawn. Mid-morning we were up watching the skiers on Cairngorm Mountain. They get them up the mountain with a funicular railway. You can see it snaking upm to the ski station on the second picture. In fact, there are two trains that are strung together on a long cable. One goes up whilst the other comes down. Hence gravity is doing a lot of the work of lifting the lower train as the upper train falls. The falling train gives its gravitational potential energy to the rising train. It is a single track but there is a short section of double track half way. There is no other place where they will meet because they are tied by a cable.