A Short History of Nearly Everything: Space

"Now, the first thing you are likely to realize is that space is extremely well named and rather dismayingly uneventful.   Our solar system may be the liveliest thing for trillions of miles, but all the visible stuff in it - the Sun, the planets and their moons, the billion or so tumbling rocks of the asteroid belt, comets and other miscellaneous drifting detritus - fills less than a trillionth of the available space.   You also quickly realize that none of the maps you have ever seen of the solar system was drawn remotely to scale.   Most schoolroom charts show the planets coming one after the other at neighbourly intervals - the outer giants actually cast shadows over each other in many illustrations - but this is a necessary deceit to get them all on the same bit of paper.   Neptune in reality isn't just a little bit beyond Jupiter, it's way beyond Jupiter - five times further from Jupiter than Jupiter is from us, so far out that it receives only 3 per cent as much sunlight as Jupiter.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale.   Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close.   On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres away (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway).   On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away.   Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away.  

So the solar system is really quite enormous.   By the time we reach Pluto, we have come so far that the Sun - our dear, warm, skin-tanning, life -giving Sun - has shrunk to the size of a pinhead.   It is little more than a bright star.   In such a lonely void you can begin to understand how even the most significant objects - Pluto's moon, for example -  have escaped attention.   In this respect, Pluto has hardly been alone.   Until the Voyager expeditions, Neptune was thought to have two moons; Voyager found six more.   When I was a boy, the solar system was thought to contain thirty moons.   The total is now at least ninety, about a third of which have been found in just the last ten years.   The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don't actually know what's in our own solar system.  

Now the other thing you will notice as we speed past Pluto is that we are speeding past Pluto.   If you check your itinerary, you will see that this is a trip to the edge of our solar system, and I'm afraid we're not there yet.   Pluto may be the last object marked on schoolroom charts, but the solar system doesn't end there.   In fact, it isn't even close to ending there.   We won't get to the solar system's edge until we have passed through the Oort cloud, a vast celestial realm of drifting comets, and we won't reach the Oort cloud for another - I'm so sorry about this - ten thousand years.   Far from marking the edge of the solar system, as those schoolroom maps so cavalierly imply, Pluto is barely one-fifty-thousandth of the way."


A bit out of date now, of course, but still pretty cool.   Science!  :D

Food and Drink: Delicious Teas

In tonight's post I thought I'd share with you some of the delicious teas I've discovered lately.  The first one was brought back from China for me by my flat mate.   It came in a sort of cake form, wrapped in paper and sitting in a beautiful little box.  

Not really knowing what I was meant to do with it, I resorted to scraping the cake with a knife to loosen enough tea for a cup.   It makes a tasty and very delicate green tea.   Yum! 





Next is a brilliant tea I found in a local tea (and antiques) shop called Anteaques.   When I went I promised myself myself I wouldn't end up leaving with a bad of whatever tea I ordered.  Not only did I fail at that resolution, I also finished the bag of tea within two weeks and had to go back for a second.   It's called Festive Fruits.   It's a hibiscus based tea and tastes just like Christmas!   It's all apples, cinnamon, cherries and almonds.   Delicious!   Quite possibly my favorite ever tea!

This next tea is also a hibiscus based one, and came from a tea shop in London.   It's called summer pudding and is also yummy!   It's full of apples and blackberries and tastes just like an English summer day.

This last tea is one that you can find fairly easily.   It's made by a brand called Tea Pigs, which is quite expensive, but worth it, in my opinion.   I've tried a few Tea Pigs teas and my favorite is one called Super Fruit.   It's another hibiscus based tea (are you noticing a pattern here?) and is full of cranberries and blueberries.   It's got a pretty refreshing and delicate flavour and is yummy! 

Songs/Promotion: Nothing is Easy

This is a song called Nothing is Easy by VerseChorusVerse.   As well as being a lovely wee song, it also happens to have a music video filmed by my very clever little brother!  It was nominated for a Limelight award and everything.   *Proud sister face*.

Photography: Lago Maggiore

I love storm lighting.   You know the kind I mean.   Dark and moody clouds but with the sun still managing to sneak through somehow, casting a strange yellow glow over everything.   The kind of light that can last for mere seconds and when it does appear you of course never have a camera with you.   Well, I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with the right equipment on this occasion, and I managed to get some lovely shots of Lago Maggiore at home just before a storm broke.   Some of them are HDR and some aren't.

                                                                        The HDR

                                                              And the non-HDR ones

 

Songs: Indian Summer

Who could argue with a bit of Stereophonics?   Everybody knows them, everybody likes them and they just keep getting better and better.   This is Indian Summer.   It's a great song with a vast talent for getting stuck in your head.

Film Reviews: Les Misérables

Never having seen Les Mis on stage, I didn't really know what to expect from the film, but I have to say that I really enjoyed it.   It was a big film, with lots of big scenes, big stars and lots of big songs.   I especially enjoyed Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baren Cohen as the nasty innkeepers.   They were hilarious!   Brilliant performances.   But what else could we expect from Helena Bonham Carter?   I enjoyed the little street urchin Gavroche as well.   Real talent there.   Everyone seems to have hated Russell Crowe's singing voice, but I didn't think he was that bad at all!   Not great, but passable.   There have definitely been worse!   Since watching this I've listened to the soundtrack a lot and there are so many brilliant songs in it and most of them really well performed.   My favorites were Eponine's song, On My Own, which is so beautifully sad and poignant, and Do You Hear the People Sing, which is so very stirring.   But there are loads of other good ones besides.   Some of it was a bit over-the-top melodramatic and drawn-out for me, but that's just because the original material is.   Not much the director (who by the way is Tom Hooper who directed one of my all time favorites, The King's Speech) could have done there without changing it dramatically.   And even as a smelly ragged prisoner I still found Hugh Jackman attractive!  

TV Reviews: The Big Bang Theory Season 5

I love The Big Bang Theory.   It's definitely one of my favorite tv shows.  I love the characters and the writing is so clever, and it's full of nerdy geeky jokes which I understand!  It's my staple program to watch in bed when I'm ill.   It never fails to cheer me up.   Season 5 did not disappoint!   It followed on seamlessly from the previous seasons and had the same energy and humour.   Sheldon and Howard's girlfriends Amy and Bernadette are by now well established in their roles and make excellent additions to the group.   The series is dominated by the build up to the big season finale, namely Howard and Bernadette's wedding and Howard's trip to space.   There are plenty of mentions of wedding plans throughout and arguments about Howard going into space.   And of course the big event we've all been waiting for happens as well, which is Leonard and Penny getting back together.  We all knew it would!   We all know it's right!   But once again the course of true love does not run smooth for them.   This isn't a fairy tale.   And perhaps my favorite moment of the series was Sheldon and Amy finally becoming an official couple.   It was so cute and funny.   Of course with a group of such "interesting" personalities there are always going to be interpersonal difficulties and this series deals with quite a lot of them.   Both Sheldon and Amy, and Bernadette and Howard encounter difficulties in their relationships, like Sheldon being selfish and Howard's shady past, but they both get through them.  Sheldon and Leonard also have problems with their friendship for the same reason.   The issue of Raj's loneliness is also dealt with pretty thoroughly too, with him falling for Penny, his phone, a gold digger, then asking his parents for help for help finding a wife, then finally getting a dog from Howard and Bernadette.   Poor Raj.   I also enjoyed a cameo from yet another Star Trek actor, this time Brent Spiner.   It made my inner Trekkie child very happy.   All in all a very strong continuation to a great series, and I can't wait to see Season 6 (Yes, I know it's been out for ages!   I'll get to it!)