The Periodic Table

A post built around Dan Green’s “The Periodic Table in Minutes” and an article that brought things even further up to date.

INTRODUCTION

This is a post that has grown from two distinct roots as you will see. At the end I will be sharing some photographs and other links that have caught my eye.

A BOOK AND AN ARTICLE

I spotted a small format book about the periodic table in the library a few days ago, and duly borrowed it (I have also read and enjoyed Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ Periodic Tales). It proved to be an enjoyable and informative read.

While I was still working out how I might work this book and some ideas the occurred to me from my reading of it into a post I came across this article about the approval of names for the four elements which had previously had placeholder names based on the Latin for their number (113, 115, 117 and 118). This leads to my next section…

NAMES FOR ELEMENTS

The four new names are in ascending atomic number order Nihonium (based on the Japanese name for Japan), Moscovium, Tennessine (for the state of Tennessee) and Oganesson (in honour of physicist Yuri Oganessian), this latter further tilting the list of elements named after people in favour of men. Although a few female mythological characters were honoured in earlier times the number of real life females to feature in the periodic table stands at two – Marie Curie with Curium and Lise Meitner with Meitnerium. There was nearly a third – element 102 was subject to vigorous dispute over its discovery between research teams from Sweden and Russia – the Russians were ultimately given credit for discovering it first, but by way of compensation it was given the name Nobelium chosen by the Swedes as opposed to the Russians preferred name of Joliotium (for Irene Joliot-Curie.

This paucity of females having elements named after them got me thinking about ideas for names for future use if more elements (if you have sensible suggestions in this regard please post them in the comments section) and I came with a few ideas:

Hypatium, in honour of the possessor of the last great brain to be nurtured in the Great Library of Alexandria.
Noetherium, for Emmy Noether, mathematical genius.
Angieron for science writer Natalie Angier.
Reichsine for forensic anthropologist and hugely successful novelist Kathy Reichs.

PHOTOGRAPHS

I given you a lot of text, so now here are some pictures…

dscn7856 — Three pictures from the lumiere shown on Greyfriars tower.

dscn7889 — Christmas lights in Fakenham (three pictures).

LINKS

My first link is to a post by Rob Gorski, who calls himself the Autism Dad. This particular post is about sorting out an issue of one of his sons being bullied.

My next two links are to posts on the blog that twitter legend Rachael Swindon has just started. The first is a challenge to Michael Dugher and Tom Watson. The second is her response to the decision by the Press Gazette to name Laura Kuenssberg political journalist of the year.

I end this section with a link to a piece on The Canary titled “The Transport Secretary just sent a massive f*ck you to exasperated rail commuters up and down the country” which leads nicely on to my final section…

PUBLIC TRANSPORT OF THE FUTURE

The text that appears below comes courtesy of Google translate, which I put to work on a piece from Spanish language website www.circuitodeprueba.com – if you can read Spanish, or would just like to see the piece in its original setting click the image that ends this post.

We are in a boom of artificial intelligence for vehicles and electricity as the main fuel, this is when IBM, a legendary computer manufacturer, wants to board the ship and for that he presented OLLI, the means of transport of the future.

Olli is a bus created solely with 3D printers that has automatic driving and is totally electric. In his brain we find the artificial intelligence system IBM Watson IA and its skeleton bears the mark of Local Motors.

The Olli Smart Bus has a capacity of 12 passengers (seated and stopped) and is currently being tested in the city of Washington DC, soon to reach other cities nearby (Miami, Las Vegas) later, specifically later this year, Begin the tests in Denmark.

IBM Olli public transport of the future 2

Hydrogen Powered Buses and Clean Air for London

Some environmental news and some pictures – enjoy.

INTRODUCTION

Having recently shared the latest of Anna’s posts about her campaign to prevent a big new road from being built through an area of outstanding natural beauty I thought a couple of stories showing a more sensible approach were appropriate (and I have some new pictures to share and was looking for something else to put in the post).

HYDROGEN BUSES AND A CLEAN AIR PLAN FOR LONDON

Hydrogen buses are already a feature of the streets of the city of Aberdeen, and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan intends them to be in service in the capital by 2020. Buses are less damagaing than cars anyway because they carry more people, but hydrogen buses have an extra plus point – zero emissions. To read an excellent article on this theme click the picture below:

hydrogen-powered-buses — A hydrogen powered bus.

Councillor and London Assembly member Caroline Russell has produced a very detailed plan for making London’s streets healthier, backed up with evidence of a successful scheme in Walthanstow. To read the whole document click on the infographic giving details of the Walthamstow success that appears below:

PICTURES

dscn7833 — A Brunel £2 received in change

dscn7837 — The next four pictures show ice on the surface of the lower Purfleet (yes folks, here in the north of the world it is winter)

Pictures From King’s Lynn

Some pictures from King’s Lynn – featuring Christmas lights and the Great Ouse.

INTRODUCTION

Here are some of my most recent pictures from in and aroun King’s Lynn.

PICTURES 1: MORE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS

When the Christmas lights were first turned on in King’s Lynn I put up this post. Now I have some more Christmas light picturesfor you…

PICTURES 2: THE RIVERBANK

Regular visitors to this blog will know that walking alongside the Great Ouse is something I do a lot of, and I have some good pictures from earlier today when I did just that…

Beer Mats, Buttons and a few Other Bits

An analysis of my newly acquired collection of beer mats (complete with photos), a unique LNER display and some other stuff.

INTRODUCTION

This post features some stuff I have bought at auctions and some stuff I have been given, and features some links at the end.

BEER MATS

I mentioned in my post about James and Sons’ November auction that I had purchased a box of beer mats. Well I have just finished sorting through them and categorizing them, taking photos along the way.

MACALLAN

There are seven mats that relate to Macallan Scotch Whisky. Macallan are sposnors of one of the world’s most prestigious bridge tournaments as well as purveyors of whisky.

HEINEKEN AND ICE HOCKEY

I have 12 Heineken mats, one circular and 11 athletics track shaped. These latter 11 feature Ice Hockey Heroes – I have a run of numbers 2 through 9 of the original series of 10 and duplicates of numbers 7, 8 and 9.

RANDOM FOREIGN

Five mats referrg to foreign drinks.

COCA COLA AND COMPETITIONS

I have three mats advertsiign coca cola, two of which are duplicates, a schweppes mat and mat advertising a Holsten Pils competition.

014 — The two central mats are duplicates – I have shown different sides of each.

GENERAL SCOTCHES

Four mats advertising scotch whiskies other than Macallan.

PRODUCE OF THE APPLE

Five mats where the focus is on drinks created from apples:

THE IRISH CONTINGENT

I have nine mats featuring products of the Emerald Isle.

018 — The two big Guinness mats are duplicates, as are the three Murphy’s mats.

UNCATEGORIZED

Four mats that I could not think of a category for.

BEER MATS GENERAL

We now come to the best bits of the collection. Starting with nine mats featuring a range of beers from around the country.

019 — The Webster’s mats at the top are duplicates save that they have different heroes on the back, as you will see later…

BEER MATS – EAST ANGLIA

There are ten beer mats in this group, all with a connection to East Anglia.

You have now seen every beer mat in the collection, but I was not quite finished yet…

THOMAS’ TOP THREE

This is an image of my three favourite beer mats.

THE RAILWAY CONNECTION

Some mats that are specifically railway oriented.

023 — The Samuel Whitbread connection is a little tenuous, and I took the opportunity to show the Amy Johnson profile.

THE BUTTONS

One of my colleagues recently gave me some LNER buttons (LNER stood for London and North Eastern Railway), and had previously given me an LNER badge. I also had some other LNBER buttons and an LNER themed postcard from previous purchases, and assembled this into an LNER display.

dscn7687 — The three buttons that set me thinking about the display – without using the flash

dscn7689 — close up of the locomotive button

003 — Buttons, the badge and the postcard mounted ready for display.

010 — The display (it is housed in a plastic wallet).

A TWITTER FIND

If you are interested in trees then the following, tweeted by a certain James Rees, will certainly appeal:

A COUPLE OF KING’S LYNN PICS TO FINISH

001 — A gull using the flagpole at the top of Clifton House tower as a perch.

James and Sons November Auction

An account of James and Sons’ November auction

INTRODUCTION

James and Sons’ November auction took place yesterday at the Long Bar, Fakenham Racecourse. This post covers both yesterday and the aftermath today.

THE PRELIMINARIES

The setup was accopmplished on Tuesday, with more than a few hints of trouble ahead (see here for more details). There was a heavy frost in evidence when I set forth to catch the 6:28 bus to Fakenham (now that they have reduced the number of morning bus services I cannot get in early enough on an auction day on any other bus). The bus left on time, but only made it as far as Littleport Street (its first outward bound stop if anyone is there) before breaking down. The replacement bus took longer to arrive than it should have, given that the depot is only couple of miles away. This bus did make it to Fakenham, arriving at approximately 7:30, although it had no heating. The Long Bar is, for all its grand title, a wooden hut, and the heater would not work at first. When we did get it to work it pumped out smoke.

The IT setup did work however, and the auction started promptly.

dscn7682 — As well as posters and prints there are jockey’s silks on display at the Long Bar

THE AUCTION ITSELF

The auction started with coins, which fared very well. The coins were followed by banknotes, which sold phenomenally well. Then came the militaria, which was good in parts. After that came some aviation postcards. Lots 350-377 were toys, first toy cars, starting with the ‘Goldfinger’ Aston Martin DB5 in mint condition, and progressing through more toy cars, Hornby, Triang and a few dolls. After that we were into collector’s models – a few boxes of lead soldiers and a large quantity of model aeroplanes, which appropriately enough went sky high.

The stamp lots were patchy, and apart from a few bits of jewellery very little after lot 550 did anything of note, partly because the auctioneer was hurrying through things by that stage. A box of interesting beer mats went to me for £9.

Once the auction was concluded I was able to consume my sandwiches before helping with the clear up. I managed to get the 16:37 bus back, and this time I arrived in King’s Lynn in the same bus I had left Fakenham in! The only problem was the early evening traffic in Lynn (basically from Gaywood to King’s Lynn town centre was gridlocked).

TODAY

My only involvement with the aftermath of the auction was helping to unload to van – while three of my colleagues attended to the invoicing I was imaging some bulky stamp and cigarette card lots for our next auction on December 14, and in the process rendering the kitchen area navigable.

This was lot 268 – the last lot I imaged today.

Lot 478 – can you spot the ‘jewel in the dungheap’?

Overcoming Hurdles For The November Auction

An account of final preparations for James and Sons’ November auction.

INTRODUCTION

James and Sons’ November auction takes place at Fakenham Racecourse tomorrow, which combined with the somewhat stressed preliminaries led to the title of this post.

A CHANGE OF VENUE

Firstly, a miscommunication led to this auction being held in the Long Bar rather than the Prince of Wales Suite. Then when we arrived at the venue with the items for auction (as the picture below shows this was a very full van load) it was in state of disarray.

The next hiccough was the necessity of running a long cable from a building with an internet connection into the Long Bar, which involved stretching it across a bit of road that was due to be used by caravans, but some metal supports of the type more usually used for putting up shelving came in handy to provide a secure guard for that bit of wiring…

Also, the Long Bar has a very antiquated heater, which had clearly not been used in a long time.

I had a picture to take to resolve a query and also located a lot that had not previously been imaged…

46-a — This was the image used to resolve the query.

I also in odd quiet moments got some pictures from the Long Bar, and on the way back to the shop took a few pictures through the open window of the van…

dscn7667 — This horse turned its head at the key moment, so the white flash down the front of its head is not visible here.

BACK AT THE SHOP

Back at the shop I had some big stamp lots for our December auction (on the 14th) to attend to, and was then required to buy some paper (there is a stationer down the road who sells plain A4 at £17 for five reams).

261 — The box with the books in had fallen to the floor shedding some of its contents, so had to be dealth with as a matter of urgency.

Thomas’ Christmas Light Challenge

Some pictures of King’s Lynn’s Christmas lights and a challenge/ invitation to my fellow bloggers.

INTRODUCTION

King’s Lynn has just had the big Christmas Light switch on, so taking my cue from Anna (e.g in this post) I am offering some pictures and then a challenge.

KING’S LYNN CHRISTMAS LIGHTS

Here are some pictures of the Christmas lights we have on display in King’s Lynn:

THE CHALLENGE

What are the Christmas lights like where you are? If you create a post and put a link to it in the comments I will reblog it.

Moon Capture or How’s That, Anna?

My response to Anna’s “Catch The Moon Challenge”

Anna recently put up a post entitled “Catch The Moon Challenge” and this morning as I headed out my flat on the way to catch the bus to work I was granted a perfect opportunity to do so, resulting in this picture:

Congratulations to England Women’s XI

INTRODUCTION

While Alastair Cook and his team are fighting hard in Visakhapatnam, the women have recorded a tremendous victory in Colombo.

A SPECTACULAR RECOVERY

You may recall that in my last post I detailed the recovery of the England Women’s innings from 58-6 20 241-9 in their 50 overs. Rain then intervened, so the players reconvened today for the Sri Lankan response. Natalie Sciver, whose 77 dug England out of trouble followed up by accounting for both Sri Lankan openers. Danielle Hazell and Laura Marsh who had continued to Sciver inspired batting recovery then cashed in on the early breakthroughs , Marsh taking 4-21 from her full ten overs and Hazell finishing with 3-21 from 8.1 overs.

While all three of the young women mentioned above performed outstandingly I would say that Sciver who played the major innings and then made the early breakthroughs that the other two capitalised on was the key to this astonishing turnaround. The cricinfo scorecard makes no mention of a Player of the Match award, but if there was one it should have gone to Sciver with honourable mentions for Hazell and Marsh.

THE SOLUTION TO THE MATHS TEASER

Below is the pair of simultaneous equations from my last post – the challenge was to pick and solve one of these pairs:

73X + 43y = 211 685,463X + 314,537Y = 2,685,463
31x + 83y = 199 314,537X + 685,463Y = 2,314,537

If you did the non-mathematicians thing of selecting the pair of equations featuring smaller numbers you get zero credit. If however you managed to avoid being scared by the large numbers in the second pair you might have noticed that the number of Xs in the first pair equals the number of Ys in the second and vice versa, or in other words, temporarily removing the numbers we have:

aX + bY = c
bX + aY = d

This gives us options for possibly simplifying the equations. First up let us look at adding the two initial equations together which gives us:

(a+b)X + (a+b)Y = c+d

Feeding the numbers back in, we get:

1,000,000X + 1,000,000Y = 5,000,000 which simplifies nicely to X + Y = 5

we can also subtract the bottom equation from the top one, giving us:

aX – bY = c-d

Feeding the numbers back in gives us 370,926X – 370,926Y = 370,926, which at first glance may not look terribly pleasant, but a second glance shows that the number of Xs and Ys are equal and that that number appears on the other side of the new equation, so in other words it simplifies to X – Y = 1.

Thus the solution to the original pair of equations with those huge numbers is the solution to this pair of equations:

X + Y = 5
X – Y = 1

Thus X = 3 and Y = 2.

SOME PICTURES TO FINISH

234-a — These images are all of lots in our December auction (takes place on the 14th), starting with some coins

Lot 593, four images. This is a particularly fine specimen of the Kukri or Khukuri, the knife carried by Gurkha warriors.

Nature, Music and a Few Other Things

A good news story about nature from the village of Balcombe, West Sussex, a King’s Lynn walk, some stuff about music and a few other things.

INTRODUCTION

This post incorporates a King’s Lynn walk but also features plenty of other stuff.

NATURE

This morning I reblogged a post by Anna about the folk of Trosa and their continuing fight to preserve their nature from greedy road builders. I start this section of the post with:

GOOD NEWS FROM WEST SUSSEX

The small village of Balcombe, West Sussex (and having done a walk in that part of the country some years back I can confirm that it is indeed small) was targeted not so long ago by fracking villains Cuadrilla. Not only have they beaten back the frackers, they are on the way to becoming a solar-powered village. Please watch the video below for more:

This is what new developments for the 21st century should look like – big new roads are so last century!

A KING’S LYNN WALK

Although it was not terribly inviting outside I went for a walk this afternoon, taking in the Great Ouse, our river. Here are a few pictures:

At this point I saw a rare visitor to King’s Lynn –

A GREY HERON

Here is a picture taken looking across the Great Ouse, and the page of my bird book that gives info about the Grey Heron:

After the Grey Heron there were no more exceptional sights but a few more photo-worthy moments:

MUSIC

As part of today’s Hili Dialogue, Grania at WEIT mentioned that among those born on this day (happy birthday Ayaan Hirsi Ali) were Leopold Mozart (father of the more famous Mozart) and Fanny Mendelssohn (older sister of Felix) and linked to this video of a performance of Leopold’s Toy Symphony, which I offer you below:

Also, last Saturday was a Musical Keys session, and I have a few photos from there:

dscn7266 — A keyboard that enables the player to produce the sounds of other isntruments. The coloured patches stuck to various keys come in to play when Kirsten held up a sheet to indicate which colour one should focus on – although I was on a guitar by then and was using my left thumb to press on a coloured patch, shortening that string.

dscn7267 — This instrument, here held for me my Kirsten, one the people who runs the Musical Keys sessions is filled with beads and played by being upended, held until all the beads have fallen and then upended again for as long as you care to.

WHAT IS NORMAL?

I found this infographic on twitter and had to share it – I think it is splendid:

HONEST AND DISHONEST PHOTO EDITING

I have shown you some examples of honestly edited photos already in this post. What follows focusses on dishonestly edited photos. Two “newspapers” whose names I refuse to give, one owned by the fourth Viscount Rothermere and on which the good folk of Liverpool refuse to buy, produced photographs purporting to show Jeremy Corbyn dancing towards the Cenotaph yesterday (Remembrance Sunday). To do this their photo editors had cropped out from their original picture the 92 year-old WWII veteran who Mr Corbyn was accompanying and who hotly denies any suggestion that he was dancing:

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