Blog!ARU

I was watching this video of Airplane without the jokes and after it finished there was the video below of a random MIT lecture on solid-state chemistry in the list of related videos. I've just watched the whole thing and for me it just brought back so many memories of physics lectures at St. Andrews, though I wish all lecturers could be as enthusiastic and as anecdotally interesting as this guy (Hons. quantum mechanics I'm pointing at you). Amazing stuff, makes we want to take a degree again and to try harder! (I got a 2.1)

I know this blog isn't well read these days, but if anyone knows what these berries are I'd love to know. They were on a black withered vine and the host tree was dead. There were a few others like it nearby as well as a large bush heavy with ripe sloes.

When observing a staple gun that looked just like one the department used to have and that was covered in little stickers from a specific variety of apple but now had no stickers:

Ah, pink lady bits, them were the days…

The Pink Lady bits in Question

When in conversation about living next to railway lines and a colleague says: “every night at 10:30 we get a BRRRRRRP” the incorrect response is:

I've added a batch of photos to my neglected Flickr account, go take a look.

Images from my Flickr Photostream

Right. There's no easy way to say this. Sometimes a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, and sometimes that means he's got to buy curtains. Here are some handy tips for the would-be male curtain procurer.

Quoted curtain sizes are weird: “46 x 72” is often all you get to go on. Apparently curtains tend to come in fixed widths and heights. The width is first and the height is second. It would be kind of nice if someone stopped to consider the novice curtain purchaser and said which was which. Except that the width isn't the width of the window the curtains need to fit, that would too easy, no, the width is the width of one of the individual curtain sheets. Standard widths are 46, 66 and 90 inches. Standard heights are 54, 72 and 90 inches.

Now, my living room has a window whose curtain pole is 72 inches long and a height to the floor of around 84 inches. I thought therefore I'd need curtains of 72w x 84h inches, but couldn't find curtains at these sizes. What I actually needed were 46w x 84h curtains, ignoring the 84" height for the moment, the 46" width is because you need to divide the length of your curtain pole in two (72" / 2 = 36") and then pick the standard curtain width that is just larger than this — in this case being the standard 46" width. I can't do much for the height so ended up buying 46" x 72" curtains, result.

Also, curtains labelled "Do not iron" but that come out of the packaging more creased than the forehead of your average 90-year old can probably still be ironed on setting "1" if sprayed with water first, possibly slowly and with a heavy hand. Right, hopefully that explains curtains. I shall not be talking about them again.

…groyne strain I've ever seen

Seen last Tuesday on the beach at Alnmouth