Seasons of change!!

Don't you just love Autumn? I love living in the uk because of the seasons. Sure, we don't get much real summer and it's often a bit cold and wet but have you seen the wonderful colours and the early morning mists we've had recently? Throw a bit of autumnal sunshine onto those and what sights they are.

I think Spring and Autumn are my favourite times of the year. In summer my hay-fever tends to kick in and I don't sleep as well due to the sun coming through my curtains so early. In May the world seems to come to life again and it's my birthday ;-) We all start dreaming what we are going to do in the summer, our holidays, weekends or even days away. As I said Autumn has the mists and the colours - great for photography and we can all start dreaming about Halloween, Bonfire night and then, ultimately, Christmas. Winter is great becasue on those dreary cold days it's a good excuse to just snuggle up with a good book.

So I love the changing seasons of this country and the variation it all brings. This weekend the clocks fall back, bring it on I say. Anyway, I won't notice because I'll be on a plane to Tokyo on Saturday night :-)

Nobody True by James Herbert

Yep, another good yarn here. Based on the story of a guy who growing up discovers how to use out-of-body experiences, only to be murdered in his early thirties whilst absent from his body. His brutal slaying is made to look like the work of a serial killer but it is not. He works this out because around the moment of his death he finds himself in the serial killers flat. Caught between life and death he battles to stop the murderer whilst discovering the betrayal of his wife and best friend who actually killed him. Great twists and turns, most of which I did n't see coming.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill

Finished this last night. It's not long, about 160 pages. Whilst not a riveting read it was a better effort than "The Small Hand" by the same author which I read recently. The writing still seems quite old-fashioned and not really very captivating, it is a book I could easily put down, and often did, but managed to read it over three days (sat, sun, mon eve) so had no problem going back to it. The story revolves around a junior solicitor in bygone days who is sent to grim north to sort out the affiars of an elderly lady who has died. She lives on an island which can only be accessed when the tide is low. He first sees the ghost, the lady in black, at the funeral of the old woman and then again in the graveyard on his first visit to the island. He eventual flees the area whilst he still retains his sanity to return to London but sometime later is revisited with a bit of a kick. Decent ending.

I'm not finding these horror stories at all scary, maybe I should n't read them in the day time but should read them in the night by candlelight??!!!!

Ok, who's up next, ah Mr Herbert, an old friend.

It might take me a while to get through this one so in the meantime I'll write about the books I read in the first half of the year!

Echos From The Dead by Johan Theorin

Read this last week and a good yarn it is too. Set on the Imaginary Swedish island of Oland this was my first foray into Scandinavian thrillers (I seem to have bypassed Steig Larsson!!). Anyway the reviews on Amazon looked good with greater than 4 out of 5 stars and lots of write ups. The story is based around the disappearance of a small boy about 20 years ago and the resurrected search by his elderly grandfather, and to some extent his mother, following the arrival of one of his sandals in the post. The plot is strong; most chapters are split between the present time (1990’s) and the past based around the main suspect for the widely believed murder. The characters are engaging, the setting is well described and evocative and the twist at the end, whilst being well within the realms of reality, came as a surprise. Very enjoyable!! I look forward to reading more from Jerone.

This week in science ........

..... has been a bit surreal really. I posted earleir today about the sadness of Steve Jobs passing and that really kind of sums things up. It has been odd.

Lets start with physics shall we. Last week, we learned that some bods had sent some nutrinos from CERN in Switzerland to Italy, through rock. That in itself I thought was quite an achievement. However, they turned up early. Early? Well, the maximum speed anything is supposed to be able to travel is c, or the speed of light (as in Albert says E = mc^2). the fact that these things turned up early threatens the utter foundations of theoretical physics!! I'm glad my son Tom is just in the first week of his Physics degree at Leeds becasue the are probably re-writing the course as we speak.

As if that was n't enough, this week evidence was published that the expansion of the universe following the big bang is not slowing down, as believed for centuries, but is actually speeding up! Again, it kinds threatens the whole basis of physics. Funnily enough, there was a story that Einstein actually predicted this, but then looked at his work and screwed up the piece of paper believing it to be nonsense!!

This week the winners of the Nobel Prizes were announced. One of the prizes for medicine was awarded to Jerry Steinman from the University of Rockerfeller, New York. His work on dendritic cells was seminal in understanding how the body fights infection. Unfortunately, the morning it was announced he had won this amazing and prestigous prize (and the near £1 million that goes with it) his university announced that he had died a few days before. Normally, the Nobel committee don't award prizes posthumously, but I understand, they plan to make an exception.

For the field closest to my heart, chemistry, the prize was won by Danial Shechtman from Isreal. He discovered quasicrystals - which break all the rules of crystalinity with their perfectly ordered but never repeating units. You would have thought his discovery would have been celebrated but no, it seems not. Indeed, to quote form the BBC website ""The head of my lab came to me smiling sheepishly, and put a book on my desk and said: 'Danny, why don't you read this and see that it is impossible what you are saying,'" Dr Shechtman recounted in an interview with Technion.

The Israeli researcher was later told that he was a disgrace to the group and asked to leave.

On returning to Israel, Dr Shechtman published the results.

"Then all hell broke loose," he said.

Many scientists from around the world started telling him that they too had seen the same crystal structure.

Not everyone was convinced, however. To his dying day, Linus Pauling, the head of the American Chemical Society, said that Dr Shechtman was "talking nonsense".

But Bassam Shakhashiri, president-elect of the American Chemical Society, told BBC News: "This is how we make progress in science.

"[If] someone comes up with a discovery that we are sceptical about…we [have to] take time to verify the observations and discuss the conclusions among ourselves."

He added: "This is a really great example of the triumph of science.

"And an opportunity for all of us... who are curious about nature, to be vigilant, to be careful, and to engage in respectful debate about the interpretation of results."

NO, this is an example of when a bunch of arrogant dicks thought they knew better than the facts in front of their eyes. Sometimes, smart people can be incredibly dumb !!!!

A sad day....

This man was a genius and a visionary – and those are words I don’t use often, at all, if I’ve ever used them together before.

This guy was not some princess or a badly behaved pop star but an incredibly intelligent inventor in the modern technological era and a pioneer who was brave enough not to listen to people who said it can’t be done.

Even if you don’t use Apple products, but assuming you do use some kind of modern technology, then your life will have been enhanced by his inventions, or newer inventions based on his technologies.

The world is a poorer place for his passing.

R.I.P. Steve Jobs.

The Small Hand by Susan Hill

Yeah, this one did n't quite work for me.

So, after trawling Amazon for some good horror to read I came across a book called "The Woman in black" by the same author which seemed very highly rated. I ordered it but unfortunately Amazon have yet to grasp that Super Savery Delivery = next day (or three!) so it did not come in time for the weekend. I ended up getting this out of my local excellent Bar Hill library insted.

It is about a guy who gets lost in his car and ends up at a derelict old house where he seeks directions. There is nobody there to ask but he feels a small hand (of a child) work its way into his and hold him tightly. The rest of the book goes into his return visits, him learnig the history of the house, his travels to buy / sell antique books, his brother's involvement and the return of the feeling of the hand and how it tries to drag him into any nearby mass of water.

Whilst this was a decent enough book, the story it never feels overly novel whilst also never keeping strictly to ground already covered by other authors. However, I found it quite mundane - the pages did not grab at me with the elequence of the writing of other books I have recently (Dan B rown, A&D) and I think I probably would not have bothered with the second half had not been only 169 pages of well-spread text.

Still, I'm not sure when I last read a whole novel in a weekend !

Bokeh ......

..... is a term used by photographers to described the blured background in portrait photos. It provides that smooth backdrop, with the main subject of the picture almost standing out in 3D, that makes some people pictures look really good. In order to achive it well you really need a specialised portrait lens, something with a focal lens of around 90 - 100 mm (human eyesight is about 50 mm) with a very small fast maximum aperture of F2.0 or less. I recently started using a Panasonic GF-1 micro four thirds camera and over the summer Olympus (with whom Panasonic stuff is interchangeable) announced the relaease of a 45 mm (micro 4/3's lens are designated with half the focal length of "normal" lenses due to the difference in sensor size - are you keeping up!) with a pretty fast maximum aperture of F1.8. What's more, it is realtively inexpensive. I chased Olympus to find which shops in the Uk would receive the first supplies and placed my order. With a last minute upgrade to next day saturday delivery I must have been one of the frist photographers in the UK to receive one. It looks cheap with it's silver paint straight out of an old airfix kit and feels like plastic (unlike the equally wonderful Panasonic Lumix 20 mm pancake I bought with my inheritence from Auntie Evelyn) but the first images I've had out of it are superb. A wise investment that I think will give much pleasure over time and record nice images of the people I am blessed to have in my life.