Frankfurt am Main

This is a Kryptikmo stzle entrz from an internet cafe in Frankfurt. Iäm stuck here for two hours because I just missed the onlz decent train connection to Nuremberg. I have a german kezboard and canät be bothered to tzpe properlz. Iäm going to go and see if I can get mugged now.

The Lancashire Derbyshire & East Coast Railway

If I walk out of the back door of the house where I grew up then within 20 minutes walk I can cross the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway, the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln Railway and the North Midland Railway. They all run parallel in the floodplain of the River Rother, and their owners presumably didn't get along with one another too well, cause they could have saved themselves a lot of hassle by just building the one. Now only one is left, the North Midland Railway, which is used by a few freight trains.

The first one I listed (that's the one in the title) must have been a bitch to build, as it was the last of the three and the flat and easy ground had gone. The railway dates from the 1890s and runs through impressively deep cuttings followed by huge embankments. Today I cycled, walked and slipped down the derelict remains of this railway. The lines were removed when I was small and the track has been mostly left to nature and to fly-tippers, which makes cycling quite a challenge. Here's a picture of the railway as it passes through a cutting.



click for google maps overhead shot of photo

Possibly the trickiest bit of cycling the Lancashire, Derbyshire & East Coast Railway to get past is the bridge over the Chesterfield Canal. In some weird parallel world the canal is filled with water and boats and the railway is home to the Killamarsh steam railway museum, and all visitors to the area would flock to see the point where the steam trains pass over the narrowboats going down the canal. In this world the canal is empty and filled with vegetation and the odd house, whilst the bridge has huge holes in it and is fenced off on one side. Here is a photo of the bridge. If you look carefully you can see the fence which used to block the way, but no longer does.



And here's the bridge from the other side. I didn't manage to get my bike across, but it's not too hard to walk round.



click for google maps overhead shot of photo

Anyone wishing for a serene pedal would be better advised to go down the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln Railway which is now a cycle path and part of the trans-pennine trail, but it isn't half as much fun.

If you read this far you might wish to see the three railway lines on google maps. They run fairly straight from north to south and are lined with trees. If you can't work it out, use streetmap for orientation. Note the lovely oxbow lake in both cases.

(I wrote this a few days ago, but only got the pictures up now).

Welcome to Chavland

I landed in Manchester airport this afternoon, and the first words I heard were a tannoy announcement 'Would the person who bought a bottle of Jade Goody perfume please...'. I can't remember the rest, as in my head the only words which made sense were '...kill yourself'.

It's going to be a long week at this rate. For the sake of England, the Queen and old maids bicycling across foggy airports drinking pots of tea please don't bother looking at the following wikipedia links.

Chav
Jade Goody

Juggling and the Coriolis Force

The Coriolis force is one of those things that I've believed in but never experienced. When it was taught at the university we were given examples of balls falling from equatorial skyscrapers, the British Navy making false corrections in the Falkland islands (possibly mythical according to wikipedia) and weather systems.

All of these are rather abstract things for a physics student as I rarely have a skyscraper or battlecruiser handy, and to me wind blows in straight lines. When was the last time you read "the icy wind was blowing from the north with a radius of curvature of 50km"? If I had a fully-crewed battlecruiser I would do nothing else but try to hit shipping at all possible latitudes in both hemispheres, but sadly I don't.

All of these examples are of the coriolis effect because of the earth's rotation. Things are much more fun and managable on smaller things which rotate every few seconds rather than planets which rotate once a day, such as roundabouts in this YouTube clip.

Last week I experienced my first ever difficulties with the Coriolis force. I was trying to turn around whilst juggling 5 balls, and found that if I turned clockwise then my right hand was catching balls far from the body and my left hand was catching them close to the chest. If I turned the other way then exactly the opposite happened. Was this the Coriolis force? Having read so many phenomena which are attributed to the Coriolis force but which aren't I thought I'd better check this out to make sure that it wasn't just bad aiming because of dizziness.

If you throw a ball from one hand to the other so that it stays in the air for one second, and your hands are half a metre apart, then the horizontal speed (v) is 0.5m/s. If you turn around every 12 seconds then you will have an angular velocity (omega) of about 0.5 rad/s.

The size of the coriolis acceleration is 2*omega*v, so to you the ball will appear to be accelerated inwards or outwards at about 0.5 m/s^2, which is about 1/20th of g, the acceleration due to gravity. The ball will land about 25cm further away (or closer to you) than you would expect. Maybe I wasn't turning that fast, because this seems a bit too much, but it's not far off what I was doing.

The centrifugal force depends on the square of omega, so it's not too important for slow rotations. Of course for fast rotations it quickly becomes important, see here, here and here.

Having had a few minutes of enjoyment (and then dizziness) experiencing this elusive force first hand I found that I'd got the hang of juggling whilst turning, and was automatically correcting for it quite nicely. It was fun while it lasted.

It took me a long time to understand why, if your throw an object in the direction of rotation, it should appear to move away from you or towards you. I only really got it whilst drawing the following diagram. Those blue squares represent a pair of hands, the small round thing is a ball, which starts from the left hand and is aimed at the right one. During the flight the hands rotate around the point in the middle, and if you're in control of the hands then the ball appears to make a curve. Of course somebody hovering above you would argue that your hands were curving and not the ball.

End of Part two

Part two of the blog (September til now) was pretty shite, to be honest. I wouldn't have bothered reading it, if I were you. It wasn't really more interesting than it sounded, but for the record here is what it said at the top of the page:

"The diary of a disillusioned physicist trying to get back on his feet by finding a job. It's more interesting than it sounds, honestly."

I will start a job in Bochum at the start of February, developing ultrasound scanners at the university. This means that I now have six weeks proper holiday.

Loss of Reality

Today I just about returned to the real world. I've had a damned annoying cold and decided to basically stay in bed for a week. I stopped reading emails, stopped checking post and prayed that the phone wouldn't ring.

I popped in once to reality to go bowling but spent the rest of the time asleep, or lying in bed or surfing the internet or playing freeciv. An afternoon nap has a great habit of shortening the day by a few hours. The most interesting activity was rereading a few books in a random but on the whole back-to-front order.

This laziness started off as being a fair enough reaction to a bad cold, but now the cold is gone and I'm left lying in bed trying to avoid anything happening. Time has speeded up so that December seems to be going in a flash. Three days are somehow nothing.

Well today I at least took the rubbish out, went to the bank, booked a flight and read my emails, and I'm going to go juggling. It's a start, at least.

Kenny Lunt

Asides from being nominally a Sheffield Wednesday fan, I am a fan of subtle humour. Wednesday beat Norwich City 2-1 on Saturday, with midfielder Kenny Lunt earning a booking. I looked up his entry on Wikipedia, but am at a loss to explain how he got the nickname "Lenny". And why does clicking on his nickname lead to the page on Spoonerisms?

I nicked this one of Jon Henley's diary from last weeks Guardian, but here is Sheffield's top eatery, the Polonium Restaurant.



I'd better be off, otherwise I'll be lucking fate for lunch.

William "Fatty" Foulkes

I've got a godawful cold, my nose is blocked, and I keep falling asleep and waking up with a parched mouth. I tried to get over this cold on Thursday evening by playing squash, but I just ended up with an even worse cold and very wobbly legs. This cold might explain why I'm writing so much, for in between sleeping and reading I've been looking at some good stuff on YouTube.

But to get you in the mood, here is a competition. Please identify, from the 1897 England team which beat Wales 4-0, William Foulkes. The only clue I'm giving is that his nickname was "Fatty".




Anway, I was watching this clip of the 1901 FA cup final replay between Tottenham Hotspur and Sheffield United (boo hiss, for I am a Sheffield Wednesday fan). I was struck by the size of the goalkeeper, and thought "Is it? Naa it can't be, no way, not the legendary Fatty Foulkes". But it was, and is. As United (in striped shirts) trot onto the pitch one of their players is a head taller and a few feet wider than all the others. We then see him taking a goal kick, before pulling up his shorts (perhaps he'd been on pre-final diet).

There are numerous stories about Foulkes, the Sheffield United website says that he hung from and broke a crossbar in the 1896/97 season, and this cartoon from the day after the cup final replay makes note of his famous punches (If I read it right then the caption bottom right says "Little Willie's little punch with all his weight behind it"), which were claimed to reach the half-way line. Here is a report from the Independent describing Foulkes "picking up the Liverpool centre-forward George Allan, turning him upside down, and standing him on his head in the mud".

He even found time between meals to play some cricket for Derbyshire, and his cricketing obituary appeared in Wisden.

A stick of rhubarb.

It took me a couple of days to work up to this, but England (without Trescothick) managed to throw away the second Ashes match. Having scored over 500 runs in the first innings and having declared (that means that they were so confident of not losing that they gave up their remaining wickets voluntarily) they were in control of the match, but they blew it on the morning of the fifth day. It took me a couple more days to see the funny side, but quite amusing in hindsight are the comments in the 25th over from Rob Smyth: "If England lose this game I'll run through Oxford Street tomorrow wearing nothing but a relentless glow" and in the 31st over from Brad in California "So let me get this straight, you're not watching, not listening to, but reading about a game that has been going on for five days, and is almost certain to end in a draw". England lost, quite disastrously, but at least that showed Brad in California, Haa.

For anyone who takes pleasure in English disasters, you can read all about it here and here too. There are lots of amusing quotes, such as "Let's face it," says Matt, "it is going to be a draw.", " "That was the biggest load of rubbish I have ever seen."

And now for something completely different, here's a YouTube link to a football match in the days that Referees wore impeccably straight bow ties.

Something I should have done a while ago.

The only thing I managed to do today was to go to a psychotherapist. There are two reasons that I made this appointment, and one of them is a bit embarassing. The first is my failure to go about getting a job in any kind of sensible manner. I just can't keep a positive mindset long enough to go through the process of reading an advertisement, writing an application, going for an interview and then accepting a job. I've got a CV which would suggest a job involving complicated physics stuff or some kind of responsibility or importance, and I generally don't feel up to it.

Possible jobs (I just opened up an old Physikjournal) include working with an "intense optical fs-laser in two-colour pump-probe experiments" or "non-equilibrium phenomena in multiphase flow through porous media"

This kind of stuff scares the shit out of me. Some other jobs require that you are "Belastbar": able to work under pressure, and I'm not. The second and real reason that I went to a psychotherapist is because of the England cricketer Marcus Trescothick. A couple of weeks ago he decided that touring Australia swinging a piece of wood was too much for him, and I knew how he felt.

Here is a report from Geoffrey Boycott on Trescothick's departure, and I found the comment from Melanie most useful.

Burnout is not solely a mental fatigue it is physical, the body no longer has the physical resources to cope with demands being made upon it and this leads to the mental stress and illness. Gastro-intestinal illnesses are induced by the body’s constant demand on adrenalin to keep things going – high levels of adrenalin in the body cause a reduced blood-flow to the stomach and intestines, this in turn affects the body’s ability to absorb nutrients from food, which in turn affects the body’s ability to renew its resources.

As far as I can work out this is what happened to me two years ago. I pushed myself too far in my PhD and broke down completely. Sleeplessness, depression, stomach pains, an ear infection and a general feeling of exhaustion and worthlessness. Now I'm alright, as far as it goes, but I'm scared to do anything with my life. I also still get really nervous whenever I'm woken up by a telephone. So I'll book an appointment for a therapy course on Monday.

The shrink asked me whether there had been a history of depression in the family. My honest answer is that I don't know. It's not the kind of thing we really talked about, and the only way I'd have known is if a relative had blown their head off, which they haven't, so I guess things can't have been that bad. This design for life probably explains why I haven't taken this step earlier, but I can't think of any good reason for not doing it now.

An Old Film and Bamberg

Well I'm still alive and well, so yesterday I took the RC for a nice trip to Bamberg. She wanted to take some photos, so I got my old camera out of the cupboard. It is a 20th century model which still takes film and I've not used it for a couple of years.

After taking one photo the film was full but I was able to buy a new one from the newsagents at the station. I'm going to go and let the film be developed now, and I don't have a clue what's on it. Probably some holiday with an old girlfriend or something.

What's that, you say that you don't care about an old camera, and want to know what went on in Bamberg? It was a lovely day out, and I got to have liver-dumpling soup, roast pork and smoked beer for lunch, but somehow things seem different to being in a disco, and explaining the tale of Queen Cunigunde and the ploughshares (see picture) was maybe a mistake. The story is that as a test of her virginity and she was forced to walk across a dozen glowing ploughshares, and emerged unscathed. I bet that she'd been round the houses and was probably fucking the blacksmith.

Aye m'Kaiser, them there ploughshares be straight out o' yon fire. Them be black hot ploughshares, so they be. (winks to queen)

Note for Interpol

If I should happen to be found murdered with an ice pick, it was presumably the siberian oil mafia.

The geeks' guide to pulling.

Experimental science is rather simple, and you learn pretty much all you need to know in school. You put on a white coat, set up your stuff and every 10 minutes change something, whilst looking and recording something else. Hopefully you will then see a pattern emerge between what you change and what you observe.

This is a pretty universal technique, and is fully described in this link for science projects. At any one time thousands of poor scientists are sat around twiddling their knobs (should I rephrase that?) and looking at the colour of their litmus paper, and some of them will be female.

Now here's the trick: If you wander into a laboratory at 5pm on a Friday evening you will find frustrated scientists trying to finish their measurements, one of which you identify as your date for the evening. She'll be twiddling a knob, waiting a while, and then looking at the colour of her litmus paper. This process will have to be repeated for several hours, and she's probably written the evening off.

As a geek, you can walk in and connect a computer via a digital-analogue converter to a motor which automatically rotates the knob, aim a digital camera at the litmus paper, wire the camera up to the same computer and write a program to fourier transform the colour information, plot the results and send them by email to her supervisor at 2am.

You then take your astonished admirer by the arm, whisper into her ear "the only buttons you'll be pushing this evening are mine" and walk off into the bright lights of the city.

I'm sadly not geeky enough to achieve this. I settled for leaving her to finish the experiments alone and picking her up later. Although it lacks the style of the real geek method, it does have the advantage that she'll be so frustrated with the futility of experimenting that she'll be desperate for alcohol.