Life is too short!

I hope whoever was in this car is safe and well!

Massaya

Every once in awhile I have the most perfect day. Yesterday was a case in point, enhanced with this Massaya red from the Bekaa Valley

Supper at Bista

I went to see Caravaggio's, Supper at Emmaus again this week. I hadn't really noticed the bread before and wanted to have a good look. A lot of scholars think it was the act of Jesus breaking the bread that identified him to the two disciples. I must say I am baffled as it doesn't look like that to me! A lot of questions remain. Jesus is depicted on the cross by numerous artists with a beard. Again on the road to Emmaus. So why does Caravaggio depict him without his beard? Why in his second picture in Milan does the artist have the inn keepers wife present? Was it an after thought or was she in the original and then get painted out? 

Apologies to Caravaggio

Spell to destroy speed cameras

O ye demons, and all princes and every kind of demon whom your gods cast from heaven on high, I adjure you and order you to obey my command and my precepts. Just as God commanded the Jordan and it stood still and that the children of Israel might walk across without hindrance, so do I command you to obey my precepts day and night, at all hours and moments and be subject to my precepts. Just as the Red Sea obeyed Moses and Aaron when it divided and provided a dry path for the children of Israel, so by invocation of Our Lord Jesus Christ.  I command you to obey me without delay and render the speed camera in Shillingford to decay, turn to dust removing all trace of images therein!

Goose Family

The family of geese I have been nurturing since the spring disappeared last week. I assumed they had flown off, on the start of their great adventure!

Yesterday the combine harvesters were out in this part of Oxfordshire. Given the recent excellent weather, I assume wheat yields,  will be up this year.

This morning just after day break I was walking Patch the collie across one of the newly threshed fields and found a flock of Canada Geese,  presumably stocking up their grain reserves  before migration. Just slightly away from the main group were nine birds in the same formation I had witnessed many times on the nearby pool. Whilst the main flock prepared for flight, my nine came trotting over to say goodbye. How good was that?

JOHNJ

Perseid Meteor shower

Every year, from around July 17 to August 24, our planet Earth crosses the orbital path of Comet Swift-Tuttle, the parent of the Perseid meteor shower. Debris from this comet litters the comet’s orbit, but we don’t really get into the thick of the comet rubble until after the first week of August. The bits and pieces from Comet Swift-Tuttle slam into the Earth’s upper atmosphere at some 210,000 kilometers (130,000 miles) per hour, lighting up the night time with fast-moving Perseid meteors. If our planet happens to pass through an unusually dense clump of meteoroids – comet rubble – we’ll see an elevated number of meteors. We can always hope!

Comet Swift-Tuttle has a very eccentric – oblong – orbit that takes this comet outside the orbit of Pluto when farthest from the sun, and inside the Earth’s orbit when closest to the sun. It orbits the sun in a period of about 133 years. Every time this comet passes through the inner solar system, the sun warms and softens up the ices in the comet, causing it to release fresh comet material into its orbital stream. Comet Swift-Tuttle last reached perihelion – closest point to the sun – in December 1992 and will do so next in July 2126.

My field of vision was somewhat limited but even so, I saw seven meteors in the clear sky over Oxfordshire. It was a pleasant evening sitting out with the sheepdog, warmed by my firepit,  contemplating the vastness of the universe.

Not all of me will die!

Graveyards are peaceful places, where one goes to contemplate and remember. Surrounded by anonymous names, people who have left grieving loved ones. Who were they, what did they do, were they happy, did they have full and satisfying lives. A cross section of ages, skewed towards those in their seventies and eighties. I sat and wondered, in front of one grave in particular. It was recent, obvious by the fresh flowers and lack of a headstone. I was wondering what would be  his epitaph. Some words etched in a granite or marble block that his family deliberated on at length between their tears. A few words to both describe a life and fill for them  the dark void of his departure. Then I noticed where the grass was tinged with a faintly brown circle as though a plant pot had been removed. How sad, one can only wonder why?

"I am not alone a solitary red kite circles overhead,
sky dancer dip and rise, among the suns intermittent rays,
silver crowning it's russet mantles, he seeks the breeze,
pirouetting above this place of special memories,
his sharp eye spots a new rose, far below,
re-established , now resting at my feet,
amongst the verdant hues of Dorcic,
non omnis moriar"

Google Doodle celebrates Schrödinger

Schrödinger's cat is a famous illustration of the principle in quantum theory of superposition, proposed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Schrödinger's cat serves to demonstrate the apparent conflict between what quantum theory tells us is true about the nature and behavior of matter on the microscopic level and what we observe to be true about the nature and behavior of matter on the macroscopic level -- everything visible to the unaided human eye.

Here's Schrödinger's (theoretical) experiment: We place a living cat into a steel chamber, along with a device containing a vial of hydrocyanic acid. There is, in the chamber, a very small amount of hydrocyanic acid, a radioactive substance. If even a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, a relay mechanism will trip a hammer, which will, in turn, break the vial and kill the cat.

The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed. Since we cannot know, according to quantum law, the cat is both dead and alive, in what is called a superposition of states. It is only when we break open the box and learn the condition of the cat that the superposition is lost, and the cat becomes one or the other (dead or alive). This situation is sometimes called quantum indeterminacy or the observer's paradox: the observation or measurement itself affects an outcome, so that the outcome as such does not exist unless the measurement is made. (That is, there is no single outcome unless it is observed.)

We know that superposition actually occurs at the subatomic level, because there are observable effects of interference, in which a single particle is demonstrated to be in multiple locations simultaneously. What that fact implies about the nature of reality on the observable level (cats, for example, as opposed to electrons) is one of the stickiest areas of quantum physics. Schrödinger himself is rumored to have said, later in life, that he wished he had never met that cat.

Google Cache

It's so annoying when your Google search turns up a page that has been removed or updated.

There is usually a cached page that Google keeps!

The new way to view it is

Search for the website / webpage on Google

In the organic search results look for a small menu triangle. It's underneath the title and immediately to the right of the URL (see illustration)

Select the menu triangle and you'll be presented with the options of Cached, Similar and you'll also have the option of "Share" if you're logged into your Google+ account.

Click on "Cached"

At the top of the page information is also provided about the last date Google updated this page in their cache and also a link to view the text only version of the page.

Here's an illustration on where to find the Google Cache now!

Just click on the little green down arrow