Wibbly Wobbly.

On Friday during a lecture we were asked to suggest ways of shortening the assembly time of any given thing.

I wrote on my notepad...
"Assemble whilst travelling near to the speed of light so that time stretches. It wont mean that you make it quicker but it will mean that the time taken will be shorter relative to everything else".

Right, now I realise I got that the wrong way round. The time taken to assemble the thing would be longer relative to everything else. So you would have make everyone else travel near to the speed of light while you assemble the thing, and I'm just not sure it's worth the effort.

My excuses for getting it wrong are

• I was really tired that morning 
• I am not an expert

I could still be wrong, I'm not sure.

Of course, to actually travel at the speed of light you would have be completely massless and that could make assembling the thing more difficult.

Maybe I'm over thinking it.

Richmond Park

This is a big map of London we have.

I love this map. I can stare at it for ages to see how different bits of the city fit together.

But now we're going to focus this bit.

Richmond Park, which made news in the summer as the location a dog getting filmed chasing some deer whilst the dogs owner shouted at it.


I have never been to Richmond Park.
But it always catches my eye on the map (especially since I drew an arrow on it) because of this.

Right, it isn't really visable, but what it says in the circle is "Queen Mothers Corpse".

I find that really interesting. It doesn't say "Queen Mothers Grave" or "Queen Mothers Memorial", so therefore I can only assume that the Queen Mothers dead body is just there on display.

Whilst I'm sure that the royal family could hire the finest corpse preservers on the planet, she did die over ten years ago. Is a ten year old corpse really an appropriate thing to have on display in a park?

Although as I said I haven't been there, and I haven't done any other research.
So it could have been removed since the map was made in 2007, or could of been a joke by the cartographer.

Either way if I ever go to Richmond Park I am definitely going to search for the exhibited corpse.




Update: It turns out it says 'copse', which is a small woodland. But please let's all instead imagine there is a rotting dead body in the middle of Richmond Park.

Shopping List.

Today, during a lecture, I decided to find out how nosey the guy sitting next to me was.
So I took out my little pad and wrote down 'shopping list'.
I preceded to write 'Pepsi' and 'satsumas', fairly normal shopping, and then turned it up a notch by adding 'heroin'.
He didn't notice.
I continued to write absurd and strange things broken up by clusters of normal things.
Eventually I ran of space on the page and just left it on the desk between me and him.

Here is the full list...

About 5 minutes passed before he glanced at it. It caught his eye.

He tapped me on the shoulder and said "Tinsel and lipstick, Are you secretly a cross-dresser?"
My response, "Sometimes".

He then listed all the drugs I'd written and said I must have quite a weekend planned.
I said "It's amazing what you can buy in Asda".



So basically he wasn't nosey enough to read over my shoulder while I was still writing the list, but he did read it afterwards. I think that gives him a score of 4 on a scale of 0-10, where 0 is completely ignoring and 10 is News of the World.

P.s. Apologies for my poor handwriting.

Five things I love about Liverpool

Firstly, I should point out these definitely not the only, and probably not the best, reasons I love Liverpool. They are just the ones I want to point out.

In no particular order...


1. The Guinness Wall.



I should point out that the clock is either broken or set to the wrong time. Either way, I've never spotted it showing the right time.


2. The Echo Game

This is quite a simple idea so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is already a common thing, but in Liverpool City Centre there are many of these newspaper vendors.

(To save their privacy I've disguised their faces, I don't know if you can tell.)

Anyway, the local paper is the Echo and the vendors will intermittently call out "Echo!", and I like to then say "Echooooooooooo". So I echo their echo. It amuses me.


3. The City Councils 'no nonsense' attitude.

I imagine the conversation in the office went like this.

"The information on that sign on Mount Pleasant is no longer correct, Should we replace the sign, or remove it or what?"
"Nah, just gaffa tape a bin liner to it."

4. Sefton Park


5. Finally, it's socially unacceptable to buy the Sun.

Story Telling: The Princess and the Heat treated plain carbon steels.

I have to write a formal lab report and the brief includes 'story telling'. Here we go.


Once upon a time there was a magical prince who was trapped in a scary castle which had three plain carbon steel doors.
The first door had been heated to 860ºC then allowed to cool.
The second door had also been heated to 860ºC then quenched by dropping the hot metal into water.
The Third door had been heated and quenched like the second one, then heated to 650ºC again.

The princess, who wanted to rescue him, only had one good lance that would break if it was used on a door that was too hard. So the princess, knowing that only one lance meant only one chance, went to the lab to find out which door she should try and break down.

Initially the princess used the Jominy test to determine the Vickers Hardness. The test involved making an imprint with a diamond at set distances from the quenched end then comparing the results for the different samples. From this the princess found that second and third doors had a much higher Vickers hardness.

Next the princess carried out the Charpy impact test, where the samples were hit with a big heavy pendulum and the energy absorbed was measured and from this the princess found the third door was ductile, the second door was brittle and the first door had some plastic deformation.

The princess deduced that although the second door had a harder surface than the first, it would break under smaller force.
So the princess went back to the castle, broke down the second door with her lance then saved the prince. And they lived happily ever after.

Lab Coat

Occasionally, I have to wear a lab coat. It makes me feel quite professional.




The trouble is, as it has poppers instead of buttons, and throughout the lab session I will repeatedly do up all the poppers...



Take hold of both sides...



Then rip it open as if I am superman.

So much for professional.

McGritte

Yesterday I went to see the Rene Magritte exhibition at the Tate Liverpool. It was fantastic.

But the problem was that it reminded me of what happened two years ago on the same dock when visiting Liverpool for a Uni open day.

Once the open day was over I had time to kill so I decided to walk around Albert Dock which I'd been to before and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Whilst walking past a gift shop that sold naval models and Beatles memorabilia, I noticed ahead of me a poster.

The poster was like Magrittes 'The Son of Man' but with a burger in front of the face instead of an apple, and I was blown away, I thought it was brilliant.

I felt it was poking fun at fast food shops and making a point about modern obesity.

It was saying junk food is now where fruit should be.

I thought I'd never seen such a perfect piece of artwork.

But then I realised I was staring at a burger shop and that this was an advert for it.

Never has my opinion changed so quickly. It immediately lost all its charm and wit, I felt betrayed.

The conception of the idea which in my mind started as 'Lets show how society has changed whilst paying homage a great painting' had become 'What's famous that we can put a burger on?'.

I wouldn't be surprised to see The Mona Lisa eating some nuggets, Van Goghs Sunflowers covered in chips or Michelangelos David holding a bucket of chicken.