Very interesting. Did a very quick and simple IQ test I found on the Internet (expecting it to be completely useless) and it came up with the same number from a “professional” test that took well over an hour. Obviously worth a go if you want to know and you’re short of time.

IQ

We are it seems surrounded by trouble and strife.  What I have written below came into my head almost complete – in one go.  I don’t believe it came from God  But it might have

I live in the south of the U.K. and I am defined by the Government of the day as English.  Do I, together with the millions who live with me in England actually “own” this land?  Already I hope you can see what a stupid question this is, and where it is leading.  Of course you do not “own” the land.  For the moment you are a mere squatter on the piece of dirt where you were dropped by your mother and that’s about it.  If you are extremely lucky you might be allowed to squat on your patch for around 80 years or so, not much more, and the way most of you go about business, it is likely to be a helluva lot less.  But don’t you at least “own” the house you live in, the one that you have bought and paid for?  Well you might think so, but does the house?  When you peg out and the house belongs to someone else will they now “own” the house, or will they like you just be squatting there for a short time?

You do not own the patch of land you and your neighbours are squatting on, you are (very) temporary custodians, and to be frank, you’re making a pretty shit job of it on the whole.  No land, country or house within a country actually belongs to you – you are simply a temporary squatter, get used to it.

Second in the list.  We have a group of Philosophies that create anything but the peace and goodwill they claim to champion, we come to Religions.  Don’t know if you’ve managed to work this one out for yourself yet (personal observation says that you haven’t) but every Religion on the planet is man-made.  Do you get that?  Every faith that you follow has been cobbled together by a man or a group of men.  There is NOTHING that can be pointed to that has come “directly from God”.  A man writes down words that he says God spoke to him.  There’s a name for people that hear voices.  A man claims that God has written “His thoughts” in stone, in metal sheet, on papyrus – you name it, God has written on it.  You actually believe that?  You don’t think for a nanosecond that the bloke that produces these wondrous relics actually wrote the stuff himself?  Let me have your name and address – I’d like to do business with you.  There may well be a God, but if there is, He does not intervene in your everyday life and He does not count the fall of every sparrow.  It is now long overdue for you to start growing up – you need to start taking responsibility for your own actions – and that’s very painful.

Lastly, your ever so finite lifetime.  Your one glimpse through the extremely narrow window to have a peek at what’s going on around here.  The full window stretches to 4.5 billion years into the past, and quite a few billion years into the future, with or without Homo Sapiens treading the Earth, almost certainly without I would say the way things are going.  You have this infinitesimally small window of a few decades (at best) that you are allowed to glimpse through and yet you act on a daily basis as if you have an infinity of time stretched out in front of you.  Sorry but you don’t.  The afterlife is something made up by the people in charge that don’t want their workforce going nuts on them.  There are Indians in the Amazonian rain forest who on their deathbed will wail and scream before just death, Christians think this is atrocious and attempt to placate them with their Religion.  Bloody right you should wail and scream before death because that’s the end of your all too brief time on this wondrous world, your allotted span has come to an end and you will not be around to see how things turn out.  A finite lifetime is a stinking trick, a pretty sick joke, and we’re all the comedians.

Now tell me again what exactly you are fighting about and what you are so ready to lay down your (very short) life for.

POSTSCRIPT:

You come into this world with nothing, and you leave it likewise.  The only thing you do have any control over is how much harm, or good, you do during your watch.

It does not diminish the beauty of a sunset to know a little bit about it.

Smart man!

Yesterday’s “Pointless” programme on BBC1 had me more than a little confused and I just looked up the life of Marie Curie to try and sort out my confusion.

One of the question categories was on Marie Curie, and two of the questions in the category were:

(1) What element did she discover?  (2) What subject was her Nobel Prize in?

I thought I knew both answers.  For the first I knew the element was Polonium, named after her native Poland.  However the contestant answered Radium and that is the answer that “Pointless” had as well.  Turns out that Marie Curie discovered BOTH Radium and Polonium – how about that then!!

For the second question I knew she had a Nobel Prize in Physics, but the female contestant wasn’t sure if her Nobel Prize was in Physics or Chemistry.  “Pointless” gave the answer as Physics.  Once again the correct answer is BOTH!!!!!  She got the Prize in Physics in 1903 and the Prize in Chemistry in 1911.  The only other person to receive 2 Nobel Prizes in two separate disciplines was Linus Pauling who won the Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Peace Prize in 1962.  You may be wondering about John Bardeen.  John Bardeen also got two Nobel Prizes, but both were in the same discipline – Physics.  In 1956 he got the Prize for semiconductor and transistor theory, and in 1972 he got the prize for his part in the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) theory of superconductivity.

Now ain’t that all interesting?

There is some current web-wisdom going around that the human eye is unable to see polarised light – this is about as accurate as the observations of Mars as big as the full Moon.

With nothing better to do whilst sunbathing on a beach on a Greek island I practically put it to the test whether I could see regions of polarised light or not with the naked eye.

If you’ve done some basic optics you will know that if you look at the regions 90 degrees horizontally to the right and the left of the Sun, then these regions should be quite highly polarised.  Why?  Because any dust (dielectric) in these regions will be receiving light from the Sun at a glancing (shallow) angle and the light that is reflected from the dielectric towards your eye will be polarised.

I took a look at these two regions with the naked eye and saw nothing unusual.  I then picked up my Polaroid sunglasses and rotated them in front of my eye over these regions.  A bright patch appeared and disappeared depending on the orientation of the sunglasses, this was clearly a region emitting polarised light.  Now knowing precisely where to look I checked it out with the naked eye and could clearly see two mauve/purple regions precisely where the polarised light was coming from.  So the eye IS able to detect regions that are producing polarised light.  Mine can anyway

Symbiosis or Evolution, or maybe a little of both?  It doesn’t really matter.  If you don’t know what I’m on about in the first sentence then you need not read any further and it won’t ruin your day.

Gaia – lots of misconceptions here – Gaia is NOT an organism, Gaia is a system.  A system that includes both living, and what we call non-living objects.  You don’t believe me?  Well the living objects certainly have a massive impact on our Planet’s atmospheric composition.  You don’t believe me again?  Then why do you think those looking for life on other planets propose using spectroscopy to look at the atmospheric components – and thus the clue as to whether life exists there or not?

Or our seas, rich in algae and plankton not only do they have a huge atmospheric impact, these life forms also have a necessity for the sea’s PH to be within certain bounds for their very existence.  So what?

I have written published papers on Biomimetics where I state that if Nature has produced a solution, whether aerodynamic, optical or hydrodynamic to some survival problem, then that solution is likely to be highly optimised and we are unlikely to be able to improve upon it – apart from using materials (like metals) that Nature doesn’t seem to incorporate into her living systems to any great extent.  Note that the living systems are not “heading” towards some sort of “perfection”, there are random changes occurring that may, or may not aid survival.  Those changes that do aid survival will allow the continuation of the life form, and vice-versa.  There is no “intelligence” involved here, but there are enormous timescales involved, timescales beyond human comprehension – and this is what makes evolution such a difficult concept to grasp.  But just take two things from this paragraph – very long timescales, and changes to living organisms that bring them more into “balance” with their surroundings in order to increase their probability of survival.

It is believed that the Earth is around 4.54 billion years old, and that life on Earth began around 3.8 billion years ago, unless you’re one of those that believe life began around 4,004 B.C.  So life has had 3.8 billion years to thrive, multiply, evolve and undergo symbiosis, creating billions upon billions of different bacteria, viruses, plants, animals, insects and birds – and during these geological timescales all these life forms have been undergoing change to increase their probability of survival in an environment that was also undergoing change.

In 2014 A.D. we are over 3.8 billion years down the life road, and the “system” that has evolved over all this time, Gaia, is now taking a very severe bashing from just one species – Homo Sapiens.  The system is actually having bloody great holes cut out of it, and what happens if you have a highly complex system in a quasi-equilibrium state and you take bloody great holes out of it?  It changes of course in an attempt to regain some sort of quasi-equilibrium.  And how does it do that?  How the hell do we know?  This is a multi-billion, probably multi-trillion component system we’re talking about here – who can possibly know how such a complex system reacts to the wiping out of whole animal species, and the felling of obscene areas of rain forest?  This is not Gaia “fighting back” as some sort of conscious organism that feels pain (I hope) – this is a complex life/non-life system in quasi-equilibrium that is having severe external constraints put upon the system – by our complete disrespect for our planet basically.

Is there global warming, climate change, melting of the polar ice caps, massive increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, life-form extinctions and a myriad other worrying things going on right now?  Some will argue that some of these things are not happening, and that some may be happening but they are “natural” occurrences and not the work of Homo Sapiens.  Then again, the average Homo Sapiens, like the Ostrich, is a master at sticking his head in a bucket of sand.

A new course is available at the New Forest Observatory for those wishing to set up their own “Mini-WASP array”.

A friend on one of the astronomy forums asked me if these would be any good for taking flats:

Any good?  They are utterly superb!!!!!!!!!!!!  AND they are cheap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  AND you can get an A3 or even an A2 panel (also CHEAP) if you have a large aperture scope.

I think these guys may find they have an unknown market out there for their drawing light boxes

Just been told I got today’s Earth Science Picture of the Day (EPOD) http://epod.usra.edu/

Took a look, and yep, sure enough, my favourite insect – the Morpho Rhetenor butterfly which kindly provided me with the Patent design for a new type of Photonic Crystal

Thank you Jim at EPOD for continuing to publish my work.

Here is the current status of the mini-WASP array as of beginning May 2014.  The latest addition is the autofocuser for the Canon 200mm prime lens fitted to the top plate.  So we have:

1)  A Megrez 80 used as a guide scope together with an SX guide camera connected to one of the M26Cs.

2)  A TS80 triplet APO with 48mm IDAS filter and an M26C OSC CCD.

3)  A second TS80 triplet APO with 48mm IDAS filter and an M26C OSC CCD.

4)  A Sky 90 with a 52mm IDAS filter, filter-wheel with H-alpha, H-beta, OIII and SII narrowband filters and an M26C OSC CCD.

5)  A Canon 200mm prime lens with a 72mm IDAS filter and an M26C OSC CCD.

Probably enough for anyone