Yesterday, for the first time ever, I installed an operating system and it went like a dream so I am feeling smug even if it is on the back of the skill of some anonymous Microsoft team. Today's pages of the notebook have many different things so there may be no connection between paragraphs.
First up is this article about Art and Accessibility which I think is related to an earlier announcement that The Government wants to expose children to more high culture. I passed this article about whether Bonekickers will be recommissioned as well. And now hopefully the last in found articles - this one about the prospect of an atheist Prime Minister. Tomorrow will all be from the Telegraph - I promise.
Next on the page is a random doodle which is my idea of what a strangelet will look like when it eventually screeches to a halt in front of the detectors at CERN and poses for Torchwood. Following this is a linked note which states that using the number of stars in the universe as a measure of how many addresses the next generation of Internet protocols will be able to handle is flawed as most people have no idea of what order of magnitude that number lies in. I know I don't. And then my daughter phoned me to ask how old the sun was and whether that meant it was still young or getting on a bit. She did say she would accept an estimate which was quite lucky as we have forgotten to buy a birthday card. Anyway - the answer is 4-and-a-half billion years old which is about half-way through its main sequence life cycle.
I have to mention Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery which yesterday examined the development of brain surgery, including some eye-opening (literally eye-opening for the victims) photographs of the madman Doctor Freeman, in the middle of Transorbital lobotomies. I'm not really sure that pushing an ice-pick through an eye socket and waggling it about a bit should actually be considered surgery but it was a major part of 20th century brain medicine and had to be included. The rest of the programme was about much more measured procedures from the early experiments using many artery clamps to stop bleeding to the almost bloodless implantation of electrodes to counteract the symptoms of Parkinson's disease. The running theme was an operation on a young woman with a vascular abnormality in her brain which caused epileptic fits. The removal of the affected part of the brain had to be done with the patient fully conscious in order to check that no important sections were damaged. In another section of the programme, the presenter - Michael Mosley - was challenged to perform simple motor tasks while his motor cortex was interfered with by heavy-duty magnets. While the startling affect on his movements was the main payoff for this, I was intrigued by the thin metal probe which produced detailed MRI-like pictures of the brain when placed near his head. I think the word he used was "cool".
Next is this from The Daily WTF which sums up several systems I have been involved in.
And finally we have this story about the attempt on the wind land speed record. I was struggling to understand how a sail-powered vehicle could manage to travel at several times the real wind speed. I did have some idea that it would be The Bernoulli Effect but I struggle to reconcile a wind speed of 40 kmh giving a forward "lift" of 120 kmh. I tried to imagine a jet fighter travelling at high speed managing to get a lift rate of twice it's own forward speed. Of course Greenbird is designed to produce this speed but it all sounds a little counter-intuitive to me.
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