Magnetic Soap
You might say so-what as there have been magnetic soap holders for years.
But Bristol University have come up with something special, if it can be used to say clean up oil spills or waste water.
There’s a more technical explanation here in The Engineer.
Could it be that the next ten years will be decade of chemistry, as micro-electronics have ruled for too long? I have also heard that some of the new techniques used in chemistry owe a lot to chip fabrication methods. After all you could argue that a lot of chips are just a three-dimensional array of atoms.
The University Doctor Smellie
The GP at Liverpool University in C’s and my time there was a Doctor Smellie. He was one of the better GPs I’ve had and I’ve been lucky to have at least two good ones.
When C became pregnant with our first child, she went to see him and he suggested she have a home birth. Not something that she was thinking of and she wnt to Oxford Street Maternity Hospital instead.
If you research the name Smellie amongst doctors you’ll find an interesting history, including a William Smellie, who is sometimes called the father of British midwifery. So perhaps the good Dr. Smellie was just wanting to follow the family tradition.
Are the Bishops Right to Vote Against a Benefit Cap?
To me it’s what the statistics say, but then we don’t have access to full figures. I would like to see a database on the Internet of all those who get benefits of over the £26,000 level. It would obviously be anonimised completely. We would then see how many people lived in a particular town, who got more than £50,000 for example.
But I’m interested to see John Bird, the founder of The big Issue has written in The Times, this morning.
The title of the piece is These bishops are not so Christian after all and it has a sub-title of A benefit cap is needed. You don’t help the poor by making them dependent on handouts.
You should buy the paper today just to read this article on page 20.
Aurora Borealis
This year seems to be the best in my life for the aurora borealis or northern lights in the media.
I’ve only seen it once and that was from a British Airways jumbo, crossing the Atlantic. The pilot spent a long time making sure that everyone who wanted was able to see the wonderful display as we passed down towards San Francisco over northern Canada. I suppose it keeps the passengers busy on a long flight.
I have been though to one of the best places to see the aurora in the UK. And that is in the cab of a train going from Edinburgh to Inverness in the evening. The night I did the journey, the time was wrong and anyway it was cloudy. But the driver had seen them many times, as they climbed over the Drumochter Pass, which at 1450 ft high is the highest railway line in the UK.
The Anonymous Widower 