Miscellanea for the weekending 26-Nov-2023:

• Prime Numbers and Spirals - Plot prime numbers as polar coordinates and you get spirals. An easy to follow explanation of why this surprising result occurs, and how it relates to approximations of pi, Euler’s totient function and Dirichlet’s theorem.
• Lego DNA 2.0: Double Helix History - an educational Lego Ideas design celebrating 70 years since the discovery of the double helix. Half the kit is a representation of the King’s College and Cambridge labs where the structure of DNA was discovered including a Rosalind Franklin minifig, her X-ray diffraction camera, and photo 51. The other half of the kit is a realistic model of four codons of DNA. I think I learned more about how the bases actually fit together in three dimensions from the Lego DNA 2.0 Trailer than I did from A-level biology.
• Volumetic Display using an Acoustically Trapped Particle - generating 3D animated images by moving a 1 mm foam ball with an ultrasonic phased array. I’ve seen simple levitation by ultrasonic transducers but this is next level. And for good measure the design files have been published on GitHub.
• Melting Windows - the strange tale of why the windows fell out of an Airbus A321 in flight last month, with lots of fascinating details of how airliner windows are constructed.
• A Guide to the Orders of Trilobites - documents everything you ever wanted to know about trilobites and much that you never thought to ask. I’ve been reading about trilobites for years, but I’m learning so much more from this site.

Miscellanea for the weekending 12-Nov-2023:

• Oort - Learn Rust by programming a fleet a spaceships flying through the Oort cloud. Control the ships’ engines, weapons, radar, and communications in this real time on-line simulation.
• @2001frames - a bot that posts the next frame of “2001: A Space Odyssey” to Mastodon every hour. (Mastodon account not needed.) I’m unlikely to make the 24 years to the end of the film, so will have to content myself with…
• @2001faster - which posts every 24th frame to Mastodon, one per hour, giving a run time of a year.
• milliForth - a full programming language in 386 bytes. This beats the dreadfully bloated sectorForth which could almost fill a 512 byte boot sector.
• Skjálfti - (Trembling) Visualisation of live seismic data from Iceland. At the time of this post Grindavík is experiencing hundreds of tremors per day and residents have been evacuated as a volcanic eruption is looking more and more likely.
• One-Winged Sail Plane - Yasushi Nishimura attempts to fly a radio-controlled glider that has no left wing. His other videos are worth watching too - especially if you like Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds or just daft flying machines.
• Lucy’s flyby of Dinkinesh - A detailed report on the Lucy space probe’s encounter with Dinkinesh and the unexpected discovery of its binary pair of moonlets.

The unrelenting poison poured into UK society by the current Home Secretary can lead to a sense of numbness and apathy at how she wants to reshape Britain. If you are as appalled as I was by her depiction of homelessness as a “lifestyle choice”, then there is a positive way of pushing back.

Find a local homeless charity or foodbank and bung them some cash - even the smallest amount helps. If you are in a position to do so, add Gift Aid. That way, the Government has to top up your contribution by another 25%!

It is worth doing a little research to find out how a charity raises and spends its money. A quick check in the Charity Commission’s Register of Charities can tell you a lot - do they have a whole load of board members with salaries of more than £60K per year, or are they sitting on an excessive amount of funds? Note, though, that the Charity Commission does consider it good practice to have some reserve funds to provide financial resilience.

Smaller local charities often give more bang for your proffered buck. I recently found that the food bank I had been supporting was sitting on a large bequest, so I switched to supporting Friends of Essex & London Homeless when I can. Their Charity Commission entry says:

We set this charity up to help homeless, vulnerable and people living in poverty in Essex and London by distributing foods, drinks, clothes, toiletries and sleeping bags and we do this by operating 2 soup kitchens weekly and also if anyone needing our help is brought to our attention.

And that is what they do, with minimal overheads and providing regular evidence of their activities on their Facebook page.

If there are multiple ways of donating to a smaller charity, check them all out. I found that it wasn’t possible to add Gift Aid when contributing via their website, but it was an option when helping Friends of Essex & London Homeless via Facebook. Of course, that means keeping a Facebook account, but that is a minor inconvenience if it forces the Government to help people experiencing homelessness, even in a small way.

Rory Cellan-Jones and five other people living with Parkinson’s disease accompanied me as I strode along on my lunchtime walk today. The “Movers and Shakers” podcast’s inaugural episode wasn’t how I had imagined it. I’d recently completed a course on the neurology of Parkinson’s, but I had no real idea of what day-to-day living with the condition meant. So I feared it would be a depressing listen, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The podcasters were three journalists, a writer, an academic, and a High Court judge, and they were hilarious. Laugh out loud, hilarious. While I didn’t learn much about the latest science and treatments for Parkinson’s, I’ve got Rory’s substack for that. But I learned a lot about the wide range of symptoms, the variety of ways the disease can progress, and its impact on the sufferer.

With a panel made up of:

• Rory Cellan-Jones - retired BBC technology correspondent
• Gillian Lacey-Solymar - Senior teaching fellow at UCL
• Mark Mardell - retired BBC journalist, presenter, and editor
• Paul Mayhew-Archer - writer, producer, and actor
• Sir Nicholas Mostyn - High Court Judge
• Jeremy Paxman - broadcaster, journalist, author

the conversation is always going to be interesting. If you want to learn about the impact of Parkinson’s on the sufferer, their families, friends, and colleagues, then this has all the makings of a must-listen series. Search for “Movers and Shakers”, produced by Podot, on your favourite podcast app.

I read “The Daily Stoic” every year, but I have a love-hate relationship with it. Tim Ferris once described Stoicism as a “personal operating system”, but to me, it is more like a toolbox of techniques for attaining your good life, and this is a good reminder of the tools available.

“The Daily Stoic” has 366 sections, each starting with a quote from a Stoic philosopher and then some commentary putting the sage’s advice into a more modern, often American, context. This works well and provides a structured overview of Stoic thinking. The quotes are mainly from the best-known late-Stoic figureheads - Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus.

While most of the quotes come from works intended for publication, Marcus Aurelius’s contributions are from his journal, which was not intended for publication - he often entertains contradictory views or approaches at different times. So cherry-picking quotes for a book like this can be problematic.

The modern context provided is heavily skewed to recent American examples and often has an unspoken assumption that the reader is well-off, which can be rather grating.

If you have a basic understanding of Stoic philosophy, this book is a great daily reminder of tools and exercises that can help your everyday life. However, if you are new to Stoicism, then there are better books for learning about the basics and gaining an overview of how the philosophy can help you - for example, “A Guide to the Good Life” by William B. Irvine.

Skyward by Brandon Sanderson 📚

I greatly enjoy Brandon Sanderson’s fantasy novels. His world-building and magic systems always have an interesting logic - balancing a power’s advantages against its limitations or disadvantages. I always feel that those rules would translate directly into a well-tuned RPG.

“Skyward” is the first Sanderson science fiction I’ve read, but it won’t be the last. It’s a hard sci-fi YA adventure with a teenage girl protagonist who makes mistakes and embarrasses herself but has you cheering her on every step of the way.

The technology and action scenes are convincing, and I enjoyed the way Sanderson went into some detail about how the spacecraft and their weapons worked.

Overall the plot was a little predictable but didn’t detract from the fun of the story, and the final revelation was a good surprise and set-up for the sequel.

I first used Vim about 20 years ago and have used it as my default editor for both work and play for the last five. At work, I live within Vim and have reached the stage where I couldn’t tell you many of the commands, but my fingers know. But I’ve increasingly suspected there are better ways to do some editing jobs.

Last week I flicked through “Practical Vim” by Drew Neil and was immediately hooked on growing my Vim knowledge more holistically than learning about each command in isolation. By page 8, I’d discovered the t command - how had I not discovered this command before?

I’m really amazed by this picture. In the early hours of this morning I went out into the back garden to see if I could see the Perseids meteor shower at its peak. I took my camera in case I spotted any of my froggy friends out hunting.

I didn’t have much luck with the Perseids as there was a full moon and some high level haze, but Jupiter was majestic just above the roofline of my house. I’d had some success with photographing the moon with my new camera, a Lumix DC-TZ90, and wondered if it would be able to focus on Jupiter.

I rested my head against the side of the shed for extra stability and zoomed in on Jupiter. The camera struggled to get focus for a second or so, and then claimed success. I squeezed the shutter button.

It was only when I looked at the captured image that I spotted the four dots around the planet. Were they the Galilean Moons? A quick check with Sky and Telescope’s Tools showed that indeed they were! From left to right Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io.

That a relatively cheap camera, can capture a shot like this, hand-held and set to automatic, is truly stunning.

A big thank-you to everyone who contributed to the JustGiving fundraiser in Dad’s name for the DEC Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.

On Thursday the funeral directors deposited £170 collected at the church on the day of the funeral to the fundraiser. The total has now reached £455 (including Gift Aid), and has all been transferred to the Humanitarian Appeal. I’m sure that Dad would have been very pleased.

The fundraiser page is still live at https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/John-Littlewood.

(Photo courtesy of Maureen Littlewood.)

Sometime in the mid-1970s a fellow member of the National Cactus and Succulent Society passed away and his widow gave his collection of cacti to the local group. His greenhouse had a two metre tall Opuntia taking up the whole of one end. I took home a single leaf and it was soon putting out roots.

Fast forward 45 years…

For many years the Opuntia lived in our carport and steadily grew. When the carport was pulled down it was moved into the porch, and when it grew too large it wandered out to sit, unprotected, on the wall of the pond.

Today it flowered for the first time. It is perhaps a sign of the times that it has happily survived six winters unprotected in a London garden.

Another poppy from our new poppy bed in the front garden. We’ve always had poppies in the back garden and they are a favourite with the bees. One of the priorities when we redesigned the front garden was to make the beds pollinator-friendly.

Visited my father-in-law’s grave in Brentwood, Essex this afternoon and heard a very distinctive sound. A Spitfire was doing aerobatics around a helicopter which was presumably filming its antics. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to get back to the car and grab a camera.

While I hate the peace and quiet of the cemetery being broken by external noise, if there has to be a disturbance, there are few better sounding ones…

(And yes, I know, that the photo is of a Hawker Hurricane Mk IIb! I took this a few years ago, but unfortunately can’t find any Spitfires in my photo archive.)

This is the Opium Poppy that opened yesterday - the beautiful red and black petals not having been able to hold out against the gusty wind. The stigma has had a remarkable change of colour and I’m hoping that means it has been fertilized.

This poppy is rather special to us. Its seeds were harvested from the car park of my mother-in-law’s care home a little before she passed away. It stands beside the garden path and triggers fond memories each time we pass it.

The micro.blog May Photoblogging Challenge has been over for just a few days now, and I’m already missing it. Finding suitable photographs to match each day’s prompt word was a great excuse to delve into the archives and remind myself of long forgotten images. I greatly enjoyed the quality and variety of images everyone uploaded each day, and marvelled at some of the inventive interpretations of the prompt words used.

By the end of the month I found that I’d doubled the number of fellow micro.bloggers I was following, had enjoyed some fantastic photography, and realised how chaotic my own image archive was.

Big thanks is due to the Micro.blog community manager @jean who organised the challenge. It was great fun.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Endurance 📷 Teams frantically prepare for the “24 Hours of Le Mans”, one of the most demanding endurance races of the year.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Fish 📷 A couple of the cold-blooded inhabitants of our pond share a favourite sun-bathing spot.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Stripes 📷 The Red Arrows at the RAF100 Parade & Flypast, London, 10-Jul-2018

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Fair 📷 Motobike stunt rider at our local summer fair.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Written 📷 “Lets Adore and Endure Each Other” - Stephen Powers, Great Eastern Street, London

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Schedule 📷 Ever since the heady days of the Psion LZ64 I’ve relied on portable computing to get as much information out of my struggling brain into more reliable storage. The MC400 and S5 were game changers but, for me, the S3a was the pinnacle.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Mountain 📷 So, I’m in the process of mounting the heat sinks on this Raspberry Pi and… What? Sorry? Mountain? Oh, I thought you said “mounting”… (Yes, I have no mountain photos.)

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Intricate 📷 Lego Technic 42082 Rough Terrain Crane was a most satisfying build. At 4,057 pieces and with tons of fun features, it is one of my favourite sets so far.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Plain 📷 Some of the footpaths through it like to regularly remind us that RAF Hornchurch was built on a flood plain.

Micro.blog Photo Challenge - Textile 📷 I loved this piece by The Material Girls, a local group of textile artists. If I remember correctly this was made using Batik, a wax-resist dyeing technique from Java.