teaching expertise?

I know that sometimes members of the teaching profession glance at this site, so I thought I'd pass on a tip from Lady Banana.

Lady Banana spotted the new book about teaching by Michael Gove.

He certainly takes a very direct line in this publication. This is an example of a book that is probably not quite as useful as a Kindle download, but at the moment it's also free.

can daleks travel faster than the speed of light?

We were at the BFI on Saturday evening and it turned out there was a bit of a bash on for Doctor Who.

A couple of daleks managed to gate-crash and it made me think again about the time traveller dilemma. It would make sense to publicise a set date for time travellers to convene and a globally publicised Doctor Who fest could be one such moment. No actual time travellers were present though, unless they forgot to mention it.

It remands me also of the telly programme about Doctor Who physics shown a few days ago. It illustrated relativity, spacetime curvature and the effects at the edge of a black hole when observing the event horizon.

Some of it has great mathematics, but I can't help thinking there's a whiff of phlogiston about it. Phlogiston was the stuff supposed to be consumed by things that burned. Until a better theory came along.

So my dilemma is that clever people say things can't move faster than the speed of light. OK, so how can the earth's position relative to the sun by gravity be twenty arc seconds (8.3 minutes) ahead of its observed position? That would mean that gravity was somehow working faster than the speed of light.

Or, how could a black hole, which consumes all light, be able to have a gravitational pull? The gravity would have to be able to escape, whilst the light couldn't. Doesn't this mean it needs to travel faster than light?

Someone will say gravity is a wave, or that there's a yet to be discovered particle called a graviton. But whatever the explanations are, it still seems to me that there's some black holes in the theory.

How else would the daleks have been able to get in the bar?

time acceleration

Fun with both time travel and history acceleration today with this pop chart lookup. Click through to see many years of top 30 or top 100 singles, complete with a mini play list, via Bob Borst's site.

What with it being my birthday month, I tried my birth year and found interesting curios amongst the songs (gulp).

For the UK there's also the UK Official Charts listings, but it doesn't provide an automatic playlist.

For this blog I've set both of the above searches to 1963, because of the extensive coverage of Kennedy and Doctor Who over the last few days. Two stories from adjacent days, both receiving comprehensive UK coverage at the moment.

Thursday night on television I could watch analysis of the sight lines Elm Street or the politics of Dallas and then flip to see the first ever Who episode (or the whole series, if required).

By the morning the rolling news on the hotel room television had already moved on and extensive coverage had moved to another story. Tweets were coming in of Monty Python's planned reunion.

Crunchy frog, anyone?

not exactly jet set

Thursday started in London, but has ended in the Midlands. Well, north of Birmingham in any case.

It was late as I walked towards the hotel lobby. A couple of Christmas trees twinkled in the corner.

I'm not sure why, but after the cones and jams of the motorways it felt slightly awkward to be suddenly thrust into this apparently festive world.

I decided to head to my room, make a cup of tea and call it a night.

hemlock grove as hebenon to the eyes?

I finished watching a film on Netflix recently and it came up with a suggestion about watching a Netflix series called Hemlock Grove. I thought this might be a handy thing to have as I've started to use the bike turbo again for the winter season and duly clicked on the first episode.

Oh dear.

I've been sticking with it, but I'm not really sure about how or why they made it. What I've enjoyed is the sheer number of horror film concepts that they've managed to throw into the first couple of episodes. Kind of Addams Family meets Twin Peaks, done in a Young Adult format but with lots of steam of every kind.

Even the High School Kids could work out who was a werewolf ahead of the authorities. Here's a clue:


So what do we get? There's a High School. A posh family. A 'gypsy' family who move into the town. There's a wood where Strange Things Happen At Night. There's a very tall goth girl with a kind of facial disfigurement. A secret scientist laboratory. A few Unspoken Secrets. A gnarly dude who runs through the woods and has a bit of a twitch. A vintage sports car. Much use of big eyes acting.

Then there's the casualties. The body count is quite low at the moment, but I have a feeling it is going to rise in every episode.

I'm paused somewhere in Episode 3 but am going to stick with it for a few more episodes. I'm finding a strange fascination for the cringeworthiness.

squirrelled

Tonight was a bit of a secret squirrel affair.

One of those places along a quiet street in central London where there is no marking to explain what you are entering.

To be buzzed in from the street and then to head for the drawing room. To wait for other guests to arrive, before being whisked to another area for cocktails and more.

Annoyingly, that's about all I can disclose. Kind of hush-hush.

Dex appearing

Just in case the Sunday post didn't show enough of the early seasonal decorations, I thought I'd add another one here.

The more obvious choice would've been Harrods, but I've gone for Harvey Nick's instead. There's a suitable quantity of stars, illuminated street decorations and the type of aerial xmas trees particular to this area of West London.

I'll have to take a regulation Sloane Square picture, too.

But that can come later. Maybe wait for December.

jiggly picture

It's been a busy week, what with travelling and all.

The jiggly nature of the picture summarises the experience. Or maybe that I'm still taking all of my pictures with the iPhone.

London (signified by the red buses), some cycling, the early proper signs of Christmas, with the illuminated stars appearing along Sloane Street.

trippy and circular moments

The last week was unexpectedly trippy. Not because of the extra drugs I took for my cold. They were only Lem-sip, after all.

But there were a few things that went somewhat off kilter.

Not specifically for me, but related circumstances caused me to cover a lot of ground.

Mainly circuits of the M25. Amazing how both north and south can have simultaneous roadworks. I knew it was bad when the sat nag started to tell me to turn around on the motorway.

It's all regaining balance now and today I even managed to go for a local bike ride.

First time in over a week. 24 miles. That's just over 6,000 miles cycled this year.

every step you take

I've clocked a fair few car miles this week, although it's been at the expense of cycling.

There was a strange moment when one of the online systems I use for monitoring my cycling sent me an automated message saying it was missing my activity.

It links with the story on the front of the Economist this week which is about ubiquitous monitoring and threats to privacy.

I'm not going along the route of the 'life-loggers', but it becomes an interesting challenge to achieve the right balance between functionality and privacy.

More of the systems like Google want to join everything together, presumably to make a better target market of we individuals.

It raises the question around 'Glassware' and similar offerings that can observe and tie things together.

I gather Google won't provide face recognition on the live platform, although I assume that fringe activities will find ways around this.

I already have to smile for the camera every time I enter the United States and the fast lane back into the UK is via biometrics stored in the passport.

The 'next generation identification' systems have subtly become current.

Say "Cheese".

frost

Morning rooftops with the first frost of the year.

They are saying that by the weekend it could turn properly cold. I'm quite enjoying the sunshine we still see at the moment.

I know it's a fuzzy looking picture. Normally I'd use a bigger camera to take something like this, with a bit of a zoom on it. Instead, it's the little iPhone camera using the digital zoom on a high setting.

Big brush strokes?

the lower lower thirds rule

I usually have one of those advert blockers switched on when browsing the internet. I'm not sure what I'm missing, but generally the adverts I do see are misdirected anyway. The cookie crumbs seem to remember what I've already bought, rather than what I might need next.

Television is different. If I'm watching something pre-recorded then hitting the 30x usually does the trick. If it's on-demand, it may still have advert breaks but they don't have any actual advertising within.

So real-time commercial television is increasingly a novelty. I've decided to filter adverts using a specific easy to remember rule. I call it "The lower lower thirds" rule:

"Not more than 8 small print words."

That rule keeps me entertained during many drudgy adverts on telly. I simply decide that more than 8 words of riders and disclaimers invalidates my attention. I could add others about 'no animated animals except meerkats' and 'no quick money' but simply watching what's in the lower lower thirds works well most of the time.