The Four Ages Of Sand

Answer to "What is it? 261"

Ha,I should have known Alan would get this one

Wire from a Champagne/fizzy wine cork.

Posted by: Alan | May 29, 2012 at 07:44 AM

And we only drink the good stuff here in Hatfield by the way

Oh, Ok it was a gift from Nick.  

 

 

 

Another day, another incunabulum

Despite spending a lot of time on my new hobby (details coming soon) I'm still finding time to sell on ebay. Sales are now heading towards £300, which means, a) our household has avoided a Greek-style default for another month, and b) I can keep buying new stuff. 

The Craftsman newspaper from 1732 sold for a tenner (exactly what I paid for it 4 years ago) 

And the Gentleman's Magazine from 1734 sold for a measly £7 

 

Up on ebay now, is one of my more special pieces, a post-incunabula leaf from the Biblij  Czeska W Benatkach Tisstena: The Holy Bible in Bohemian.  Printed  in Venice, Italy, by Peter Lichtenstein in 1506.

Truth be told, I'm getting rather low on antiquarian stuff to sell, so I've taken to raiding UniM's wardrobes. I've already posted one of her (literally) many dozens of bags up for a 99p start, and 18 people are watching it already, so fingers crossed. 

If the time comes to confess what I've done, I will, but my guess is she'll never notice. As you can see, it's still in its wrappings:

 

 

 

 

The mechanics of memory

Interesting that with all the progress in the field of neuroscience, we still don't know exactly how memories are stored in the brain.

 Nick and I are off to a lecture on the subject at The Royal Society tomorrow given by Professor Tim Bliss FRS:

How does the brain store and recall memories? A critical neural component of memory is the synapse, a specialist junction where one nerve cell releases a transmitter chemical to influence the excitability of another. Memorable events are thought to induce long-lasting changes in the strength of synapses in the neural network activated by the event. It is this pattern of strengthened or weakened synapses that encodes the neural trace or memory of the event. The discovery over forty years ago of a phenomenon called long-term potentiation confirmed that appropriate patterns of synaptic activity can indeed induce long-lasting changes in synaptic strength in the hippocampus, a cortical structure known to be required for the laying down of new memories. This lecture will discuss how the study of long-term potentiation has led to a greater understanding of the physiological mechanisms of memory, and how this information might be used to enhance memory and to treat memory disorders. 

As  they say at work, we'll be 'cascading' our findings on Thursday. 

 

 

June 6th: A once in a lifetime opportunity, but I'm not sure I can be bothered...

Thanks to David for reminding me about this: Would you like to see the planet Venus silhouetted against the Sun?  Well, your chance comes up next week, and if you miss it you'll have to wait 115 years.  

Here's how it will appear from London, at sunrise on June 6th. Click on the image to animate the gif. Or you can generate your own here:

http://astro.ukho.gov.uk/nao/transit/V_2012/ 

As you can see, the problem is that from the UK you can only see the last part of the transit, and even then you'll be lucky to catch it because it ends completely just a few minutes after sunrise: (interior egress is when the edge of Venus starts cross the edge of the sun, and exterior egress is when the last part disappears) 

"Taking London as an example, sunrise occurs at 03^h46^m (UT) in the north-eastern sky. The final stages of the transit are in progress at sunrise. Venus starts to cross the solar limb at interior egress at 04^h37^m (UT), and the transit ends with exterior egress at 04^h55^m (UT)."

Transits of Venus comes in pairs every 100 years or so. I was there for the last one, in June 2004, but I'm not sure I'll be getting up at 4 in the morning just to take a chance of seeing the last slice of Venus disappearing. 

What is it? 261

Internet was down again all day yesterday so I had to post by phone. Bloody unreliable Virgin Media. Though to be fair to them, they manage to take my money in full every month without any problems at all.

Actually, I should say that I THOUGHT I was posting by phone but although my BB said messages were posting up, in fact they weren't. 

It was clearly just one of those days...

Anyway, here's the wii from yesterday: 

The wisdom of Slime Mould

4AoS has discussed slime mould before. 

These bizarre organisms exhibit characteristics of both animals and fungi. The individual 'amoebae' live as a multicellular mass communicating by chemical signals:

http://www.dgsgardening.btinternet.co.uk/slime.htm

And although it's just a single celled organism some boffins think it exhibits some form of primitive intelligence:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/944790.stm

David's just sent in this fascinating article on the slime mould known as Physarum polycephalum. It can negotiate the shortest way through a maze  and solve complex mathematical challenges such as creating a Voronoi diagram and a Delaunay triangulation, which is pretty impressive. In truth, I can't even find the shortest way out of  a maze. 

 

Physarum polycephalum lives in
forests around the world. It feeds on various kinds of microscopic
particles. As it forages for food, protoplasmic tubes of slime
extend out and bifurcate like tree branches; whenever it happens
upon a source of nutrients, it gathers into a bloblike formation.
The whole thing--blobs connected by tubes--is a single organism,
and the network serves to transport nutrients throughout its "body."

An interesting fact about this slime mold is that it is highly
intelligent--or at least it behaves as if it is. In locating food
in its environment, it builds networks that have been shown to be
optimally efficient in transporting the nutrients over the area in
question.

Full story here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/the-wisdom-of-slime.html?_r=1

Recycling fun

Ah no time to blog; I'm working on my new hobby. (Not the abacus, that's last weeks new hobby)

Luckily Alan R just sent this in:

I am sure this guy has the best interests of the planet at heart but I suspect he doesn't quite understand what recycling means!!

Double booked on the 27th

UniM is having a friend over on Sunday to be given a full beauty make-over just like they do on the telly (the main difference being that the lady in question is already lovely. I just thought I'd make that very clear.)

The 27th rang a bell, and I was worried that we'd double booked, and it transpires that in a way we have, because that's also the date that the world is going to end. For real this time.

See Nick's blog biotechnorati here for more 

 

Answer to "What is it 260"

Some great guesses this week but none even close I'm afraid.

This one brought back a taumatic memory from 1998:

5 bench presses, using foam weights.

Posted by: UniC | May 24, 2012 at 03:35 PM

I was teaching English in Manresa, near Barcelona, and I was persuaded to join the local gym so we could all play squash before lessons. You had to have an induction so you could safely use all the equipment. I tried to explain that I didn't need to learn how to use the weights but it turned out that you had to be trained on everything. 

When it came to the bench presses, I couldn't lift even the lighest weights, and in the end the trainer had to go to a special cupboard to fetch the child weights...

Anyway, back to wii. What is it that I can now do in well under 40 seconds?

It's....

multiply 3 figures numbers by 3 figure numbers using my new....

abacus.

 Amazing that you can get the genuine article from China for just a few pounds on ebay.

I'm also working on square roots and division.

Video coming soon! 

 

Call S'ecurity!

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

At last; recognition by the Spider Appreciation Blog "Fact: Spiders are adorable."

It's always nice to see your stuff picked up by other blogs.  Remember my GIF of a spider's heartbeat a couple of years ago (previous post)?  It was reposted on the Spiders are Adorable site here, and got 85 comments and was then reblogged on 40 other sites.

 

 

 

Epistolae Ho Elianae Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren. James Howell. Part 5

Have you had enough of "Epistolae Ho Elianae Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren." yet?  Me neither!

( Part 1: previous post:  Part 2: previous post, part 3: previous post, part 4)

Here's James Howell writing about how happy he was to get a letter from a friend. I'm all for letting your feelings show, but don't you think this is a little, well, over the top? 

And remember, homosexuality wasn't invented for another 300 years. 

What is it? 260

Ok, it's time to reveal the new hobby (previous post) 

What is it that I took 2 minutes to do just a few weeks ago that I can now do in under 40 seconds?

 

Epistolae Ho Elianae Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren. James Howell. Part 4

Now for the next instalment of "Epistolae Ho Elianae Familiar Letters Domestic and Forren." ( Part 1: previous post:  Part 2: previous post, part 3: previous post)

I've done some research on James Howell (Oh, alright; 'research' these days means 'typing it into the search box of Wiki' )

Here he is: 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abraham_Bosse00.jpg

Interesting fact:  "He went to Oxford at the age of 13, like most other undergraduates of his day."

His Epistolae Ho Elianae was the first ever epistolary novel, which as you all know, is a novel of letters, 

and his is most famous quote is the saying "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy"

There's something very odd about James though. 

Here he is writing to a friend while travelling abroad:

Infirma Species basically means the lowest of the low. 

Perhaps this kind of thing was normal in the 1600s but I can't imagine any of my friends being happy to Fetch up the Rear like that. 

 

Another week, another ebay sale: The Country Journal or The Craftsman 1732

I've been employing the services of the famous hand model, UniM again. (She charges me 20% of gross sales)

This week I'm selling my rather lovely early single-sheet newspaper, The Craftsman from 1732

Old 4AoSers will remember me buying this 4 years ago (previous post) 

It's not in great condition but it's rather special as an early example of an English newspaper. 

The Country Journal by Caleb D'Anvers was a radical newspaper which attacked Robert Walpole and the government of the day. The best bits are the classified ads on the back, especially this one offering a reward for a lost dog.

"Answers to the name of TIT."

You can't make it up.

5 shillings was worth about £38 in 1732, by the way.

Some more:

 

How old is the word Computer?

When I used the word super-duper in the previous post I had to check the spelling. There are lots of free on-line dictionaries but what I like about this one is that it gives you the date of a word's first known use. How old is the word super-duper? 72 years old. 

Consciousness? First recorded in 1629

Free will  -  13th Century. Though, I believe it meant "freely giving to the church" back then (previous post)

First known use of the word Sexy? 1925!

Computer: 1646! 

Here's the site:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/

Graph success

I've always had a problem producing information in graphical form. I asked Nick the other day how he does his super-duper charts and graphs, and it turns out he uses PowerPoint:

http://biotechnorati.co.uk/2011/12/wadas-testing-statistics-.html

 

Well, not to be outdone, I gave it a go this week. Here's a graph displaying the results of my latest hobby. I'll be revealing the hobby soon, but just to whet your appetite, the X er Y er... up-downy axis shows seconds and the other one shows number of times I did it.  

As you can see, when I started it took me an average of almost 80 seconds, and now I can do it in half the time: