I have a piece of the Moon! (by sarah)

Erm I think that I forgot to mention that even though I have not yet paid my top up fee and therefore do not have libary access etc... I have been given a small sliver of moon rock to blast with lasers 🙂

I have been staring at the moon lots since they gave it to me two weeks ago and am also petrofied I'll screw something up!

I got to take the carbon coat off of it and so have a quick peek under a reflected light microscope. It does seem to be an interesting sample - its from a lunar meteorite that fell to earth which is interesting in itself.

After my disappointment over the mini projects I was so startled to get this sample I have been sort of shell shock reading - I know very little about lunar geology so I am having to do some heavy reading. Fortunatly I seem to be able to apply stuff I learnt whilst doing the Carbonado essay and the moon formation essay last term.

I really feel I need to get to grips with this as it is such a blindingly fantastic sample (they have the meteorite as well) that I have jumped ship and will be doing this meteorite as my main project as well - this masters has just dragged on too long now and I don't want anything logistically complicated.

However I do still want to do the astrobiology - impact lithology stuff but when I was looking at it before I found huge issues in talking to microbiologist and isotope chemists who didn't understand one and other and having to translate stuff to each of them that I barely understood myself.

I was recommended to get my hands on some undergraduate texts for the micro-organism thing and the chem I'm picking up from the papers I'm reading and hopefully from the machines I'm going to be using. My origonal project was drawn up with the idea of it being a PhD anyway so this I think is the best course of action.

03/03/09 – Happy Square Root Day! (by sarah)

Today is a square root day!!!

Its silly I know but I thought I should mention it!

the next one is 04/04/16 which is a way off!

Apparently you celebrate by cutting your food up into cubes and stuff like that! Especially root vegatables.

Some people have even been posting their favourite formulars on twitter and things 🙂

This is only the third this century! and the first one I think everyone would have been to worse for wear to remember it being New Millenium Day and all although weather 1 really counts at all can be argued but never mind!

Tech Adventure Feb 2009 (by sarah)

Saturday saw us at the 3rd Tech Adventure in Bristol at the Trinity Centre. We attended the last one in the summer which was loads of fun and useful besides.

This one I got up at 6 am for and me and Al were wending our way to Bath by 7 am - why Bath I here you cry when it is in Bristol? The answer lays in the fact we have a van and that we had volunteered to help the organisers this time.

So we arrived after only a minor getting lost incident and begain loading the sound equipment and assortments of other tech gear.

We drove to Bristol with our navigator and then after a quick unload headed off to pick up John Honniball who has an amazing collection of old computers which I somehow failed to take a photo of 🙁 He also had a cool bubble car outside his house!

Oh and I had had to try and repair my glasses and had managed to cover about 30% of my hands with superglue - I was not a happy bunny.

The exhibits themselves where fun and I think I'll need to do some seperate posts for some of them plus I have vidoes I need to sort out of them.

There was a motion sensitive BB gun, with a targeting laser.

Guys with hand controlers that meant they could produce sound from motion resulting in me wanting to play with the concept and come up with a theatre production :/

Me reading Geek poetry and giving away Wiggly Pets to those who counted the correct number of programming languages in my poem.

The cutest robot ever which behaved like an animal, the camera looking like a little hamster nose and which maybe good research for a book me and dad are writing 🙂 Just a little fun fiction.

There was a random pirate duck but then what sort of event is complete without a mascot?

A 3D printer which had me @ndy who we dragged up from London, and Alaric all got very excited about.

Here are some of the things it made! It can make parts of itself too which is kinda cool 🙂 I really really want one for various craft applications.

There was a Wii set up, more old computers with ancient games on, a logic puzzels and game table, a swap shop which seemed to mainly consist of things we had brought with us - of which fortunatly all but one thing went from, DJ dudes, people with guitars and filming equipment.

Of course Andy got roped into cabling without even being asked if he was a tekki!

Plus there was a talk on high performance from computers - by a guy who was there last year - I ended up actually asking questions and talked to him afterwards - I feel this definatly deserves its own post however!

Alaric's Chicken Scheme T-shirt arrived just in time for him to wear it for tech adventure which he was really chuffed with - again somehow I failed to take a photo - sigh!

The Weather’s Impact (by sarah)

I have been musing on things to do with financial moderlling - why a geologist is dwelling on these things is only obvious to me! Systems are systems and then I look at moderling and think that it all pretty much the same reguardless of what your moderlling as we all exist within the same set of physical laws.

So here are my mad ramblings on the subject of weather and the financial world - it is a topic that I will investigate furthure if I get a chance - if anyone knows anything that would be usefull to know about this then please let me know!

Of Blizzards and Floods (by sarah)

Last night saw a blizzard, this was proper low visibility, swerlling winds the lot. So I got Al up early this morning to go and take photographs of the village.

We didn't get far not becuase it was impassable though I was up to my knees in some places - no what we had failed to factor in was meeting people who talk to you!

Still we found out some interesting things about last time it was like this 1963 (I think don't quote me on that!) and how the schools hadn't closed etc... The village school is still closed - yesturday it was becuase the snow might fall off the roofs and hit the kids - sigh.

But it turns out the village has several farmers with snow ploughs who have been doing their community duty and clearing the roads! Gloucestershire is out of salt so we haven't had salt bin refills. One of ours has also been 'relocated' which is always interesting.

Last night I was a little concerned about the 'pools' of melt water me and dad abserved - these were icing over at the time but today whilst out on our walk we noticed that once the sun was up it was thawing fast and there is a lot of water locked up in that snow.

I have cleared our drain out and things and tried not to panic when one of the old ladies from the village told us of the dams they built last time to stop it flooding down the valley as it melted. By the time we got back to the bakery the road leading down was already resembling a small stream.

Not that I'm paranoid about flooding these days :/

I will try and add some photos later.