Happy New Year - the F-word and maggots

Well, I have been busy in another enterprise so have had little time to post here.

I will just carry on as if nothing has happened since October last year, but, of course it has.

This eclectic mix of postings shall keep its eccentric theme and I bring to your notice a new book from Bagwash Books by Frank Roberts called Maggots about fortnightly collections of rubbish in a fictitious council (the other F-word that refuse collectors never use...). See the flyer at this link for more information.

A clock for PDT (Pacific Daylight Time)

Heaven can wait: get a Second Life now!

Another life...

How often have you lamented, Maybe in another life? Well you can virtually enjoy a second life now! I am enjoying mine. You see me above critically reflecting on my new Second Life, SL, compared with my Real Life, RL.

Yes, its free to register with Second Life, a social networking 3D virtual community, where there are not computer-characters only real people represented by avatars. You can live there as a man or a woman or, well, pretty much anything, and you can fly! The only thing you can't do is die.

http://www.secondlife.com

Some new, original modern music

This band, The Butterscotch Bandits, has a cool sound to complement their sweet name. Unlike a lot (or maybe most) bands, they don't suck.

I really like the song Sad; it seems the man would rather die than love a girl. The girl was drop-dead gorgeous, but not in a good way!

http://www.myspace.com/thebutterscotchbandits

Enjoy.

Peak District Ford

Fording with a Chevy

Went over a ford – a bit scary as one could not really know how deep the water was because the stream was in spate. Powered over it in the car, a Chevrolet Lacetti. Safely fortunately; quite an adventure.

Fountains Abbey

The Abbey is a ruin, but a magnificent one from the 12^th Century. The Abbey was added to over centuries and could only expand outwards over the river (see my photograph). In July this year it was flooded to a depth of a foot of water as a result, and that must have been fairly common over the long life of the Abbey. It was built of local sandstone but had a tower added 300 years later (apparently, an exercise in vanity; just so the Cistercian Abbey could be said to have the tallest tower).

An old monk who died more than 100 years old wrote the histories on parchment – a life witness. Interestingly, the average life expectancy of the time about 30 years, and in the towns 20 was considered old! The sanitation and regular good food are thought to have been a factor in the longer lifespan enjoyed by monks. By regulation they ate 1½ lbs of bread and 2 pints of ale each day. When meat was came in as regulations were relaxed, it was seriously argued that meat was only the flesh of for-legged animals, so chicken was not meat (sic).

The Abbey had a tunnel like room where monks could talk to each other; at other times they were meant to be silent. Only one room was heated, but the fire was continuous 24/7.

There was a jail for badly behaved monks, and it had shackles!

Schoolchildren visit wearing white robes (see my photograph), just like Cistercian monks wore. In its day, before dissolution, it was one of the richest Abbeys in the world. For instance, when a sheep disease spread and most flocks had to put down (16,000 sheep) they went into debt of £6,000 equivalent to more than a million pounds today – and that was just one of many enterprises 50 monks and 250 lay or hired workers ran.

Fountains Hall, NT

Fountains Hall and Abbey are a kind of bundled deal, but I will just say a few words about the Hall today; the abbey is huge and deserves its own page, I think.

Fountains Hall is really just a couple of rooms in a house that started off life in the Elizabethan era. It has an oriole (balcony) of note, although one can’t use it because the second floor is used for weddings!

The family that owned it during the ware lost a son and a daughter as a missing pilot in the RAF and a victim of a bomb, and there is a sculpture remembering them which you can see as you come out of the house down the stone stairs.

Many visitors may well miss the significance of the memorial as they are not really looking for 20th Century artifacts, but I confess, I was was moved by the tragic story of the loss of their children to the last War. The Vyner Memorial Window inscription is as follows:

"WHEN YOU GO HOME
TELL THEM OF US
AND SAY
FOR YOUR TOMORROW
WE GAVE OUR TODAY

FROM THIS THEIR HOME, THEY WENT TO WAR.

Elizabeth Vyner WRNS - Died on Active Service June 3rd 1942 Aged 18 years. Also her brother Charles De Grey Vyner Sub Lieut (A) RNVR Reported missing from Air Operations Off Rangoon May 2nd 1945 Aged 19 Years."

NT Ref

Belton House, Lincolnshire

Belton House

A seventeenth century house run by the National Trust. It is interesting but seemed to lack the charm that Rockingham Castle has in abundance, perhaps because it is more a museum than a home. One saw the Blue Room and Marble Room made famous by the TV drama Pride and Prejudice based on the novel by Jane Austen... rooms and exteriors shown in a drama based on Jane Eyre by Bronte, which was interesting; one saw the faux kitchen range actually made of wood for a TV show called Moondial about 40 years ago... but it just does not seem to have a soul and even sells tea and coffee in recycled paper cups. A museum, not a home. It has lovely grounds, a fountain and a kind of secret large glasshouse with a fish pond. The house boasts its own silent and unused chapel, but the extant church nearby is worth a visit too.

Check out the link to wikipedia, and you may see my addendum to the Moondial entry.

Rockingham Castle

I have been traveling ...

http://www.rockinghamcastle.com/

Details of location etc

This is the best preserved Motte and Bailey castle in the UK. The Bailey is the wall surrounding and the Motte was the hill on which a Keep was built, the last refuge for the besieged. During the civil war the Roundheads accidentally blew up the armoury and the Motte with it, but it is still an impressive place.

Mr and Mrs Watson live there with their children, a practice happening for over 400 years now; and they are very pleasant to guests should they come across them, as I can testify myself when I met Mrs Watson near the private stairs, up which had scampered a little girl, one of the daughters shouting to her sister to get ready for their trip out. Her mother, slightly embarrassed at her daughter's rush and exuberance wished me well and hoped that I was enjoying my visit and afternoon. I said I was which was true. Everyone seemed pleasant and helpful, and the guide knew some interesting facts and made the old house and walls live with anecdotes from its bloody past.

Some things I learnt a Rockinham Castle

1. Charles Dickens, the famous nineteenth century author, was a close friend of the Watsons of his era, who were benefactors of the community, setting up model schools – antitypes to Dotheboys Hall, for instance. They would rejoice in Dickens' plays performed in the house of an evening with guests taking different parts. Bleak House's “Growlery” and Tolkinghorn's offices were based on its rooms. The Long Hall, said Dickens, was the setting for the Dinning Room of Chesney Wold.
   
   
2. In the Long Hall (upstairs) are paintings of men in wigs and a couple of wig boxes. Yes: a big wig was a person of nobility who ruled, and the wig was large acting like a hat of authority may today. On attending, one would look around and decide who was most important according to the size of the wig worn! Hence the term big wig.
   
   
3. And talking about wigs leads me to a tale of horses, or indeed, tails of horses. Rich people could afford to buy the hair of local maidens who grew it long to cut and sell for wig makers to construct the wigs that the wealthy would buy and wear; a cycle that lasted centuries. Aspiring to be bewigged themselves, less wealthy people had their wigs made from the hair of horses' tails. That led to the horses having stumped tails, and they can be seen in paintings at Rockinham. So, now you know why they had docked tails – to sell the hair to make the wigs for the poorer folk. So the wealthy men wore the hair of women and upwardly mobile men wore the hair of horses. I wonder when they realised that the whole thing was quite daft...
   
   
4. I have been known to bake bread in one of those little electrical ovens you can buy now that produce little bricks of often tasty bread using cunning timer programs that do all the work of kneading the dough. At Rockingham Castle, kitchen staff baked bread in the shape today known as that of a cottage loaf; it was not sliced vertically, but horizontally. The bottom was used as plate because it was most likely charred or dirty from the over, and the top crust was given to the family, and the middle crust was eaten by servants. So, those who served came to know their Masters and Mistresses as the Upper Crust.

2-colour illusion

The colours (brightness) of A and B are the same!

The reason why one sees them as difference is surprisingly easy to explain. Nature designed our eyesight to interpret the real world as models that help us to survive, and it is safer to assume that the shading on B has made a surface lighter than its surrounding squares darker, so square A (actually the same shade as B) must be rendered in our minds to be darker than B. In finding prey or, even more critically, in avoiding predation, this interpretation is safer than accurately showing the squares as the same colour or illumination.

Before you get worried, this does not happen when multiple colours or shades exist, which is much more common in the world. In a shady, dark environment, showing two identically illuminated squares as differently lit actually makes both more visible!

Who knows? If our vision was accurate in shade analysis, we might not be here as a species....

Chalk Pavement Illusions - How are they done?

Jullian Beaver is an artist famous for his chalk pavement drawings that give a fantastic impression of depth. The illusion is achieved by trickery - the illusuion depends on one looking from a particular perspective.

Here is a famous snap (courtesy of another blog) from the perspective the artist does not want you to look from, and another from the direction he designed the drawing to be viewed from.

Another eye-bender

This is from the artist Akiyoshi Kitaka who is a Professor of Psychiatry. The picture is totally static; it is not moving. Don't believe me? Enlarge it by clicking on it, then place your hand on the middle of the screen gradually covering it up. The movement slows down or stops. Quotidian Hopes is not a liar - see the previous post.

What is happening is that the cones in the eye that sense colour are making the eye move to capture the light. Remember that colour only exists in the brain as a processing trick. So it is your eye that is moving very fast (saccade), not the picture. This is called saccadic masking.

So why do we see movement and not a blur? The brain cuts out the blur, so we see an animation with frames of information missing (for fractions of a second) - dropped frames. That is why the picture looks like a cartoon or an animated gif (a graphic seen in web pages, a kind of primitive video).

It is thought that the sensation surviving victims of accidents have where time seems to slow down just before an accident is due to saccadic masking. You are probably thinking that can't be right because saccadic masking would make time speed up! You have forgotten that in a fall or other such frightening experience adrenalin is released. Experiments have shown (including in humans) that the only thing known to suppress the saccadic masking is adrenalin. So, in the fall we see everything as it really is without the brain's censorship, and it is stored instead of being thrown away. So time seems to go slowly.