Spaced out

I love where we live.  We are fortunate in this part of Oxfordshire to have the amenities of a market-town on hand (shops, library, schools, pubs, takeaways, restaurants, museum, football team, churches, health centre, leisure centre, children's groups, social groups etc) or town/city facilities close enough by (hospital, cinema, arts centre, train stations). Yet within 5 minutes walk we're on footpaths that meander through farmers' fields, and in 5 minutes drive we can be on the lovely ancient Ridgeway (http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/ridgeway/).  To my mind it's the best of both worlds.

Yesterday we visited the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories for their Space Open Day to learn about other worlds! (http://www.stfc.ac.uk/RALSpace/Default.aspx).  This is only 15 minutes drive away, and was a free event - woohoo, something to fill another day in the school holidays (which by now are dragging on, for both chidren and parents...).

We arrived late, having picked up a teenage friend of my daughter's who took an age to collect her things to be ready to go.  I don't remember being that bad at that age, but memory plays tricks on you, I'm sure.  So we got badged up, had the health and safety talk, and joined our allocated group in the 'Mars Robotics' building.

I'm not good with science.  I've not been able to get my head around it since Mrs (battleaxe) Carruthers (maths teacher at the Convent school I attended in the late 1970s).  If you weren't good at maths you didn't do physics - that's how it was back then - and I wasn't good at maths...  'Mrs Carruthers, I don't understand' 'You don't need to understand it, JUST DO IT' she barked.  Full stop.

So although the things they told us during the visit made sense (in context) as soon as I left the various buildings the normal soundtrack to my life returned and wiped clean the interesting information I'd just been told about electrons, positrons or whatever-trons.  The same thing happened a couple of years ago when we visited the Diamond Light Synchatron (another tron!).  (http://www.diamond.ac.uk/).  But that's another story.

Within the Mars Robotics building is a central quadrangle, which, un/surprisingly, has been filled with rocks and earth to resemble the surface of Mars and enable realistic testing of the robots to be done in the development process.  Unfortunately they didn't demonstrate any of the robots in action, but the roving photographer took a photograph of our group 'on Mars' with the robot vehicle.

The soil and rocks had come from Tubney Wood Quarry ( http://www.hills-group.co.uk/consult/tubney-wood.html), a local site, so it seems that Mars is closer to home than you would think.  They also test the robots in a desert in Chile.  So I learned something then.

The next session was light science - as in the science of light (doh) - lasers, and also much more talk of electrons and charged particles.  They've a lot of interns and students and they were all very enthusiastic to communicate either what they were doing or what the equipment on display did.  A nice young man (!) started to explain something to me, but I had to stop him part way through with 'I'm sorry, you lost me at electron'.

The children had a lovely time here, Phoebe, under careful instructions, became positively charged using the Vandergraph Generator (I thought that was a psychodelic band from the 60s!), and her hair stood on end - to the general amusement/satisfaction of the gathered group.  She was also very taken with the lasers and defraction lenses.  Tom had fun trying to move a laser beam through a maze, discharging the electrons from a plasma ball (?), and racing a hydrogen powered toy car.

I was interested to see the old technology - they had an IBM 360 computer - the size of my car, which was the state of the art when installed in 1969, and had the equivalent computing power of the RAM of a modern day printer.

The final session was space based.  Phoebe and her friend spent time learning about geology with rock samples, and we all had fun with the UV camera and ice-cubes!  This was to demonstrate how the scientists look into deep space to find things hidden to other telescopes.  The solar flare man had 3D glasses for us to try and we missed out on making bracelets with special UV detector beads that change colour in the sun and indicate when it's necessary to put sun screen on.  (These are available on the internet we were informed later, so we may have to have a hunt for those).

The final 'wrap up' session had us in the lecture theater with all 10 groups gathered together to give feedback (by way of handsets you pressed a button for to answer the questions on screen).  The lady in charge had her assistant pouring liquid nitrogen onto a small disc - thereby making a smaller magnet levitate.  You could have a closer look at the end of the session, as it was very small to see in a lecture theater, but it was magic the way the magnet hovered, the polarity reversed, the dry ice swirling around it mysteriously....

She said this was the most exciting thing about working at RAL.  They'd discovered this effect of this super-conductor in the 1980s, and it had initially been discovered in 1919, but, she enthused, THEY DON'T KNOW HOW IT DOES IT.  I love to see someone so animated, so enthusiastic and passionate about what they do.  Life affirming, and still more to explore - out there, and closer to home.  The future, it seems, is science.

See ya!  Kat

Hello world!

If you're reading this then thank you.  Looking at my blog statistics is becoming a bit of a guilty pleasure.  Not just the number of page hits (a boost to my ego), but the page view locations.  From the top of my head I know you're reading/have read this in USA, UK, Netherlands, Norway, Australia, Russia, Finland, Venezuela, Oman, Belgium, and I'm amazed and slightly curious.

Certain locations make sense, there are obvious connections that I understand, but other places I'm read in I have absolutely no idea how I've arrived there (Venezuela and Oman!).  But to you all, thank you.  I may be a middle-aged woman in a middle-aged mini-identity crisis, but thanks to you readers I feel like I have a voice.

Blogs are a funny old thing.  Some passionate with a considered theme,  like a political campaign, with ardent followers, and others blow hot and cold, depending on the blogger's available time and (dis)inclinations.

My inclination is that I write this as a kind of therapy.  A balm.  A way of reconciling and recording events, an aide-memoire, a diary.  On a mortal note it's also something for our children if anything happened to me....  And I do now wonder what my memory of recent events would have been if I'd not written them down.

I'm not exactly worried.  About my memory.  I think it's just some people are better at remembering details than others, and I'm not sure it's all that important.  Maybe the dementia nurses would have something to say about it, but I'll worry about that when I'm older (or maybe I won't)!

Some friends, and family, can remember exactly what happened at junior school, or what they were doing when they were 21, or are good at remembering facts and figures.  I feel I'm more of an impressions person.  I have a sense of how something appeared to me at the time, and may recall small details, but certainly wouldn't be able to give a verbatim account.  So by writing things down here and now, I've got the account, both recorded (time and date) and impressionistic.

Equally, unless I've just finished reading, I will tend to forget the exact plotline of the story, but will have a sense of whether or not I enjoyed a particular book/author.  Maybe that's just my way of handling the vast number of books I've read in my lifetime.

In the meantime, here's a photo of the Easter hot cross buns I made.  Quite pleased if I say so myself. May make them again!

all my own work!

Keep it sweet, thanks for reading!  Kat :)