Author: Tim

Amazing cloud film

This is an entry I’ve been meaning to write for ages. Sometime a while back I stumbled upon a website for a Science/Art project called “A History of the Sky” by a guy called Ken Murphy. This project sets out to record the history of the sky as viewed from a fixed vantage point using a time-lapse camera. The camera films the sky each day taking a picture every 10 seconds and then the film from each day is displayed side by side on a big screen producing a mosaic-like effect in which each block of the screen is a day’s worth of sky change. The aim is to put screens in public arenas and, ultimately to show the full year in one go. It’s perhaps hard to get a real grasp of what this ends up looking like but you can read more about the project at its website which also include examples of a 42 day preview movies and a 126 day version which is also available to view in better quality directly on youtube (watch in full screen mode). The 126 day version is particularly good because it is a long enough period to be able to see the seasonal change in sunrise and sunset times between the earlier and later days in the sequence. I also really like the way that you can see the pinky/purple tinge of sunset enter each image just before the end of daylight and the image dropping out to black.

Personally, I think there is only one word to describe this piece of work and that (much over-used) word is “awesome”.

Cage football

Anyone who has clicked through to look at my “Run O’Hare Run” page may have noticed that alongside my record of my running exploits I have added the comment “+ cage football on Saturday” in the entries for the last couple of weeks. I thought I would explain what this is.

Most Saturday mornings at the moment are taken up ferrying my younger daughter to her football matches for Phoenix City under-14s and then watching these games unfold. However, when there is no match, as has been the case for the last couple of weekends, some of the players in her team together with their manager/coach and a few of us old men (Dads) get together in one of those small cages that house a concrete pitch, a couple of basketball goals and a couple of open areas that serve as football goals. We then spend an hour or so running around like mad things, the girls practising their skills and the Dads trying to regain their lost youth. It’s brilliant fun – if I played football with just a bunch of men I’d be instantly mashed to pieces, but against the girls it’s possible to run around a bit, demonstrate those silky ball skills (though mine do then to occur in slow motion) and even score the odd goal or two (though my shots do have a frustrating tendency to go straight at the ‘keeper). Mind you, it’s not without no physical content – the girls are pretty good at the odd kick in the shins and it’s good to see (and experience) them beginning to get the hang of barging opposition players out of the way and trying out some of the dark arts of holding and shoving. It’s also really, really good exercise (for me). In fact two weeks ago I almost managed to reduce myself to complete physical incapacity within the space of 10 minutes – and quickly learned the lesson to pace myself better last time.

Anyway, that’s cage football.

Induction

Well, that’s four solid days of Induction over and done with for another year. This is the process of welcoming new students onto the courses I run, filling them with rather boring but quite important information and beginning to get to know the new ones a bit. Today I had 2.5 hours of small group tutorials with half of the new first years (~30) and then group meetings with the returning Year 2 and 3 students.

It’s always interesting to meet and properly talk to the new students and find out a bit about them. This year we’ve got eerything from a professional boxer to a road-cyclist from the Sky team to an Olympic Development Squad wind-surfer to someone who is very keen on origami! (which gave me an excuse to tell my story about how, as a child, I put on an exhibition of my origami models in the local public library only for all of my models to be destroyed when the library burned down in a fire…).

This afternoon it was great to welcome back the returning students and I decided to test myself by trying to name every single one of them and only stumbled (okay, forgot) about 5 out of 60 or so in total which can’t be a bad achievement.

The trouble with Induction Week though is that it’s almost impossible to get any other work done for a few days so although I have the luxury tomorrow of a “clear” day in my diary, it’s going to be a day filled with pretty frantic activity to prepare for the start of teaching next week.

Super Freakonomics

A while back I read and thoroughly recommended a book called Freakonomics that presents a whole series of ideas about the analysis of interesting problems and data sets using approaches from economics. I really enjoyed thw wide-ranging ideas in the book and the journeys into topics I hadn’t given much thought to before. So I was looking forward to reading Super Freakonomics – a follow-up book by the same pair of authors.

SF started off quite well. There’s a really interesting and eye-opening chapter on the economics of prostitution. But I felt like I had read quite a lort of the book before, not least because there IS some duplication with Malclom Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” both in content and style. Towards the end, SF focuses in on actiosn that can be taken to counter-act climate change and here I felt that it rather looses the plot and becomes a bit of a rant about geoengineering and an advert for a few particular ideas. The critical analysis that characterised Freakonomics and the earlier parts of SF seems to get lost which is a pity.

Sun Dogs

A couple of weeks ago I was driving back from dropping my younger daughter off at her football training. It was about 6.30pm and the route took me almost due west through Plymouth. Ahead of me, in the sky, were (high) Cirrostratus clouds blocking out the Sun as it dropped down towards the western horizon. Either side of the sun were two small patches of “rainbow” – in other words not actually portions of full rainbow arcs but small patches of rainbow coloured light glinting through the clouds, horizontally one on either side of the sun. It was a beautiful site and, of course, when I got home I went scurrying to my books and discovered that what I had just seen was an excellent pair of “sun dogs”, also known as “mock suns” or “parhelia”. They are formed by the refraction of sublight through hexagonal ice crystals (hence the observation of high clouds). According to my copy of “The Cloud Collector’s Handbook” a matching pair of sun dogs earns me 35 points! (TCCH is like an I-Spy book on clouds…).

For more on this kind of atmospheric optical phenomenon this Atmospheric Optics website is really excellent and contains explanations and lots of wonderful images. The entry on sun dogs is here.

A comfortable opening day win

Just got back from watching my youngest daughter’s football team (Phoenix City under-14s) play their first league match of a new season. It was a home game against Activate and, after the upset of going a goal down eraly on (and an own goal too), Phoenix took control of the game scoring 3 in the first half and 1 more in the second half to run out 4-1 winners. She played in centre-midfield, marking Activate’s best player and providing much of the distribution that helped to unlock the Activate defence. They all played really well (tired a bit towards the end as would be expected for a first game) but it was great to get this one out of the way, some points on the board and some positivity into the goal difference column.

The pleasure of finding a new author

I’m always a little sad each time I finished reading a book by one of my favourite authors because it means that there is one less title in that particular series waiting for me at some point in the future. A few days ago I finished off another of the Ian Rankin Rebus novels and I’m steadily working my way through the crime series of Arnaldur Indridason and Andrea Camilleri. On the historical fiction side I’m about halfway through George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, well advanced with Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series and also recently finished the latter author’s most recent Uhtred novel. I’ve read all of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels and the first three of Julian Stockwin’s Kydd series but every single one of Forrester’s Hornblower books are still ahead of me so there’s still plenty of naval fiction to go.

So, I was absolutely delighted when, on completion of the latest Rankin book, I picked up the first Wallander novel by Swedish author Henning Mankel. I’ve watched some of the BBC TV Wallander adaptations and read great things about the original Swedish TV ones but this didn’t necessarily mean that I would enjoy reading the books. I should not have worried; Mankel’s novel had me gripped right from the start and I am cracking on through it at a great pace. It’s a story that I have watched the TV adaptation of but it’s really interesting to observe how different the two treatments are and how certain elements of the story were mucked about with for TV. Best of all, it’s a pleasure to know that I now have another great series of books stretching out before me.