I Dream of Utopia

Criminals like to be free and have what they want on demand. They are very serious people who are both shallow and very deep depending on what level they need to be to get what they want. So both instant gratification and long term fulfillment appeal to them. The more dangerous ones are more interested in instant gratification. They feel like they owe nothing to everyone else, and everyone owes them something. They feel good just playing their games – they can never be trusted and carry on a bit like a party. Sex does not particularly appeal to them, unless there is some personal involvement or someone seduces them.

Bath in Fashion 2015 Jaeger conversation on style. Fashion writer Hywel Davies in conversation with Anna Sui (esteemed designer) Inspiration ·          NYC wedding as a kid [from Detroit] ·          Advert in back of Life magazine for Parsons School of Fashion – just applied and got on course ·          Had a dream she wanted to create (from Vogue and Mademoiselle magazines) ·          Influenced by NY Punk scene ·          Shopaholic o    New outfit from a thrift shop every day for $5 to look like a rockstar Getting in there ·          Spent time at college mostly going out rather than studying, dropped out in favour of a job after 2 years ·          Got her collectio...

I read a book called 'The Slave Trade' by Nigel Sadler and here are a collection of quotes from that book telling the story of the slave trade which I have posted on various people’s profiles on Facebook: ‎ '...the first known British trader in Africans was John Hawkins. Between 1562 and 1567, Hawkins made four journeys between the Sierra Leone River and Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic ), taking a total of 1,200 enslaved Africans to sell to the Spanish settlers.' ‎'prices had already been arranged with the quick for what quantity of each goods a female, male and child slave would raise' ‎' Bristol owes ALL her prosperity, nay, her existence to commerce with the West Indies .' 'I never before witnessed such a Christmas Day; the negroes have been beating their tambourines and dancing the whole day and now between eight and nine o'clock they are pursuing their sport as hotly as ever'. ‎...

New book review: The Eye A Natural History by Simon Ings I don’t like how Simon Ings describes how eye-sight evolves. He seems far too obsessed with his mortality for my tolerance to bear and is verging on ‘mentally unwell’ – perhaps it is his coping mechanism. He says that as you get older the lens in your eye evolves it grows thicker via a process of sedimentation of layers of dead cells and eventually deforms, muscle aside, and you would need artificial lenses to keep focussing. I think that is a form of curable illness. Your brain can direct development of your eye when you are a child to correct visual problems so it can do it to you as a fifty year old. Bad treatment is the cause of bad eye-sight and if Simon Ings were to discard his hang-ups about his own mortality he would know that being an adult is no different to being a child, sure ‘freaks’ still exist but it would also seem that the ‘biblical’ freaks have taken over and we are all being subjected to the Devil’s...

100 Years of Superconductivity, Professor James Annett BRLSI (IOP South West Branch) 6th May 2011 Prof Annett graduated from Cambridge and completed post doctorate studies in Illinois before moving to Bristol in 1994 as a lecturer. 1897   JJ Thompson discovered electron 1900   Mark Plank quantum physics 1905   Albert Einstein and the photo-electric effect, special relativity and Brownian motion 1908   H Kamerlingh Onnes liquefied helium at 3 degrees Kelvin 1987   James Dewar liquefied hydrogen Superconductors expel ALL the magnetic field, they are perfect diamagnets. BCS Theory solved in 1956 which explains such things as ‘coherent states’. Þ     Electron-lattice attraction near Fermi momentum (Energy level) Þ     Leads to Cooper Pairs of electrons Þ     Near band gap energy (The conduction band electrons are all paired up) ‘Gauge symmetry’: Ø ...

Heating and the safety of medical ultrasound, Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Mobile Phones Francis Duck, professor at the University of Bath and Honorary Medical Physics professor at the Royal United Hospital , Bath . BRLSI Wednesday 18 th May 2011 Francis Duck graduated from Nottingham and obtained a PhD from London University . Ultrasound 2 - 20MHz radio frequency. MRI and Mobile Phones 50MHz – 2GHZ radio frequency. ·       This can cause tissue heating via the same mechanism as microwave heating in a microwave oven. (He did not state this himself) ·       Blood travels through the capillaries to carry away heat. [On the speaker: I find he has a very annoying manner. He speaks very badly dithering with “um” and “err” to waste time. He also has a poor rapport with the audience. His presentation is disorganised and the gaps in his delivery seem as though he is thought disordered.] The human bo...

Mental Health and Cardiovascular Disease Risk: What is the role of physical activity? Dr Mark Hamer of UCL at E NHS Lecture Room,   Centre for Sport, Exercise and Health, Tyndall Avenue , University of Bristol on 18 th May 2011 . m.hamer@ucl.ac.uk Mental health accounts for 20% of the disease burden in the European Area and globally. ·       This is put down to stress but Mark Hamer thinks there may be other causes. §   It is thought to be linked to ageing There are two available treatment options for mental health: ·       Anti-depressant drugs ·       CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) Depression is linked to heart disease ·       There is evidence that tricyclic and other anti-depressants can increase the risk of heart disease by 35% ·       There is poor scientific rigour in the drug trials carried out which is wh...

Review of A Dance With Dragons from A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin Exciting I enjoyed reading A Feast For Crows and the long wait since Feast was published left me hungry for more of A Song of Ice and Fire; A Dance With Dragons. I bought Dance the day it came out. To start with I was thinking of giving up when the first half is about three characters who I thought of as boring and tedious but I persevered and finished the book in six weeks. In the second half of the novel the action picks up and I found it to be gripping in parts as new characters are introduced and the plot develops. The authentic style used to create the story is sometimes difficult to palate with Martin’s brand of story-telling involving devices using repetitions of certain phrases and retellings of certain events to flesh out the imaginary fantasy world all creating friction with the reader. I like how the author explores virgin territory in the imagination of the Fantasy Esta...

‘The Sense of an Ending’ by Julian Barnes, recent Man Booker Prize Winner 2011. An evenly balanced social critique of modern Britain dated to the turn of the millennium. The story is interesting and narrated by the protagonist as a kind of memoir, it is reminiscent of teenage frolics come back to haunt. There is no mention of church-going or of rotisserie chicken which are poignant to the sartorial nature of the piece; it is set comfortably in the middle-class Britain known to Bristol University graduates, the main character is depraved. The fact that a 2:1 degree class is so pertinent to the story is a clear indicator the author has used his poetic licence judiciously. What this book says to me that if one of the characters was black, it would have been mentioned explicitly in the text but no one says anything about non-English mixed race people as it is really obvious they are white. In all a challenging rather than comfortable evening’s worth of reading that leaves a feel...

Active Galaxy Jets Prof Worrall, University of Bristol Herschel Society Free Public Lecture, University of Bath 17 th November 2011 She Assumes Black Holes are at centre of all galaxies The small scale pattern of one light year or less affects larger pattern of length scales of over 100,000 light years through some feedback process. Black Holes emit radiation through matter falling into them Jets are visible to us as products of synchrotron radiation We can view the jets using X-rays X-ray jets only last for about 30 years radio jets are much larger X-ray Jets can be over 3000 light years in length I think there must be some other explanation or mechanism to explain 10 million degrees centigrade temperature of hydrogen gas in the jets. Jets inefficient radiators (Inefficient at entropy?) Jets involved in feedback loops between black-hole growth and new star formation. Does cold...

The Hallé Orchestra at the Bath MozartFest was almost as I expected them to be; they have a big name and made a big performance. I was gladdened by how they outperformed the string quartet on the opening night of the festival which I saw as well (they made me think of the guy who used to play the saw like a violin as a busker on the shopping streets of Bath ). This was not the first performance of the Hallé in Bath , historically this was their second performance. The whole festival seems to be trying to “jazz-up” Mozart this year and also other classical composers with a laboured style. The Hallé started well enough, their string section performing admirably but the brass section took half the set to warm up. I liked parts of their quintet of pieces of Mendelssohn’s music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Intermezzo piece was the best the rest was droll and uninspired although we did enjoy some periods of great gusto in the playing. They were regal and brillia...

Boxing Day Chicken Preperation and cooking time: 45 minutes Serves one or two. Ingredients: Two free range chicken breasts (400g) Three large mushrooms Three regular tomatoes A pinch of turmeric A small bunch of coriander (10-15g) A couple of sprigs of tarragon Half a teaspoon of cumin seeds Half a lime A few drops of Fairtrade intense vanilla essence from Uganda A large pinch of ground cinnamon A knob of ginger Two to four segments of garlic Half a teaspoon of Rock salt Some organic black pepper corns Miscellaneous spices (cardamom pods, cloves, etc) Half a glass of fine wine (Gevrey-Chambertin red 2008, Il Bruciato from Bolgheri 2009 red) Olive oil for cooking A pinch of dried oregano A pinch of dried parsley Basmati rice (Optionally a medium green de-seeded chilli and a few chopped up spring onions) Prepare the basmati rice by rinsing it and adding water to it in the pan two parts water to one part rice, let it r...

I am incensed by the arrogance I have to contend with on a daily basis, the appalling depravations of modern life during the recession have weighed down my spirit and have made me ill. I often have a stomach upset and a bad gas problem as a lot of the food is contaminated and it gives me painful gas eruptions. I feel defeated and imprisoned by my general predicament although the situation is really that of horror tinged with hope and I am attaching an article I have written on physics which is almost ready for publication.

Vice-President Communications, Anthony Gaskell OE. Formula 1 needs more money in it to go back to how it was before. They need to get more serious. This is reminiscent of the good old days, the jet-set life and clean country living, where furniture and furnishings were made to the highest possible standard and there was no compromise on quality. Bad eye sight is like bad posture, it can be corrected without drugs or mechanical support. Eye-sight is a skill just as much as it is a transient attribute, many Opticians and others would say that eye-sight degrades with age and I would call them eccentric as typically one can expect that eye-sight would improve with age unless there was a problem. Ageing is a disease. A white British man with a PIO card as a businessman in Dubai , disappointed at a meeting. It is believed that Indians are descended from white-skinned peoples and that the truest Indians still have the whitest...