Mine Craft Week 2 (by sarah)

Yep I am still playing and am getting more obsessed!

I built a bedroom and found iron ore in the process so could make shears and go and shear sheep to make myself a bed 🙂 I didn't like the idea of killing the sheep just for their wool 🙁

Then I dug myself a garden with a fence and gate - because of where the stairs are it acts as a one way valve for animals - if I leave the gate open at the top then animals wonder in, jump over the fence and then can't get back out! This was not genius just an accident but a fun one none the less!

But I quickly ended up with too many animals so had to expand - I dug an underground barn for them 🙂

I also mined sand and popped it in the furnace to produce glass blokes to use as windows.

I am hoping to collect stuff to make dye for the sheep and I want to put some sort of system in place to divid the sheep, cows, pigs and ducks (apparently they are chickens but they are lodged in my head as ducks!).

I have also been hunting cows and got enough leather to make a full set of leather armour.

And Alaric didn't realise you could put torches on the fences 🙂 So I taught him something 🙂

Painting the Body (by sarah)

So on the 15th of March I will be at Centre Arts in Cheltenham putting up bits of science-art that I and others have made/created.

Today I did some painting - I am not sure if the blood cell picture is finished (I think though I am not sure which way up it should go) and I am not feeling that happy with the liver - namely as it is in the wrong place so need to think about that. There are a few more Paintings of the Body but you will need to come to the exhibition to see them 🙂

We also have molecular jewellery, a sound panel, science knits, maths art and paleo-art.

Dating of Old Monuments (by sarah)

I've been working my way through documentaries on various subjects as research for my Punk series and one of the things that keeps coming up is that you can't date monuments. You can date the last organic stuff inside them like food left overs and you can date when the stone was formed but you can't date when it was quarried and used to build the monument.

But I am wondering if this is true. When I was doing my MRes there was a technique that dealt with exposure dates - in this case sand dunes but I know it has been used for other things. If I recall correctly when a cosmic ray hits the surface it can cause little explosions which leave scars called tracts which can be counted. The number off them combined with the rate of cosmic rays hitting the surface gives you how long they have been sitting on the surface.

Now there is a similar thing that happens due to probability and atomic decay within rocks but you can tell the difference.

I can't remember all the specifics but it does seem to me that this could be used.

Obviously there would be issues such as open cast mining or quarrying could leave rocks on the surface for 1000s of years before building occurs but I think most builders would have removed weathered sides of blocks to make them look nice. Then there are issues over rock type - are different types more susceptable to the tracts forming? What if it is a composite material made of fossils and rock fragments?

Some monuments no longer have their outer layers such as the giant pyramid in Egypt so you would get a mixed date of = quarried date - time spent under cladding + time since cladding was nicked or disappeared.

But I can't see these as being worse than the issues surrounding migrating dunes. the dating of these structures would be very important for sorting out our own history and how civilisations have come to be etc...

There maybe more issues with dating like if it can only give dates accurate to 1000s when you need 100s or 10s of years or them only being relative to other techniques but I think it would add an extra layer to what we know.

Now obviously I have been out of the science world for years now and can't even remember what the names for all this sort of stuff is and I am not an archeology expert so maybe these are already being use or rejected or what ever and it just hasn't filtered through to the books and documentaries I am getting my hands on.

However I thought I would share my idea just incase - plus people may suggest other sources of info for me 🙂

p.s. having a quick little looky at stuff it would appear there are interesting optical dating methods for minerals that have been exposed to sunlight - surely some of that would be interesting to archeologists. Also another problem with the dating would be how long the monument had spent buried in the ground too!

Astronomical Fun (by sarah)

The last few weeks have seen me going in to help with the scout group for their astronomy badge - I took in my old Astronomy Now mags and some old lab books and mission cloth badges I was given at the museum when I worked there and the stuff I won with Celestial Montage from ESA.

Oh and one antique telescope our lovely friends bought us as a wedding present - this is the fourth time it has had an outing to help infuse you people with the joys of space 🙂

I didn't have time to plan a talk so had to wing it - this was made extra interesting due to the meteorite air burst over Russia and the near miss asteroid which the kids were a little confused over. So I waffled at them and gave them stuff to look at and asked them questions which showed that some were confused over the difference between America and Russia but that they have brains enough to deduce impact behaviour which was interesting.

The some of the girls meticulously pawed over my old note book and I explained abit about blasting rocks with lasers to see what they are made of. One boy shyly asked to keep an Astronomy Now and I think he would have taken more if he could have 🙂

Then they all toddled off to look at the night sky as it had cleared up nicely.

Yesterday I bought in stuff for them to make little models of the Hubble Telescope out of loo roll middles and serial packets - this seemed to go down really well and ended up in interesting conversations about space probe design.

I really enjoyed it 🙂

Turning People Off (by sarah)

I take part in lots of online chats and things one of which is LitChat on Twitter. During one of the chats last year I upset soem 'trolls' and ended up with a rain of abuse - my crime?

I was talking to the guest author about his books, these were his Hate Club - he as a person is basically the oposite of my in the political sphere but we were having a good discussion and talking. He writes a column in some big American newspaper of something so is well known over there hence the rain of abuse.

Now the thing is that politically I am more in line with the attackers but their behaviour made me not want to be. They were not contributing to the group, they were gate crashing and being vile. They were not interested in actually talking about things but just ramming their own ideals down peoples throats and were being very personal about how they attacked. On top of that they targeted the people who were talking to the guest author and I can not make this right.

Worst of all is that some of their points were valid but the way they came over put everyones back up so no one is going to listen to them. They hurt their own cause.

From a social dynamics point of view the episode was interesting.