Lost and Found

 Over the years I have developed two strategies for finding lost items.

First is to check all your pockets. My keys have a magical ability to migrate from the pocket that I think they should be in to a different one. Often a pocket in another garment.

The second strategy is not to look for them, but to sit down and think carefully about where you last saw it, and to think about where it might be. I once found a lost nut by knowing where I had left it, and working out that the only thing that had left that area was my inspection light. The inspection light has magnets on it and the nut was stuck to it.

This week I lost my credit card, debit card, driving licence and Tesco Clubcard, and I was unable to find them. I realised they were missing on Friday night and I had last seen them at the counter in Lidl on Tuesday. I had been to too many places to check them all, but I looked in the car, around my house, and in the pockets of every garment I had worn and bag I had used. I eventually admitted defeat and cancelled the cards and ordered replacements.

Reader I found my cancelled cards in the pile of laundry, the pockets of which I had painstakingly checked.

Richard "Where did you last look for them?" B

It Was This Big

 I have talked before about how much I love the fact that the standard meter is "the same length as some stick in Paris". Sadly this isn't actually true. It's been redefined a couple of times, both in terms of the speed of light, and in terms of wavelength of some particular light.

I was today years old when I found out that it's not just some random coincidence that, in the metric system, the acceleration due to gravity is almost exactly the same as pi squared.

Before the standard meter stick, there was a proto-meter that was defined as the length of a pendulum that swings once every second. The formula for simple harmonic motion is defined in terms of theta - the angular frequency and acceleration. Because of radians theta is 2 x pi x frequency. If you solve the SMH equation for a pendulum with f=1, you get l = pi squared.

It's squared because you need to differentiate twice to get from acceleration to speed to distance.

The meter used to be defined so that, if you know how long a second is, and you're sitting in a nice comfortable gravitational field at Earth's surface g=pi squared meters per second per second.

The name "meter" seems to make more sense now as well.

Richard "Blame it on the Metrologist" B 

It's my Party

 I don't remember this clearly, but I'm pretty sure that when I was a child my mum bought and cooked a lobster to celebrate something for one of my older brothers. I'm also pretty sure that my brother had no interest in eating a lobster.

I've just seen a very similar scenario play out with my goddaughter. She just passed the theory part of her driving test. Her mum bought a good bottle of champagne and Scicilian lemons, and when I visited their house we drank french 75's "to celebrate". I'm pretty sure that my goddaughter had very little interest in drinking champagne cocktails and that the celebration was for the parents and their friends.

Richard "vicarious" B

Turning and Turning

Screw you Caterham!

Part of the rear suspension of my Caterham has gone rusty so I've removed it, wire brushed it and repainted it. To refit it I needed a new pair of nylon washers. They're an odd size 17.5mm ID. 1mm thick. The good news was that these washers were easily available directly from Caterham. The bad news was that, with shipping, these two flimsy washers would have cost £10.

As It happens I have a short length of nylon bar stock, so, out of spite, I decided to make the replacements myself. I drilled and bored out the centre, faced off the stock, and then parted off two very short lengths. The project was a great success, other than the huge amount of material wasted as swarf, the surface finish, the dimensional tolerances, and the massive burr I raised when the parting cut met the centre bore.

Richard "But at what cost" B  

Dinner Party

On New Year's Eve I cooked a 4 course meal for seven. Do you recognise this menu?

Mulligatawny Soup - served with sherry

Fish (Cod in parsley sauce) - served with white wine

Chicken (roast, with roast potatoes and vegetables) - served with champagne

Fruit (salad) - served with port.

It was a social experiment that had got out of hand. The previous new year one of the guests was a German and as a cultural exchange program she showed us a sketch which the Germans often watch around Christmas time. The sketch is in English, it's black and white, and involves an old lady and her butler having a four course dinner. It's called "Dinner for One". When I found out that she was coming again I decided to cook the Dinner for One menu and see how long it took for her to recognise it. She spotted what was going on between the first and second course.

Next year I'll cook something simple.

Mulligatawny soup has become my goddaughter's favourite, and even if I say so myself, the parsley sauce was excellent.

Richard "Admiral von Shneider" B

Ambiguous

 I love and hate the Engligh language. It can be very specific. We have, for example, a fully fledged verb for using subterfuge to direct someone to one particular Rick Astley video. At the same time it can be wildly ambiguous. I once boasted that I'd taken 200kg of woodchip to the tip. My mentor said "nobody can have that much wallpaper". I was talking about chipped twigs and branches that I had taken out of my hedge. In the days before Christmas my sister and I were shopping for Christmas supplies. I said that we needed crackers. "No need" she said "My husband will bring a big box of them". I was expecting the pyrotechnic cardboard party favours that you see on Christmas dinner tables. He brought a big box of biscuits for cheese.

Richard "Suzi Dent" B