This is an article I originally wrote for Education Otherwise but I decided it should get a wider audience here.
Back in December 2003 we were reading Caroline Lawrence's The Twelve Tasks of Flavia, on of the books in her Roman Mysteries series. In it the Roman festival of Saturnalia is described.
So we decided that we would have a Saturnalia day on December 21st that year. Io Saturnalia!
We researched into it by checking out various websites as well as reading the book. Then we invited another home educating family for a Sunday lunch with a difference. In Roman times the festival would run for several days but we decided that one day would suffice, especially as we still had Christmas to come and so many of the Christmas traditions were originally based on Saturnalia. In fact it is said that the Christians stole Saturnalia from the Pagans, then commercialism stole it from the Christians, and now the Pagans are trying to take it back again!
We dispensed with the usual sacrifice at the temple, but we did choose a Lord of Misrule for the day. Actually, we chose a Lord and a Lady, the two seven year olds! The idea of this is that the servants and children become the rulers for the day. In Roman times it was all part of the fun, so they weren't really rulers for the day, but the citizens of Rome played the part of the servants and the servants and children were waited on for the day. So for that day we let the children play at being in charge. Unfortunately I am also the regular servant in the house so I was still in charge of serving the food!
We decorated the house with greenery from the garden, just as the Romans would have. Although the Christmas tree didn't come into play until much later, the Romans would have had garlands similar to the ivy ones we put up that day.
Dolls and hats featured in Roman Saturnalia. Dolls were traditionally given to the children, and dolls featured in the plot of Caroline Lawrence's book so we sat down to make some clothes-peg dolls to give to each other. We also had a bag of scraps with which we made silly hats for each other. This tradition lives on today in the form of the paper hats that come out of the Christmas crackers.
No festival is complete without a feast, so we had a Roman feast while reclining on cushions on the floor. Unfortunately we couldn't come up with authentic couches! We used earthenware to serve the food on, ate off of platters, and used our fingers. We stuck to food available in Roman times: olives; roast chicken with a modern version of garam; green beans, olives and salad; home made bread made with grape juice; and for dessert dates and almonds roasted with honey and black pepper. The children even bravely tried the warm drink that Flavia has for breakfast: half milk, half spiced wine with a little grated cheese over the top.
The two families had a wonderful day that day, but unfortunately we have never again been in the same place at the same time to recreate Saturnalia. But we still decorate the house for Christmas on the Solstice with greenery, and say 'Io Saturnalia' to each other.
Tuesday 18 December 2012
Saturday 23 June 2012
The Optimism Bias
Our second talk was The Optimism Bias given by Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist from UCL.
The basis of the optimism bias is that people overestimate the positive and underestimate the negative. We think that we will win the lottery, and not not get cancer, that our children will be especially talented, but we won't be in a car accident. The bias is the difference between what we expect and what actually happens. It was coined by Weinstein in 1980.
Tali gave some good examples such as marriage and divorce. When we get married we think that we will definitely not get divorced, and yet the statistics show that almost half of all couples getting married today will not have lasting marriages. Even with experience, people will think it will get better next week and some just keep getting married time after time.
We are more optimistic about ourselves, but less optimistic about others and our country. We also think that we are better than we really are, for example more than 50% of people think they are better than average drivers.
Although most people (80%) have some degree of optimism bias, some people don't, and they tend to be depressed. Those that are more realistic have less of an optimisim bias and are mildly depressed, those that have no optimism bias are very depressed think that all things will turn out bad.
But it isn't only humans that show this bias. They found that some animals such as mice and birds have it, and if they are kept in a cage with no comfort or toys, they get depressed like humans do and stop showing optimistic behaviours.
Interestingly, it is an illusion, because normally when things go wrong we would evaluate and make adjustments with the new information, but somehow we seem to be able to see things as being better than they really were. We pay more attention to the good stuff, and less to the negative.
Tali being a neuroscientist, has used fMRI to find some of the areas of the brain involved. The left Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG) responds to good news, and the right IFG to negative things, but the right side shows a weaker response than the left, so people will pay more attention to the positive than the negative.
One of the applications for this is warning signs. People don't take notice of them, they think that it doesn't apply to them. Hence the warning on cigarette packages that “Smoking Kills” probably doesn't work, and would be better if it said something like “80% of people can stopped smoking”
Expectations and anticipation also plays a part. People with high expectations tend to assume that if things go well it was because of something they did, so they will continue to work hard to make things turn out positively. People with low expectations tend to blame themselves and feel worse. This will colour how they see things panning out in the future. We tent to dwell on what is happening now, rather than the future, and the anticipation of something good in the future, like a holiday or a dinner out, might actually be better than the event itself, making us feel happier and more optimistic now.
Optimism can also change both subjective and objective reality. If we expect something to be positive, we will interrupt negative results more positively. But also, if we are expecting something to be positive we may put more effort into making it work out.
Having the optimism bias can be good for our health; optimists think that they have less chance of dying, and are more likely to recover quickly from an illness. They think this is because anxiety and stress are reduced so they can put more effort into recovering.
It can be helpful knowing about the optimism bias, so that we can take precautionary action. It would be wrong to get rid of the bias, it makes more sense to work with it. We can be optimistic that our houses will never burn down, but still take out insurance. We can assume that we will never get divorced, but still sign a pre-nup.
There are wider implications as well, for instance in finance. The reason why the Olympics is not grossly over budget this time is because the Green Book took into account the optimism bias and adjusted the figures accordingly. There is also a believe that the crash of 2008 was caused by the optimism bias.
We all have our own optimism biases. For us I think it was the number of lectures a day that Ram could comfortably handle. He struggled last year, but we still went ahead and booked the same number for this year.
For me, it is this blog. Last year I wanted to blog the festival, and never got as far as writing anything. This year I thought I had learned from that and decided to be strict with myself and write them and blog each day. I still haven't managed it, although I have done better. Will our optimism prevail and result in us booking the same number of talks next year, and will my optimism make me put more effort into keeping this blog up to date? Only time will tell!
For a more detailed look at Tali's work check out this article written by her.
The basis of the optimism bias is that people overestimate the positive and underestimate the negative. We think that we will win the lottery, and not not get cancer, that our children will be especially talented, but we won't be in a car accident. The bias is the difference between what we expect and what actually happens. It was coined by Weinstein in 1980.
Tali gave some good examples such as marriage and divorce. When we get married we think that we will definitely not get divorced, and yet the statistics show that almost half of all couples getting married today will not have lasting marriages. Even with experience, people will think it will get better next week and some just keep getting married time after time.
We are more optimistic about ourselves, but less optimistic about others and our country. We also think that we are better than we really are, for example more than 50% of people think they are better than average drivers.
Although most people (80%) have some degree of optimism bias, some people don't, and they tend to be depressed. Those that are more realistic have less of an optimisim bias and are mildly depressed, those that have no optimism bias are very depressed think that all things will turn out bad.
But it isn't only humans that show this bias. They found that some animals such as mice and birds have it, and if they are kept in a cage with no comfort or toys, they get depressed like humans do and stop showing optimistic behaviours.
Interestingly, it is an illusion, because normally when things go wrong we would evaluate and make adjustments with the new information, but somehow we seem to be able to see things as being better than they really were. We pay more attention to the good stuff, and less to the negative.
Tali being a neuroscientist, has used fMRI to find some of the areas of the brain involved. The left Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG) responds to good news, and the right IFG to negative things, but the right side shows a weaker response than the left, so people will pay more attention to the positive than the negative.
One of the applications for this is warning signs. People don't take notice of them, they think that it doesn't apply to them. Hence the warning on cigarette packages that “Smoking Kills” probably doesn't work, and would be better if it said something like “80% of people can stopped smoking”
Expectations and anticipation also plays a part. People with high expectations tend to assume that if things go well it was because of something they did, so they will continue to work hard to make things turn out positively. People with low expectations tend to blame themselves and feel worse. This will colour how they see things panning out in the future. We tent to dwell on what is happening now, rather than the future, and the anticipation of something good in the future, like a holiday or a dinner out, might actually be better than the event itself, making us feel happier and more optimistic now.
Optimism can also change both subjective and objective reality. If we expect something to be positive, we will interrupt negative results more positively. But also, if we are expecting something to be positive we may put more effort into making it work out.
Having the optimism bias can be good for our health; optimists think that they have less chance of dying, and are more likely to recover quickly from an illness. They think this is because anxiety and stress are reduced so they can put more effort into recovering.
It can be helpful knowing about the optimism bias, so that we can take precautionary action. It would be wrong to get rid of the bias, it makes more sense to work with it. We can be optimistic that our houses will never burn down, but still take out insurance. We can assume that we will never get divorced, but still sign a pre-nup.
There are wider implications as well, for instance in finance. The reason why the Olympics is not grossly over budget this time is because the Green Book took into account the optimism bias and adjusted the figures accordingly. There is also a believe that the crash of 2008 was caused by the optimism bias.
We all have our own optimism biases. For us I think it was the number of lectures a day that Ram could comfortably handle. He struggled last year, but we still went ahead and booked the same number for this year.
For me, it is this blog. Last year I wanted to blog the festival, and never got as far as writing anything. This year I thought I had learned from that and decided to be strict with myself and write them and blog each day. I still haven't managed it, although I have done better. Will our optimism prevail and result in us booking the same number of talks next year, and will my optimism make me put more effort into keeping this blog up to date? Only time will tell!
For a more detailed look at Tali's work check out this article written by her.
Friday 15 June 2012
The Re:Generative Power of Sleep
The second talk at the Cheltenham science Festival was on the optimism bias, which I will blog about later. First of all I would like to share with you our third talk called the Regenerative Power of Sleep given by Russell Foster and Till Roenneberg.
As this talk was later in the evening we were a bit worried that we might actually fall asleep but we didn't need to be as it was very exciting. Russell spoke first, initially outlining the different areas of the brain involved in sleep. One of them, suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN),Is what gives rise to a 24-hour cycle. All the different areas and their neurotransmitters feed forward into the cortex to keep us awake. The ventrolateral preoptic nucleus (VLPO) is the sleep switch, which when activated starts the sleep cycle by inhibiting the waking systems.
Because so many brain areas involved, it means that it is highly vulnerable to disruption which can lead to health problems. This is not just mental health problems but sleep deprived people are more likely to put on weight as well. Sleep affects different systems in the body in different ways.
When sleep is disrupted we are more likely to need caffeine (and cigarettes) to wake up in the morning, but coffee interferes with the receptors for the VLPO which helps keep us awake, but then we need to get to sleep so turn to alcohol and sedatives which leads to the wrong kind of sleep which leads to more sleep deprivation which leads to more coffee so we get into a downward spiral.
Russell presented a long list of problems caused by sleep deprivation and they are the same ones as in mental health disorders. This has been known about since the 1880s, but has been ignored. In the 1970s it was thought that sleep deprivation was the by product of antipsychotic drugs so people assumed it was 'normal' and didn't bother with it.
Research has shown that mental illness and sleep deprivation are very commonly found together and lead to poor health, and that sleep deprivation precedes the illness and appears to be a feature of risk for the development of mental illness. With schizophrenia it appears that they have no clock or melatonin routines. Research from Dan Freeman has shown that intervention to improve sleep patterns leads to reduced symptoms or can delay the onset of illness
Russell then handed over to Till to speak about social jet lag. Sleep to disruption has become normal in the modern world during workdays as sleep is defined by our bosses. They have done a huge survey to find out people's chronotype, that is whether they are larks or owls, but mostly people are in the middle.
Our body clocks are not set by social circumstances, it is set by the brain and depends on the age and genes. At puberty young people go to sleep later and later and then they suddenly go onto an adult clock at age 19 ½ for females and 21 in males. The chronotype doesn't dictate how many hours someone sleeps so duration is independent of chronotype, and duration is challenged by social pressures during workdays.
So owls who would normally sleep later have to sleep more on the weekends to catch up which results in a type of jet lag. As they are later to sleep at night but later to wake in the morning for just 2 days, their body clock never gets a chance to adjust to it. Teens suffer the most is their sleep cycle is later than adults but they still have to get up for school. This sleep discrepancy results in the strongest social jet lag. T his could account for the increase in drinking and smoking and young people. There is also relationship between social jet lag and weight gain. Oh, and larks have a similar problem only involving the other end of the day.
Till then went on to discuss the difference between Germans and the British. They did some large-scale studies controlling for age and sex with 75,000 Germans and so far 5,000 British. You can take the survey here. They found that we have an identical distribution of chronotypes, spent the same amount of time outside, have similar sleep duration, with the UK sleeping 8.5 more minutes a day which results in 40 extra minutes a week.
But the UK has less social jet lag because Germans go into work early! This could be because there are more factory jobs in Germany.
At the end several members of the audience had questions. One ask Till to define senile bed flight. It does sound rather worrying but he made it sound quite fun. Older people need less sleep and can get by with a little nap in the day when needed. Evolutionarily this was well suited to grandparents matching the sleep patterns of the babies so that they could take care of the babies at night and early morning while the teen parents got some sleep. So it is a very positive thing to have when looking after grandchildren!
There was a question about the effects of continuous daylight. Constant light means that there is no local body clock. The body clock drifts later and later which results in an internal body systems becoming unsynchronised with brain, gut and muscles all adrift.
I felt that this could have an implication for those with SEN and disabled children who have sleep disturbances. Sleep affects all systems. Some people believe the digestive problems on what causes autism in some children. But perhaps it is disruptive sleep and sleep deprivation which is causing both cognitive and the digestive problems. More research needed no doubt!
Russell explained that alcohol and sedatives don't work, you need to make sure that you are exposed to light, especially in the morning, and you need to listen to your body. If you need an alarm clock you are not getting enough sleep. So with teens, let them sleep in the mornings so that they don't get sleep deprived, but make sure that the curtains are opened so that they will get light through their eyelids and their brains will know it is daytime.
They found that in schools, starting classes later resulted in an increase in exam results, a decrease in truancy, depression and self harm, and an increase in sleep and better eating habits.
So, far from falling asleep, we were wide awake for the entirety of the talk, and even afterwards when Till and Russell kindly signed their books for us and gave Ram a little pep talk about not being on the computer too late into the evening! For his part, Ram suggested that maybe Russell shouldn't be drinking that glass of wine either!
As this talk was later in the evening we were a bit worried that we might actually fall asleep but we didn't need to be as it was very exciting. Russell spoke first, initially outlining the different areas of the brain involved in sleep. One of them, suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN),Is what gives rise to a 24-hour cycle. All the different areas and their neurotransmitters feed forward into the cortex to keep us awake. The ventrolateral preoptic nucleus (VLPO) is the sleep switch, which when activated starts the sleep cycle by inhibiting the waking systems.
Because so many brain areas involved, it means that it is highly vulnerable to disruption which can lead to health problems. This is not just mental health problems but sleep deprived people are more likely to put on weight as well. Sleep affects different systems in the body in different ways.
When sleep is disrupted we are more likely to need caffeine (and cigarettes) to wake up in the morning, but coffee interferes with the receptors for the VLPO which helps keep us awake, but then we need to get to sleep so turn to alcohol and sedatives which leads to the wrong kind of sleep which leads to more sleep deprivation which leads to more coffee so we get into a downward spiral.
Russell presented a long list of problems caused by sleep deprivation and they are the same ones as in mental health disorders. This has been known about since the 1880s, but has been ignored. In the 1970s it was thought that sleep deprivation was the by product of antipsychotic drugs so people assumed it was 'normal' and didn't bother with it.
Research has shown that mental illness and sleep deprivation are very commonly found together and lead to poor health, and that sleep deprivation precedes the illness and appears to be a feature of risk for the development of mental illness. With schizophrenia it appears that they have no clock or melatonin routines. Research from Dan Freeman has shown that intervention to improve sleep patterns leads to reduced symptoms or can delay the onset of illness
Russell then handed over to Till to speak about social jet lag. Sleep to disruption has become normal in the modern world during workdays as sleep is defined by our bosses. They have done a huge survey to find out people's chronotype, that is whether they are larks or owls, but mostly people are in the middle.
Our body clocks are not set by social circumstances, it is set by the brain and depends on the age and genes. At puberty young people go to sleep later and later and then they suddenly go onto an adult clock at age 19 ½ for females and 21 in males. The chronotype doesn't dictate how many hours someone sleeps so duration is independent of chronotype, and duration is challenged by social pressures during workdays.
So owls who would normally sleep later have to sleep more on the weekends to catch up which results in a type of jet lag. As they are later to sleep at night but later to wake in the morning for just 2 days, their body clock never gets a chance to adjust to it. Teens suffer the most is their sleep cycle is later than adults but they still have to get up for school. This sleep discrepancy results in the strongest social jet lag. T his could account for the increase in drinking and smoking and young people. There is also relationship between social jet lag and weight gain. Oh, and larks have a similar problem only involving the other end of the day.
Till then went on to discuss the difference between Germans and the British. They did some large-scale studies controlling for age and sex with 75,000 Germans and so far 5,000 British. You can take the survey here. They found that we have an identical distribution of chronotypes, spent the same amount of time outside, have similar sleep duration, with the UK sleeping 8.5 more minutes a day which results in 40 extra minutes a week.
But the UK has less social jet lag because Germans go into work early! This could be because there are more factory jobs in Germany.
At the end several members of the audience had questions. One ask Till to define senile bed flight. It does sound rather worrying but he made it sound quite fun. Older people need less sleep and can get by with a little nap in the day when needed. Evolutionarily this was well suited to grandparents matching the sleep patterns of the babies so that they could take care of the babies at night and early morning while the teen parents got some sleep. So it is a very positive thing to have when looking after grandchildren!
There was a question about the effects of continuous daylight. Constant light means that there is no local body clock. The body clock drifts later and later which results in an internal body systems becoming unsynchronised with brain, gut and muscles all adrift.
I felt that this could have an implication for those with SEN and disabled children who have sleep disturbances. Sleep affects all systems. Some people believe the digestive problems on what causes autism in some children. But perhaps it is disruptive sleep and sleep deprivation which is causing both cognitive and the digestive problems. More research needed no doubt!
Russell explained that alcohol and sedatives don't work, you need to make sure that you are exposed to light, especially in the morning, and you need to listen to your body. If you need an alarm clock you are not getting enough sleep. So with teens, let them sleep in the mornings so that they don't get sleep deprived, but make sure that the curtains are opened so that they will get light through their eyelids and their brains will know it is daytime.
They found that in schools, starting classes later resulted in an increase in exam results, a decrease in truancy, depression and self harm, and an increase in sleep and better eating habits.
So, far from falling asleep, we were wide awake for the entirety of the talk, and even afterwards when Till and Russell kindly signed their books for us and gave Ram a little pep talk about not being on the computer too late into the evening! For his part, Ram suggested that maybe Russell shouldn't be drinking that glass of wine either!
Thursday 14 June 2012
Superconductors – The Two Steves and Mark
We were really looking forward to this talk as Ram is really interested in superconductors and we had read Stephen Blundell's book on the subject already. In fact we had make the suggestion of having him do a talk on superconductors last year!
Also on the stage were Steve Cowley and Mark Lythgoe. It is always a pleasure to see Mark in action; I really believe that neuroscientists are the most interesting people there are!
It started off with Stephen explaining what a superconductor (SC) is. Basically, it is something that can carry current with no resistance. They were discovered by accident after Onnes managed to liquify helium. He started measuring electrical conductivity of metals at low temperatures, and other scientists predicted what would happen.
Some thought that resistance would increase, some thought it would decrease, some thought it would stay the same, but it turned out that in some materials resistance disappeared! They tried with gold at first, which didn't work, then they thought that it would take a pure metal, so they purified mercury and found that there was no resistance when it was immersed in liquid helium. Then they decided to try it without purifying the mercury and found it also worked, so all the effort that went into purifying the mercury was a waste of time!
They also found that a SC displayed the Meissner effect. I will let Wikipedia explain that one.
Stephan makes a SC sound poetic. He said they have the “pure unbroken beauty of the atom.” Normally electrons are in a chaotic state, but in a SC electrons are paired in what are known as Cooper pairs, and it is because of this that electrons all end up going in the same direction even if they are not near each other.
It seems that experiment is better at finding SCs than studying theory, and there was a big jump in the number of discoveries in the 1980s with the use of copper oxides. Then they found ceramics and finally in the last few years iron based Scs with molecular layers in them have been found.
Mark then spoke of some of the applications. The main one that people think of is the MRI machines that can see inside things (not just bodies, check out the MRI scanner in the Discover Zone!)
The coil in the scanner creates a magnetic field, but that would always need a battery to keep it going. If they can cool the magnetic field then it can be self sustaining. This is where the Scs come in. They are cooled with helium, but if a wire breaks, it gets hot, and some of the helium can boil off, then it gets hotter, and then, Quench! Make sure you look for the venting pipe on the MRI machine before you get inside it!
Having SCs means that there are 80 million scans a year done. Some of them gives us insights into the brain, such as the work done at UCL on taxi drivers hypocampuses getting larger as they learn 'The Knowledge' Full paper here or BBC news report here.
However, the new machine they have that runs at 9.4 tesla has been able to image a mouse's heart actually beating, which can then be slowed down to the speed that a human heart beats so that they can study it better. Through this they have found new drugs for the heart. They can also use MRIs to target drugs to different areas by infusing them with nanomagenetic material which they can then use the MRI to not only see the drug but control its delivery to the right area.
Steve then talked about another application that many people don't think of immediately , the use of SCs in fusion. Without the SCs to keep the plasma in the tokamaks under control, they wouldn't be able to advance fusion power. More on that in another blog post on fusion.
As ever, the intelligence of the audience came across in the excellent questions asked. Some of the interesting things that came up were that all SCs are solids, and that they don't understand yet how the new types work. Scs are most useful in enclosed spaces and that they are not so useful over long distances such as in power lines, as the cost of refrigeration outweighs the savings in transmission of power.
Some of the higher temperature (we haven't yet found room temperature SCs) are harder to form as they are not a ductile. Niobium-tin is ductile, but ceramics aren't, so we need more innovative developments from the material scientists.
For the future Steve would like to see transmission lines to carry energy from solar instalations in sunny areas to other areas, and Stephen would like to see further development of trains using Scs. My favourite, which I think will be Mark's too, will always be the MRI scanners, and I will leave you with this song about them.
Wednesday 13 June 2012
Dark Matters
Tuesday, June 12 was our first talk at the 2012 Cheltenham Science Festival. As usual, especially for talk early in the day, there were plenty of grey heads. There was a lovely couple in front of us; an elderly man, and his 8-year-old son. You could see how proud he was of his grandson and how much they were enjoying both the talk and being with each other. I hope that young lad grows up to understand how lucky he was to have such a wonderful granddad!
This talk will be quite hard to review, because it wasn't actually a talk like so many of the other lectures. It was given by Tom Whyntie and Andrew Pontzen, former Famelab alumni. It was more of comedy sketch show then a lecture!
Perhaps I should review that aspect first. Between the two of them they acted out scenes from the past developments in dark matter.They played the roles of astronomers and physicists both contradicting each other as well as agreeing each other. There were some particularly funny scenes.
For instance they sat facing each other going through all the possibilities of what dark matter could be, and then dismissing them. Gas? It would have to be cool and ionised and there wasn't enough that. Tiny stars? Really tiny? Too small to see? Yes, probably not that either. Black holes! Yes! They are invisible so they could be dark… No wait, they aren't invisible, we can see them through microlensing. Their concluding question was how do you find something that you can't see, touch, smell, taste, or hear!
They illustrated how excited people got about finding dark matter by incorporating the word darks matter into some famous advertising slogans: “I can't believe it's not dark matter!” There was also rather amusing parody of a researcher called Doctor X to protect the identity of the people involved.
Amusingly they played the parts of a scientist being interviewed by the press. All the names of the journalists were rather funny, my favourite being Betty de Kay from Cosmo.
Through their humour they manage to convey a clear understanding of why we think there is dark matter out there, why it is important to find it, and also the question of when do we stop looking.
The laughter aside we did manage to learn a lot. They answered questions at the end that filled in any of the gaps during their presentation. They touched on things such as the difficulty in finding funding for anything other than dark matter. Andrew suggested that it was easier to get funding for something mainstream and then do the blue sky thinking and fundamental research on the side in your own time.
They explored the other theories that could explain the missing matter in the universe including the modified Newtonian dynamics theory as betrayed by Doctor X but cracks were found in that theory due to the requirement of a change in scale to measure the gravity. They explained that something was found at Gran Sasso, the lab that found faster than light neutrinos. Although this was found 10 years ago no other lab has been able to replicate it, so people don't believe that this is dark matter. Crest, another lab, has found something recently to but again it contradicts the Italians and also hasn't been replicated.
Tom explained that he felt that rather than try to replicate dark matter at facilities such as CERN, it might be better to try to detect dark matter in the underground labs, which is what he is now doing, despite his former position at CERN and his PhD paper on it.
Tom pointed out That science is done by people and it takes courage to go against the main ideas. At the moment dark matter explains things better than any other theory, so until a new theory comes along its the best we have. Perhaps that young 8-year-old boy sitting in front of me will be the one to come up with a new and different theory if no dark matter is found either at CERN or in the direct detection labs.
Monday 28 May 2012
One, Two, Three, Four, Five!
Once I caught a fish alive!
Summer is here once again and Ram is really struggling with so many things. He has struggled with the transition from winter hoodie to summer hoodie, and is struggling with footwear. He has worn big heavy police boots with zips up the sides for a few years ago for ankle support (his left ankle is particularly bad) as well as rigid insoles. However as he has pain on standing which means that he is reluctant to do any of his physio exercises which require standing, his orthotist has switched him to softer insoles, which help a little, but make his stability worse.
Around the house he wears big sheepskin slippers which we call bounce boots (we got them to wear on the trampoline in the winter) and he has been putting his insoles in them, but now with the hot weather they are not so comfortable. And they are no good for outside with our grass being liberally fertilised by the chickens. And the orthotist told him not to bother putting his new insoles in them as they wouldn't work.
For summer all they could suggest was trainers, so we bought Converse High Top canvas trainers. The laces defeated him. Not so much tying the knots, the OT has been very useful in getting him to tie knots although he is still slow. No, it is having to undo the laces all the way to get his feet in and out of them. So they have been worn just enough for him to decide that he doesn't want to wear them, but too much to be able to send them back!
So why am I having this moan? To give me the excuse to put some nice photos on the blog!
I was at the pond this afternoon fishing out some blanket weed with the net, when I managed to catch up a fish entangled with it! We have been trying to catch one of our 'wild' gold fish for a couple of years now to have a better look at them. We had three abandoned fish from one of the gardens that our Gardening Boys work in, and have never fed them or anything, but this year we have 8 fully grown and rather large fish. Six gold ones, and two white ones.
So, I catch a fish, but how to get hold of Ram. I yelled, but of course he can't hear me while wearing his noise cancelling head phones, so I ended up taking the fish in the net into the house with me to get him! Poor fish!
Ram came out, bounce boots and all, and held the net while I took some photos. So if you are hot and bothered this afternoon, and feeling miserable that you are stuck at home with your SEN or disabled child, or not able to have a holiday this year, just have a look at some lovely gold fish and that might cheer you up - I hope! It did me!
It was a feisty one
We were surprised at how deep it was, as we only usually see them from the top so can only see their length and width.
But don't worry, we let it have its freedom again and it swam happily off into the deep.
And if that doesn't cheer you up, how about the damsel fly orgy we witnessed yesterday!
Around the house he wears big sheepskin slippers which we call bounce boots (we got them to wear on the trampoline in the winter) and he has been putting his insoles in them, but now with the hot weather they are not so comfortable. And they are no good for outside with our grass being liberally fertilised by the chickens. And the orthotist told him not to bother putting his new insoles in them as they wouldn't work.
For summer all they could suggest was trainers, so we bought Converse High Top canvas trainers. The laces defeated him. Not so much tying the knots, the OT has been very useful in getting him to tie knots although he is still slow. No, it is having to undo the laces all the way to get his feet in and out of them. So they have been worn just enough for him to decide that he doesn't want to wear them, but too much to be able to send them back!
So why am I having this moan? To give me the excuse to put some nice photos on the blog!
I was at the pond this afternoon fishing out some blanket weed with the net, when I managed to catch up a fish entangled with it! We have been trying to catch one of our 'wild' gold fish for a couple of years now to have a better look at them. We had three abandoned fish from one of the gardens that our Gardening Boys work in, and have never fed them or anything, but this year we have 8 fully grown and rather large fish. Six gold ones, and two white ones.
So, I catch a fish, but how to get hold of Ram. I yelled, but of course he can't hear me while wearing his noise cancelling head phones, so I ended up taking the fish in the net into the house with me to get him! Poor fish!
Ram came out, bounce boots and all, and held the net while I took some photos. So if you are hot and bothered this afternoon, and feeling miserable that you are stuck at home with your SEN or disabled child, or not able to have a holiday this year, just have a look at some lovely gold fish and that might cheer you up - I hope! It did me!
It was a feisty one
We were surprised at how deep it was, as we only usually see them from the top so can only see their length and width.
But don't worry, we let it have its freedom again and it swam happily off into the deep.
And if that doesn't cheer you up, how about the damsel fly orgy we witnessed yesterday!
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