Zoonomian

World War II Road Block – An Eerie Reminder of Darker Times

Here’s some not so sophisticated, but still deadly serious, military technology we discovered while walking along the river bank this morning. Thankfully it never happened, but in 1940 there was every expectation that Britain would be invaded by Germany. One preparation for that was the building of a series of defensive lines around London and [...]

Latest Reading – Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation

O.K. – so I was the last person on the planet to see E.T., I still watch TV on a cathode ray tube, and I’m seven years late reading Olivia Judson’s hugely entertaining, accessible, not to say stimulating, guide to evolutionary biology Dr.Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. Making this an admittedly after the event [...]

A Brush with Base Jumping

I see from the TV listings that Channel 4 (UK) will tomorrow be airing The Men Who Jump off Buildings: a documentary about the extreme sport of base jumping. Launching from Buildings, Antennas, Spans, Earth (hence BASE), base jumping practitioners have only seconds to control their descent and deploy a parachute. Jumps from buildings [...]

Accidental Pepper’s Ghost

This picture of a rare bakelite coffin in the London Science Museum’s plasticity exhibition, is also an accidental recreation of the Victorian optical illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost. In one version of the illusion, an audience member stands in the coffin on a stage, and the rest of the audience watch as he gradually decays [...]

Out of the Archives – Calculators, Computers….and Stuff

I know, I know. Blog title of death! Anyone, like…over 12 years old, can waffle on about the various computational gadgets they’ve owned. But bear with me. This picture of a Sinclair Scientific is the latest recovered image from the 30yr archive of negatives I’m dutifully working through. That, and this recent post on Andrew [...]

Blinking Crows

Question to any crow experts out there. I recently spotted these two standing together, and noticed that they seemed never to blink at the same time – as if consciously taking it in turns. It’s easy to tell when a crow blinks by the opaque whiteness of the inner eyelid. This went on for a [...]

Recipes, Formulas And Processes

Readers interested in early twentieth century chemistry, processes, and tricks of the trade used by industry and in the home, might like to check out the online edition of Henley’s Twentieth Century book of Recipes, Formulas and Processes, Edited by Gardner D.Hiscox – a pdf of Cornell University’s 1909 copy at the Internet Archive. I’m [...]

Out Of The Archives – Telescope Tales

I’ve been amusing myself this evening scanning old black & white negatives and colour slides into the computer: strips of film that have languished in negative files on top of cupboards for years. It’s a boring process, but punctuated with the reward of finding something I thought was lost, or a negative that was never [...]

Let’s Make A Comet

Having unaccountably failed to spot comet McNaught on its recent visit, I was compensated last week by a meeting with this artificial comet created at the Griffith Observatory . Demonstrator Grace is holding the tangible product of last Friday’s ‘Let’s Make A Comet’ event, held in the Griffith’s Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon Theatre. And [...]

Partial Lunar Eclipse 26th June 2010

Here are the three pictures I got early this morning before cloud set in. The last in the series was taken at 10:35 UTC, about an hour before greatest eclipse at 11:38 UTC – when more than 50% of the moon was in eclipse. Location – Los Angeles. I suspect the colour fringing in the [...]