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