Wikipedia

My friends often call me the "Dickipedia" (Spotted Dick's knowledge is legendary - apparently) but I do actually make a lot of use of Wikipedia, as I believe a lot of other people do to.

So if you want Wikipedia to carry on going, then it is time to put your hands in your pockets and give them some dosh... I have...

Brewing Beer - the first brew - part 1

Brewing Beer - Ahhh - a subject close to my heart...

I've started brewing beer again for the first time in about 7 or 8 years. I suppose I haven't brewed anything (apart from cider) for such a long time for two fundamental reasons. Firstly I've been abroad a lot and secondly the house isn't really ideal for brewing beer. The house has got a lot of land and a double storey garage, but there is only one tiny little shed at the back of the house and the garage as at the end of a 50 metre drive and has no electricity, or water...

I have been exploring getting electricity to the garage and using the upper storey of the garage as a brewery. What I thought would be a "piece of cake" has turned out to be expensive and complex as the government has stuck its nose into this aspect of life along with almost every other and it is virtually impossible to DIY 'lecy now. Everything has to be inspected and have a "Part P" certificate issued. I've had a couple of local electricians to look and quote - it should be “a doddle” - 50 metres of armoured cable, a few plugs and lights, but the only quote so far is for £2,100!!!

So, frustrated, I decided to cut to the chase and get brewing. I decided this time to do the whole thing properly and start with malted grain rather than various forms of malt extract. I thought I would start off with something simple like a standard English Bitter.

There is an excellent little brew shop about 10 miles from home and I have been reading extensively about brewing for two months now, so I knew exactly what I wanted; a new boiler, a mash tun (an Eskimi with a tap and some copper piping to you) a new brewing container and some grain, hops and yeast, a few chemicals and off we go!

The man in the shop was very helpful (as ever) and I soon had what I needed to make my own version of Fuller’s London Pride… Except the man didn’t sell one of the ingredients “Invert Sugar” and anyway I didn’t want use sugar (I do know how to “invert” sugar and it doesn’t involve turning the pack upside down) so I bought some malt to cover that bit. But when I got home I discovered that the man in the shop hadn’t sold me the Target Hops the recipe needed. So I decided to go “off trail” and play things by ear – or rather nose and make things up as I went along. I substituted Target hops with Northdown hops which were already playing another role in the brew, replaced the 650 grams Invert Sugar with 500 grams of malt, and to compensate increased the amount of grain from a total weight of 3.5kg to 4kg.

Things went swimmingly at first despite doing the brew half in the kitchen and half in the freezing cold back garden – but without getting too technical, the “sparging” was a nightmare it took about 6 hours to get the required quantity of hot water through the grains, and as a result despite starting the brewing at about 10:30am I didn’t finish until 9:30pm when I finally added the yeast to the brew, switched on the heater and tucked the brew into the tiny shed surrounded by cushions from our garden furniture.

That was on Tuesday. I’ve just “dropped” the beer (filtered it) and it is looking, smelling and tasting (if you ignore the yeast and sweetness) good… Mind you “Pride of Dockenfield” is going to be a “skull splitter”. The OG was meant to be 1042 but turned out to be 1050 which means the beer will be about 5.5% alcohol! Actually that is good practice for me as the next brew I make will be a Belgian Trappist style ale, if all goes to plan…

I’ll keep you posted and some of you (un)lucky folk may get some bottles of the "Pride of Dockenfield" thrust upon you.

Brussel's Statues

Sorry about the lack of activity on this blog - no excuse except that when I'm busy I seem to find plenty of time to write my blog, and when I have all the time in the world I don't seem to be able to find the time to do it! Anyway I've been looking through my photos of Brussels (rather nostalgically as I'm not ther at the moment) and have been inspired to write again...


I wondered about putting a 'Discretion Advised' label on this post, but given that all these statues are on public display I decided not to - but on the other hand if you are easily offended please read no further!

Brussels is famous for many things including Sprouts and bureaucracy, but not many people comment upon one fabulous feature of the city - its amazing set of statues.

Of course Brussels is famous for the Manneken Piss (Petit Julien to his friends)

there are load and loads of other statues - including the Jeanneke Piss, Julien's sister who is to be found close to the wonderful Delirium Tremens bar

(not my photo)

and the peeing dog

but there are loads and loads of other wacky statues to be found.

How about this one (at the top of St. Catherine's)?

Not very interesting? Oh yes it is - it is dedicated to all the pigeons who died in the First World War!

Then there is the really odd set of statues close to the Royal Park and Beaux Artes on the Monte des Artes... They look fairly normal from a distance

But up close, well I hardly dare comment upon them!

I don't know what they are on - but it looks like one heck of a party!

As well as these nudes there are loads of other shapely ladies with quite a lot on display...

This lady is kneeling onto of a tall pillar close to the Gare Central then of course there are the fantastic statues on the Cinquintinaire arch. This beauty is quite close to ground level

While the massive gilded statues are impressive through a telephoto lens.

One of my favourites are the lovers in Place de la Monnaie by the opera house.

As well as these more than slightly odd statues there are hundreds upon hundreds of others that people just walk by without even noticing them. Here are a few examples:

St. Michael conquering the devil (see him cowering beneath) on the corner of Rue St Michel and Rue Adolph Max

Then there are the statues around the Grande Place

There are a series of little fountains throughout Brussels with tiny statues on the top depicting children's games. Here is an example of one of them

I've put all these photos plus one or two others of the photos in Brussels and beyond on my Fotki site and I hope to keep adding to the collection.

Dumb but not Stupid

A long time ago I worked with a rather unpleasant fellow who amongst other things tried to convince me that intelligence is impossible without language. I disagreed with him, but I couldn’t prove him wrong – but recent developments seem to prove that, in some fields at least, language is not a precursor for intelligence.

Recent experiments with Native Australian (Aborigine) children have shown that you don’t need a word for a number to understand it. They did some tests on some English speaking Aborigine kids in a suburb of Melbourne and on another group of children in the Outback. The Outback children didn’t speak English and their mother tongue had no words for numbers bigger than 3 or 4 – basically they count “one”, “two”, “more than two”, and finally “a lot more than two”.

Both groups were given a bag full of discs and then asked to listen to someone repeatedly banging two sticks together. They then had to selected the same number of discs as clicks. To the researchers’ surprise the children in the Outback who have no words for numbers did just as well as the kids in Melbourne who could count. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7563265.stm

In another interesting experiment it has been suggested that elephants can count too. Obviously they have no words for numbers, but in Japan one Indian elephant called Ashya can nevertheless count. To demonstrate this she is presented with two large empty buckets. The keeper then randomly and repeatedly drop a few apples into each bucket. Two into the left, three into the right, five into the left, three into the right, etc… and then the keeper offers both buckets to the elephant. Aysha has been trained that she will only be allowed the contents of one of the buckets and not both. Amazingly, given that the elephant “can’t count or add” because she has no words for numbers, she picks the bucket holding the most apples 75% of the time. See http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn14569-elephants-master-basic-mathematics.html

This ability is apparently very different from the one ‘Clever Hans’ had. Clever Hans was a horse that could apparently do sums and understand German (not surprising as he was from Germany). When asked “What is 2 + 3?”, Hans would tap his hoof on the ground 5 times, when asked “What is 6 divided by 3?”, Hans would tap his hoof twice. But when asked “What is the square of the square root of 144 minus the square root of 81” Hans got the answer wrong, so he wasn’t a great mathematician.

Hans could also read. If he was shown a written question he would still get the answer right… providing that his owner also saw the question, and knew the answer…

What “Clever” Hans was doing was reading the body language of his owner who knew the answers to the simple questions. Hans would simply tap his hoof until he reached the right answer known by his owner. At that point Hans’ owner would unconsciously relax and Hans would stop tapping… So Hans couldn’t count or even understand the questions, but he did understand his owner, so he wasn’t so stupid either. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_hans

I do hope, by the way, the testers of the elephant and the Australian children took steps to avoid the “Clever Hans Effect”!

Camping with the Blue Moon H3

Last weekend was a Bank Holiday in England, but here in Belgium we had our Bank Holiday two weeks before that starting on Friday 15th August – Assumption.

Because that weekend was close to the birthday of two of my fellow Blue Moon Hashers (Blue Willy and Ice Trix) and well, just because, it was decided that a group of us should go camping!

The site which Ice Trix selected was La Ferme Biologique Dorlou in the village of Wodecq close to the French border. Then we discovered it was not only close to the Graal Brewery but also was close to the start of a running race which suited the majority of us happy campers as we all run with the Blue Moon Hash House Harriers.

I had no camping gear at all, so the weekend before went and bought a sleeping bag and an airbed – I was amazed how cheap and compact the sleeping bag was and marvelled how technology had come on so far since I last went camping (about 30 years ago!).

I didn’t need a tent because both Hash Hole and Cock Trix both had massive ones and I had been offered a room in each – tents with rooms – whow camping technology has advanced!

I drove the hundred odd kilometers on Friday lunchtime and met up with the others. We were allotted a little meadow at what appeared to be at the back of the campsite – but as the site curled around the farm was in fact just next to the farmyard as you can see in this photo.


Soon tents were going up everywhere – Hash Hole’s 4 bedroom palace (to be shared by Hash Hole, Forrest Gulp, their little 4 month old baby boy Bonsai and me) Cock Trix’s 3 bedroom mansion to be (shared by Cock Trix, Ice Trix, Blue Willy and Rhythm Stick) and more traditional style 2 man tents for Ez Over and Spare Rib, Satan’s Lil Helper and Seb and Just Hugh’s in his space age fully ruggedized one man wonder. The tents as well as being a lot bigger than I remember, I could stand up in Hash Hole’s palace, are a lot easier to put up nowadays – once you get the basic concept of the rods and poles and the colour coding.

Then it was time to sit back and admire our handy work over a beer or two, or three or four – then Hash Hole produced some Margaritas and things started to get a bit blurry.

We took a stroll through the village to try to find the start of the run, but failed and then had a look round the farmyard to visit all the animals which included pigs and loads of piglets, cows, chickens and rabbits. I amused the pigs and my friends with my imitation of the pigs and gave just about everyone of them a good scratch (the pigs, not my friends).

The smell in the farm buildings was terrible though, so we didn’t stay long and went back to the BBQ.

We had an excellent BBQ on a tiny bright orange device brought by Ice Trix.



We even invented a way of getting it to furnace heat in no time by using the electric pump meant to blow up the airbeds to fan the fire (after I had spent sometime fanning it).

The meal was a long drawn out affair. There was, of course, far to much food and way way too much to drink, but I was doing OK until someone produced a bottle of Jameson’s. I then managed to break one of the camping chairs that Blue Willy had brought along, though he did kindly say it was already broken and soon after I decided it was time to go to bed.

The airbed was already pumped up, so it was a simple matter of putting it in my allotted room in Hash Hole Palace and getting into my sleeping bag – but this turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had expected. First of all the airbed wouldn’t cooperate and kept on tipping me off onto the floor, and when I had mastered that I couldn’t for some strange reason get into the sleeping bag. Finally I gave up and draped it over myself and covered that with a blanket I had brought with me from the car. I put in my earplugs, because being a bit of a country-boy I know that it can get a bit noisy on a farm...

I slept well until about 6:30am when some b@$t@rd started a large very noisy tractor about 6 inches from my ear which he then proceeded to hit with a sledge hammer for the next hour. I eventually gave up to and crawled out from under the sleeping bag and out into the outside world to find out what was really happening. I must admit I was surprised to see a man, a tractor with its engine running and him hitting it with a sledge hammer all about 6 feet from where I had been lying.

This was a working farm, and it was mid August – Harvest Time. The tractor’s rear towing coupling seemed to be causing the farmer some problems – hence the hammering. Eventually he gave up and roared off to do some farming with lots of rushing around with tractors and combine harvesters in a lot of the fields around us.

Just Hugh took pity on me and made me some porridge and a cup of tea while slowly the rest of the camp woke up. When I felt strong enough I went for a shower in the communal bathrooms provided by the campsite in one of the barns. The shower randomly sprayed me with scalding hot and freezing cold water but I managed to wash and shave without inflicting myself with anything more serious than simultaneous frostbite and 3rd degree burns.

After we had all breakfasted we set off to visit the Graal Brewery which was about 10km from the campsite. We pooled cars, so I rode with Just Hugh and a couple of others.

At the brewery the brewer’s wife greeted us. She showed us round the tiny brewery at the back of a small courtyard. It wasn’t actually brewing anything when we went around but nevertheless I felt very jealous – I would love to own and run a brewery of that size myself.

After the short tour we sat out in the courtyard and in the newly arrived sun sampled the complete range of beers the Graal produces (see http://www.degraal.be/products2.htm)

My favourite was the Triverius a blanche in the Hoegaarten style (but better). I bought a dozen bottles and a glass as a memento.

By the time we got back to the campsite it was just about time for the race. The runners (Ez Over, Ice Trix, Spare Rib, Just Hugh, Cock Trix, Hash Hole and myself) changed and set off back through the village to find the race start. We had turned back too soon the evening before; the start was at the village school about 1km from the campsite. What had been a quiet little village the night before was now a mass of cars and runners. We signed up, paid our €3 and got our numbers.

There were a lot of runners and a lot of very fit looking runners at that – I knew I was outclassed but the excitement of the whole thing got to me and I covered the first 2kms of the 12.55kms race in 8 minutes. When I realised that I made myself slow down and let hundreds of people pass me – in retrospect this was a mistake, but I was not feeling great (hangover) and it was really quite hot. I chugged along through the very pretty countryside and suddenly after about 5kms found myself back at the start where the trail then looped off in another even prettier direction, that unfortunately included a massive hill which I walked up.

I was really pleased to get to the end of the run, and given how hung over I was and how unfit I am I was reasonably pleased with my time – for the record, this is what we all did (which you can check here)

Who	Place	Time
Just Hugh	102	00:56:24
Spare Rib	124	00:58:29
Ez Over	177	01:02:03
Cock Trix	203	01:04:54
Hash Hole	246	01:09:33
Blue Willy	248	01:09:41
Spotted Dick	255	01:11:11
Ice Trix	301	01:23:41

After drinking a lot of water we walked back to the campsite and I crashed out for a much needed snooze.

While we had been away the farmer had put a large rather lame cow in the adjoining paddock and switched on the electrified fence – something I think everyone of us discovered at some stage during the early evening as we hung our wet running gear out to dry.

The meal that night was in the campsite’s farm restaurant. The starters and the pudding were excellent but we had a very long wait for the main course which was overcooked when it arrived – I think our numbers rather overwhelmed the chef.

After a fairly restrained time around the unlit BBQ we all headed off to our tents. For some reason this time I instantly could see why I was having problems the night before with the sleeping bag – it was made for a midget! It only came up to my stomach, so once again I covered myself in my trusty blanket.

It had been hot and sunny all day so the combine harvesters were making hay (well straw actually) and were roaring in the distance in all directions well into the early hours– fortunately for those of us without earplugs, but not the farmer, it rained at 3am and that stopped the harvest.

We were awoken by the tractor again at 7am (well it was Sunday, so the farmer had a lie in). This time he revved up and moved off, only to come back again almost instantly. He kept this up for an hour before I couldn’t stand it any longer and crawled out of my diminutive sleeping bag to discover just what the silly b@$t@rd was up to…

Stacking straw bales in the barn right by our camp – that’s what – he kept it up for about another hour until he managed to hit the gutter with the forklift attachment on the front of the tractor and almost ripped it off. He got soaked with the rainwater still in the gutter and we all laughed.

I told everyone about my problems with the sleeping bag and they all insisted that I showed it to them. "Of course, it is a child's sleeping bag," said Just Hugh. "How do you know?" I asked. "It says so on the side, look". The sleeping bag had the words LowesKid (or some such) on the side - I honestly thought that was all one word! Mystery solved and I felt very foolish and a little cheated until I remembered it had only cost me €15.

Breakfast cum lunch was an excellent prolonged BBQ where we attempted to cook and eat every piece of meat we had brought with us. Because Ice Trix’s BBQ was so small this took a long long time, but no one was in any hurry to leave, and besides the tents needed time to dry off.

Finally it was time to take down the tents and try and fold them up small enough to fit into the tiny containers they arrived in – something that Cock Trix managed but Hash Hole totally failed at. We paid up a massive €6 each for the privilege of sleeping in the farmers field and after a game of boules headed off home back to Brussels.

We all agreed we would do it again – but not during the Harvest!!!

By the way you can see my photos of the event on my Fotki page, or alternatively have a look at Forrest Gulp's excellent photos her Blue Moon Fotki page (which does have one or two embarrassing shots of me).

Half an Idea

I was interested to see that someone has created virtual robots and got them to teach themselves to move through an atifical intellegence programming technique called a neural net. The idea is that you don't tell the robot anything about his environment or how to move, but you give him the "will" to stand upright and to walk by scoring any movement that approximates to those targets more highly than any movements that doesn't and allow the robot to remember the moves that gave the best result and to then try variants on those moves. See the article in the Daily Telegraph.

If you follow this link you will see the robots in all their glory (one day I will work out how to embed this in the blog)

This is pretty much how a baby learns to walk, except the baby's scoring is based on how much falling over hurts and how close to mimicing his parents and siblings she has come.

Brilliant!

I am sad to say that I thought about using neural nets to programme robots to walk several years ago, but couldn't work out how to build a robot in the first place, so I shelved the idea. I didn't think of building a virtual robot and I am not that I am sure that I could do that either, but it just goes to show me that half an idea is still an idea...

Cows, Drugs, Vultures, Bats and Rabies

They have just worked out that a mass accidental poisoning of vultures in India has indirectly killed 50,000 people in a horrible manner.

You see the vultures were eating the dead cows. Often before the cows died, and routinely while they were alive, they were given a drug called Diclofenac (also known as Voltarol) which is a pain kller. Good for cows (and people) but it causes kidney failure in vultures. They have died in the millions in India. A terrible conservation disaster...

But next level of unforeseen disaster has only just come to light. There has been a big jump in the number of people dieing of rabies and almost 50,000 have died. How come?

Well, without the vultures to compete with the feral dogs numbers have boomed - and the dogs are a very efficient vector for rabies - more feral dogs = more feral dogs with rabies = more people bitten by rabid dogs = more deaths from rabies. Here is the article in the New Scientist about it...

There is a similar disaster concerning rabies and cows unfolding in the Venezuelan jungle where 38 members of the isolated Warao tribe are sucoming to a fatal mystery disease. Many doctors believe this too is rabies, but this time carried by vampire bats (how about that for a theme for a horror movie?). Again from the New Scientist

There have been vampire bats, rabid vampire bats, and people in the South American jungle since time immemorial, so why the problem now?

Well, during a similar outbreak in Brazil a few years ago (See BBC) it was thought that cattle and our need for cheap meat is the root cause. The forest is being cut down to make room for cows and the deforestation is making the Indians' lives harder and they are, as a result, poorer and spend more time sleeping in the open.

On the other hand the cattle which had moved into the cleared areas have become a very good source of food for a growing population of vampire bats. When the cattle owners started putting their cattle into netted shelters at night, swarms of hungry vampire bats started looking elsewhere for food. The tribespeople sleeping in the open have been an excellent alternative for the bats, and inevitably some of these bats carry rabies. This particular form of rabies seems to be quite slow acting (it kills after 7 to 10 days) so the infected people can be bitten by non-infected bats who in turn become rabid and bite each other and yet more Warao tribespeople - not nice!

One wheel on NASA's wagon

But Phoenix is still rolling along - squeezing soil samples under an almost completely closed oven.

Well done Phoenix!

But it does show that the other ovens are totally beyond use... otherwise why not just open up another one - there are 5 others...

So what are they going to do for the next 50 days of the mission? Take stereo pictures of the incredibly boring flat plain that surrounds the turkey of a spaceship I suppose. Personally I still vote for using the digger arm to rip the doors off the remaining ovens. Nothing ventured nothing gained, and what have they got to loose?

Favourite Headline of the Day

I saw this in the Daily Telegraph today

Giant inflatable turd escapes moorings and brings down electricity line

NASA Strikes it Rich!

Do you know where there is enough natural gas (methane), and propane to meet all the world's energy needs for the next thousand years?

No, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Siberia, and not the in Antarctic, in fact it isn't on Earth.

Nasa has just announced that they have "struck it rich" on Titan!

But where the hell is Titan?

To quote wikipedia:
"Titan is the twentieth most distant moon of Saturn and sixth farthest among those large enough to assume a spheroid shape. Frequently described as a satellite with planet-like characteristics, Titan has a diameter roughly 50% larger than Earth's moon and is 80% more massive. It is the second-largest moon in the Solar System, after Jupiter's moon Ganymede, and it is larger by diameter than the smallest planet, Mercury (although only half as massive). Titan was the first known moon of Saturn, discovered in 1655 by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens"

NASA has just announced the Cassini probe that is orbiting Saturn and its many moons has detected a lake near the south pole of Titan that is a little bigger than Lake Ontario (see the Nasa website ).

So what is so interesting about this? Well according to NASA the excitement is because it is the first planet/moon apart from the earth to have had a liquid detected on its surface - hip hooray!

But that isn't very exciting to you or me but on the other hand the lake doesn't contain water; it is made up of ethane, propane and probably other liquid hydrocarbons. The whole of Titan is awash with the stuff but the surface temperature of Titan (−179° C, or −290° F) means that methane rains down from the sky and ethane and propane are liquids and some of the rocks are actually water ice.

Why doesn't the whole place catch fire? After all methane, ethane etc are highly explosive.

There is no fire hazard on Titan, simply because there is no oxygen there. You would treat oxygen on Titan the same way we treat methane here - as an explosive gas!

In reality, this announcement will do nothing to solve our current fuel crisis. It would take more energy to get the methane and ethane gases and liquids from Titan back to Earth than would be provided by the fuel when burnt here.

So Earth's fuel crisis isn't going to be solved by Titan - or is it?

I was taught that oil and natural gas was formed by the decomposition of billions and billions of fish and plankton trapped in the earths crust under impermeable salt caps for millennia. This is proved by the fact that tiny skeletons or fossils are found in the oil - hence the term "fossil fuel".

But where are the fish and plankton that made all the fossil fuel on Titan? How could so much "fossil fuel" be made in such a cold environment 10 times further from the Sun than the Earth in the absence of oxygen and liquid water?

Perhaps once billions of years ago the Sun was hotter and hot enough to support life on Titan - but if that was the case then any life on Earth at that time would have been fried and Earth itself would have been burnt to a crisp.

So perhaps Titan moved... perhaps - but that seems to be rather unlikely.

How about it got some energy from Saturn - that's a possibility, for example gravity could induce heat in the surface like on Io (that's another story), but Titan is the twentieth most distant moon of Saturn, so this seems unlikely that there a biosphere beneath the surface warm enough to support liquid water and life, though this is proposed by some scientists. But even if there is could that biosphere be responsible for the production of so much ethane, propane etc?

So where did all these Titan hydrocarbons come from if not from fossils?

Hydrogen and carbon are very common elements not only on Earth, but throughout the Solar System. The Sun, Jupiter and Saturn are 99.99% hydrogen - the surface of Venus is shrouded in a blanket of hot high pressure Carbon Dioxide and Uranus and Neptune are mostly composed of water, ammonia, and methane...

There's methane again... Were there fish and plankton on Uranus and Neptune? It seems more likely to me that methane occurs naturally throughout the solar system - in fact methane, and other hydrocarbons have been detected in clouds in deep space far across the universe... When you put together carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms which occur through out the universe inevitably these will combine to form more stable molecules like methane (CH4) and from time to time two methane molecules will combine to form ethane (CH3CH3) which in turn can combine with methane to form propane (CH3CH2CH3) etc etc etc...

So methane and the higher order hydrocarbons occur naturally (abiogenically), without the existence of life through out the whole universe...

except on Earth.

On Earth everyone knows that methane and higher order hydrocarbons (including oil) all come from tiny little fish and plankton!

It seems rather odd to me that we should be the exception to a "universal" rule.

So what are the implications of this?

Well first of all it implies that at least some of the stuff we drill out of the ground isn't a fossil fuel at all but has always been here since the Earth condensed out of the cloud surrounding the young Sun.

And if it has always been here then it should be mixed fairly evenly through out the Earth's crust - we just detect the stuff that is close to the surface and that hasn't evaporated away because it got stuck under impermeable rocks and salt domes where it mixed with fish skeletons and other fossils similarly trapped.

What evidence have I got for this theory? Well apart from Titan that is difficult. I could point to the presence of helium in natural gas which is difficult to explain (to you and by the petroleum scientists).

I'm not the first to come up with this harebrained idea - there was a geologist called Professor Thomas Gold of Cornell University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold), who propounded this theory back in 1979 and as a result a very deep well was drilled into a meteorite crater that forms Siljan Lake in Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siljan_(lake). According to Professor Gold the meteorite should have cracked the earth's crust an allowed some of the deep abiogenic methane to be found at depths that would preclude it from being made biologically.

Everyone laughed at him and his project failed...

But given all that methane and ethane on Titan...perhaps Professor Gold was right after all. If he was it means that we should never run out of oil and gas, though we may have to drill a lot deeper for it. If that is the case then the price of oil and gas (and energy in general) should plummet - one of the drivers for the recent spike in the price of oil (apart from greed and speculation) was worries about oil reserves - BP for example has only 13 years worth of oil reserves left and everyone thinks that perhaps we have reached the "tipping point" and the world's oil reserves will soon dwindle to zero, but thanks to Nasa and Professor Gold perhaps that will never happen...

Pilgrimage to St Sixtus

Last weekend I made a pilgrimage to the very northwestern tip of Belgium to the remote hamlet of Westvleteren and the Trappist Abbey of Saint Sixtus. The journey took about 4 hours each way. A train from Brussels to Popering (just beyond Ypres) and then a "Belbus" (a bookable bus) from there to the bus stop just outside the Abbey. We weren't allowed into the abbey - it is a closed order and they don't let people in - so why did I and 9 other hash buddies go all that way?

Beer of course!

"The best beer in the world" to be precise. The Trappist monks brew 3 beers there when they are not praying.

* Westvleteren Blonde (green cap), 5.8% ABV
* Westvleteren 8 (blue cap) (formerly Extra), 8% ABV.
* Westvleteren 12 (yellow cap) (formerly Abt), 10.2% ABV.


It was a true pilgrimage for me as although I had tasted each of them before it was a privilige to go to the only place where the beer is made and officially sold.

Unfortunately for us there was no beer to take away for sale - the monks only brew when they feel like it as the abbot said "We are no brewers. We are monks. We brew beer to be able to afford being monks." Fortunately the very large and modern visitors centre across the road was open and had an ample supply of all three beers for consumption on site.

We had a brilliant time (well most of us - poor Satan's L'ill Helper was struck down by a sudden bout of food poisoning) trying repeatedly all three beers.

We started with the deep dark Westvleteren 12 which positively exploded with taste on the tongue and keep exploding and changing like a very spectacular firework display for a good two or three minutes after swallowing the almost black nectar. It was absolutely fabulous - rich chocolatey, tarry, nutty, burnt caramel, hoppy wonderful! Mind you by the end of the first glass my taste buds were almost completely overloaded. It was like going to hear a wonderful symphony orchestra play and being in the front row. The taste was almost overwhelming.

The Westvleteren 8 was almost a relief after the 12. It was far more drinkable and easier on the palate. You could easily want a second one after finishing your first glass (which is what I did).

The Blonde 'little sister' of the other two beers was almost a disappointment - it was a perfectly respectable blond beer but not a patch on the other two and there are probably quite a few other blonde belgian beers that would give it a run for its money. No, the stars of the show were the 12 and the 8 - we all agreed and just to make sure had more of each.

By the time it came to go and get the bus things were pretty blurry - looking at my photos (see my photos on Fotki ) a day or two later brought quite a few forgotten incidents on the journey home flooding back.



Just to make absolutely certain that my head would hurt for days afterwards some of us went for something to eat at a Chinese restaurant (the Blue Lotus) back in Brussels and then did what seemed eminently sensible at the time but remarkably stupid now - we went and sat on a balcony and between 6 of us polished off a whole bottle of Scotch - ouch!

Things are not going well on Mars

Phoenix is looking more and more like a turkey.

After a week of practicing Phoenix managed to get 3cc of icy Martian soil into its scoop - yipee!

But having got it in there it now won't come out! The robotic arm poised the scoop over the open doors of probably the last Tega oven and tipped the scoop upside down....

and almost nothing came out. Have a look at Nasa's photo here.

The sticky soil problem struck again - once again the icy soil has behaved like deep frozen ice cream and first melted on contact with the scoop and then refroze just like ice cream does on a spoon when it is straight out of the freezer.

So now what? There is a little soil in the Tega oven - but not enough for it to trigger the closing of the oven door to start the baking. They could try to shake the scoop or use the rasp to loosen the soil - but every second counts as the ice is sublimating (evaporating) and pretty soon there won't be any ice left in the soil which would make the baking pointless.

Not only that but what is probably the last operational Tega oven is not really usable any more. The readings for any soil added to it will be effected by the soil that has been delivered this time and will have been sitting there slowly sublimating in the sun.

Oops - chalk up yet another cock-up for the Phoenix team.

Now what are they going to do with the extra 40 days that have been added to the life of the project (to make up for all the lost time due to all the previous cock-ups)?

I am still gobsmacked by how all these problems haven't been forseen by these rocket scientists. Weren't they expecting it to be cold? Didn't they try out the collection of icy hard soil in freezing low pressure conditions before sending Phoenix to Mars? Obviously not!!

Photos of the DRIFTER Balkan's tour

I've finally got around to uploading my photos of my tour of the Balkans to the internet. They can be found on my Fotki Site. I warn you there a lot of photos, and not many captions as yet.

We (the DRIFTER Hash House Harriers) visited:

• Sophia (Bulgaria),
  
• Skopje (Macedonia),
  
• Pristina (Kosovo, where we ran a Hash in a mine field),
  
• Ohrid (Macedonia) which has a beautiful lake
• Tirana (Albania) where I took part in the most extreme Hash I've ever done
  
• Kotor (Montenegro)
• Dubrovnik (Croatia)

The photo below is one taken by Higgins it is me and Yark Sucker on the Tirana Hash - the teeshirt seems to be wrong this time...

Here are some thumbnails of the photos I took
Dubrovnik on the DRIFTER tour of the Balkans
Kotor Montenegro on the DRIFTER tour of the Balkans
Tirana Albania on the DRIFTER tour of the Balkans

Ohrid, Macedonia on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Skopje Day 3 on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Pristina, Kosovo on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Skopje, Macedonia on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Sofia, Bulgaria on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Earth from Deep Space

The NASA Deep Impact spacecraft which was sent to rendevouz with the comet Temple 1 a few years ago has just beamed back an incredible film of Earth as seen from deep space.

Deep Impact was 31,000,000 miles (50 million kilometers) away from Earth heading off to look for distant planets in our solar system and yet another comet (Hartly 2) to rendezvous with when it looked back at Earth and took a picture every 15 minutes to create the video sequence.

The object that flies across the Earth is not Darth Vader's Death Star, but the Moon!

I knew that the Moon is small when compared with the Earth and its diameter is about the same as the width of the continental USA, but to see this so graphically illustrated is stunning.By the way, when Deep Impact got to the comet Temple 1 back in 2005 it was 83 million miles from Earth! It fired a block of metal about the size of a washing machine to hit the comet. The resulting explosion was much bigger than anyone expected and generated so much light and dust that the crater the missile made was totally hidden - rather spoiling one of aims of the mission (and the bet the scientists had on how big the crater would be).

On planning an expedition

Imagine you are planning a trip from your home in Arizona to a distant and strange unexplored land to collect and analyse the mineral content of its soil. What do you pack?

A shovel......................................................................................Check!
A rake.........................................................................................Check!

Then what do you take to analyse the soil with?

A lab for analysing the soil we have in our back yard...........Check!
A grill over the lab to stop large pebbles clogging it up........Check!

and nothing else?.......................................................................Check!

Wait a minute though - what if the soil isn't loamy or sandy like it is in Arizona?

What if the ground is hard, how about a drill?

What if the soil is light, flakey, or very dusty, how about a broom or a dustpan and brush?

What if the soil is sticky, how about something to wipe things down with?

Perhaps it would be a good idea to consider all these things before setting off.

So why did Phoenix fly all the way to Mars with only have a shovel and a rake and no way of easily picking up what was raked up?

The scientists are once again blaiming Mars, whingeing that the Martian soil isn't what they expected. The complaint "It's like trying to scrape dust up off the sidewalk" has been added to the other moans such as "the soil is very sticky", "the soil is clumpy", and "the ice is not as deep as we expected".

Obviously none of the scientists was a Boy Scout... (Be prepared and carry a Swiss Army Penknife!)

Ok, Ok, I know that Phoenix has a 'rasp' on the end of the robot arm. But the rasp (a last minute addition to Phoenix) is behind the scoop and the scoop has shown itself to be unable to pick up small particles from the hard smooth surface (hence the complaint). To get the icy soil into the scoop the rasp has to spin hard and fast against the ground hopefully spraying flakes of the surface in all directions. Some of the flakes then fall on a small platform by the rasp where they can be manipulated by tilting and wiggling the scoop and arm through a backdoor in the scoop - hardly what one might call a brilliant design.

Come on NASA - this isn't rocket science

New Countries

I'm just back from a visit to some of the newest countries in Europe including what I think is the newest country in the world, Kosovo (I will tell all about the epic DRIFTER Hash House Harriers tour of the Balkans in later posts).

It is odd therefore to realise that I am currently living in what could easily become two even newer countries. Unless someone can persuade the Walloons and the Flemish to get their act together Belgium could very quickly split into two.

The King of Belgium today refused to accept the resignation of the interim Prime Minister who was resigning because he had failed to broker a deal between the two factions - I wonder what will happen next? While the north of Belgium is almost exclusively Flemmish and the south French speaking (Walloonian) the middle bit, particularly around Brussels is a real mix...

Told you so!

Looks like I was right about the problem with the TEGA ovens... To quote the NASA website (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/news/phoenix-20080625.html)

"When doors for a second TEGA oven were commanded open last week, the doors opened only partway. Later, the team determined that mechanical interference may prevent doors on that oven and three others from opening fully. The remaining three ovens are expected to have one door that opens fully and one that opens partially, as was the case with the first oven used."

Oops... Now they are in extreme difficulty - sure they still have got the "Wet Lab" and the microscope, but Phoenix's ability to chemically analyse the soil and detect water - the prime reasons for the mission has now halved!

What caused this? Well they say that the oven doors were damaged through the use of the "vibrator" used to get the clumpy soil into the first oven that caused the problem

"engineers believe the use of a motor to create the vibration may also have caused a short circuit in wiring near that oven".

This is of course an electrical problem - hence the use of the word "also" - there is a "mechanical interference" problem according to the first statement - I think that is, at least partially, the fact that the soil is sticking to the doors!

So now there are only three ovens left out of the original 8 - and only one has been used. I still think they should try using the robotic arm to rip the doors open - what have they got to loose?

Or perhaps they have already tried that - have a look at the photo at the start of this blog...

Does it look to you like they are trying to open the oven door with the scoop? I does to me!

Despite the NASA website saying they are showing the "raw images" I think they are being selective about the ones they put up there. The picture above wasn't in the general archive (or at least I couldn't find it).

Potatoes - a Fable

In the early days of last century a strange blight fell upon the remote town of Ballyspudulike.

Things were quiet there, and had been for a long time. The town was surrounded by bogs, but somehow there was a few hundred acres of good land ideal for the production of potatoes, and as a result the entire population of 800 ordinary souls had become very dependent upon the potato as a staple part of their diet. There were four farms around the town which was famous for the left-handed widgets it made and sold across the whole of the country. Mind you there wasn't a huge demand for left-handed widgets so the town wasn't that wealthy but it kept the men as busy as they wanted to be with money in their pockets and potatoes on the table.

The farmers however were less than content. It was hard work digging up the potatoes and taking the to market everyday so they were very interested in the proposition put to them by a stranger, Mr Oliphant by name, who had bowled into town one day.

"I'll buy your spuds from you at a guaranteed price, and I'll guarantee to buy all your spuds, and take them to market for you" he told them and the four of them signed up instantly. Soon Oliphant's Potato Emporium Company was up and running. Everyone was happy for a couple of years - Mr Oliphant set up a warehouse where he stored the excess spuds when the crop exceeded demand and kept the potatoes in good condition all year round - so there was never a time when the people of Ballyspudulike had to go without potatoes, and as a result they ate more and more of them.

The men of the town became healthier and produced more left-handed widgets and more children. The farmers responded by ploughing more land and planting more fields of potatoes. Ballyspudulike had never been so wealthy.

Then things started to go wrong. There was talk of building a factory to make more left-handed widgets and it was going to bring people in from the neighbouring towns to work there, and worse than that there were times when the Oliphant's Potato Emporium Co's warehouse almost ran out of potatoes because of the town's expanding population and waistlines.

Mr Oliphant could see that if the population of Ballyspudulike kept on growing there would be a crisis. But Mr Oliphant was a shrewd business man. He knew that a crisis meant an opportunity and saw the time was right to make some real money.

Over night he doubled the price of the potatoes he had in his almost full warehouse. At first the farmers complained, but when he pointed out that he would pay them the new price for their potatoes and would be passing on the agreed percentage of all future profits to them they soon settled down.

The people of Ballyspudulike on the other hand were furious, but they still had to buy the potatoes as they still needed to eat.

The town council met and discussed the problem.

They talked about not buying potatoes from Oliphant's Potato Emporium Co., but the farmers weren't interested in selling to them direct and going back to the hard graft of shipping the potatoes to town every day.

They talked about ploughing up some more land and growing extra potatoes for themselves, but no one could see the point as they had a problem today, not next year when the potatoes would be ready, and anyway the unploughed land was pretty...

"I know what," said the town mayor, "lets show Oliphant's Potato Emporium Company that we can live without potatoes, lets start making more bread!". It was unanimously agreed and the bakers were told to double the amount of bread made every day.

Sure enough people stopped buying so many potatoes, and started eating a lot of bread.

A month later the chickens died... of hunger, the baker had bought the corn they ate to make the bread. Because the chickens were dead there were no eggs so there were many rumbling tummies and people bought more bread and potatoes to compensate. The response from Oliphant was to put up the price of potatoes even more as demand was increasing.

The council then decided that people were eating so many potatoes because they were working too hard and set limits on the number of left-handed widgets that could be made. The town's economy started to collapse and it wasn't long before the population of the town had halved.

Oliphant's Potato Emporium Co was only selling half as many potatoes as before, but at twice the price, so Mr Oliphant wasn't worried. He was hated in the town, but he didn't care, he was now a very rich man in deed.

The population of Ballyspudulike continued to plummet.

Then one day the few remaining inhabitants went down to the Oliphant's Potato Emporium Company building to find a notice pinned to the door "Closed - permanently". Mr Oliphant had left town - taking almost all of the people's money with him.

The farmers didn't care, they retired to the South of France.

The few remaining folk had no choice but to leave Ballyspudulike and emigrated to America leaving the town and its fertile fields for ever.

The rest of the country wondered why they couldn't buy a left-handed widget anymore, but otherwise not much more was thought about Ballyspudulike.

As for Mr Oliphant - well what do you think he did next?

Phoenix Oven Doors - Sol 25

The saga with the Oven (TEGA) doors continues.

As can be seen from the image above Phoenix is trying to open the next oven door - and it looks like it is having a problem doing so. The door to Oven 3 is only partially opened - probably as a result of all the soil that remains on the partially open door to Oven 4 - see earlier posts on this one.

What is also interesting is how far the soil has slipped on Oven 4. The image below is the one taken when the problem with the soil on Oven 4 became apparent

I think this soil is like dried mud - stiff and brittle. The water that was present in it when it was dumped on the oven door has all 'evaporated' away now leaving it hard, "dry", and brittle. I think they should get the robotic arm to tap the TESA structure on its side to remove this crud...

The Phoenix team are also having another look at the rock with the hole in it under the lander, this time from a slightly different angle. I still can't see any sublimation on it, but the change in angle doesn't help.

However there is an interesting object on the right of the picture...

Is that something else that has fallen off Phoenix?

Or perhaps it is a seashell