Category: Random stuff

Earlier today I was in our garden clearing up some fallen twigs and leaves when I spotted a distressed sparrow hanging upside down in one of our trees. On closer inspection it became apparent that one of its “toes” (I’m not sure that birds have toes but I think you’ll know what I mean) had become tightly fixed onto a very small but strong branch by some fine white tape which the sparrow must have been collecting as nesting material. I guess that after the sparrow was initially trapped it managed to twist the tape tighter and tighter around its “toe” as it struggled to get free. I called my wife over and while she supported the bird with a dust-pan I tried to free the bird by removing the tape but our initial efforts were unsuccessful, partly because the tape was so tightly wound but also because one of our next door neighbour’s cats had also spotted the sparrow and was determined to make it a bite of lunch… In the end we had to call out our eldest daughter to remove the cat and once this was done we were able to concentrate fully on the rescue. With one neat snip of my pen-knife scissors the tape was cut and the sparrow immediately flew away, taking refuge in a nearby tree. At first we thought it might have suffered permanent damage because it sat there fluttering about whilst all its friends twittered wildly, but after a few more moments it flew off again and from the last we saw of it, it seemed fine. It is amazing how much saving a life like this, albeit the life of just a little bird, leaves you feeling like you have done something really worthwhile.

The staff canteen at work has a number of TV screens on the walls that are invariably tuned to BBC News 24 or Sky News. Fortunately the volume is turned down to zero but the screens display the instant subtitles that can accompany the news feeds. I always find it interesting to read these subtitles when I am waiting for colleagues to join me at lunchtime etc. It is amusing to observe how badly the spoken words are translated into subtitles and there are often great mis-translations that entirely alter the meaning. One such gem occurred today in a political report. The reporter must have been talking about the current level of support for the Government in the latest opinion polls but the translation came out as “The Poles are not healthy”. So there you have it, the hard-of-hearing across the country will now be thinking that the Polish people are suffering from ill-health. It’ll be down to eating too many meat dumplings, too much fermented cabbage and that dreaded extra slice of poppy-seed cake I’ll wager (information on Polish cuisine courtesy of Wikipedia).

I used to teach a student who listed Extreme Ironing as one of his leisure pursuits. For the uninitiated, Extreme Ironing involves taking an ironing board and an iron to a remote or in some way difficult location, setting it up and then doing so ironing. If you don’t believe me, you can check this out for yourself with this BBC News report from 2002. Being a diver, his particular brand of the sport involved ironing underwater…

Recently, news of a different sort of marine ironing has come to the fore, namely the idea of adding iron (the chemical element) to ocean waters in order to promote growth of phytoplankton (microscopic plant life). Iron is a nutrient that is required for phytoplankton growth but it is lacking in many parts of the oceans. It is argued that the enhanced phytoplankton growth caused by the addition of iron leads to increased absorption of carbon dioxide from the ocean waters which then absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. When the plankton subsequently die the solid parts sink to the seafloor taking the absorbed carbon with them and forming sediments in which the carbon remains locked for thousands of years. Thus the plankton bloom caused by the increased iron level serves to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and so reduces its impact there as a Greenhouse Gas and its contribution to global warming. That’s the theory anyway and there have a been a couple of small scale experiments to try to see this process in action and establish its potential for a means of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Not surprisingly, this is a controversial topic as it is not clear how efficiently it would work and what other impacts adding iron might have to marine ecosystems. Now there are plans for a new (larger) experiment on iron fertilisation in the Southern Ocean and there was a nice piece about this, and about measurements of the effects of naturally occuring iron fertilisation caused by volcanic islands, on the BBC Radio 4 programme “The Material World” last week.  Further details and more relevant web-links can also be found at this related BBC News report.