Year: 2013

I know some of you will be starting to think about Christmas already…don’t worry, that’s fine. I’ve got a little sing-along-a-Dave treat coming up for you with which you can begin the “celebrations”. I might even accept gifts this year, as long as they’re of the 40% distilled C₂H₅OH-H₂O flavoured azeotrope variety, preferably from Northern Ireland rather than Scotland.

Anyway, if you are starting preparations early (it’s 15th November folks, no need to rush), here’s a little festive warning you can cut out and pin to your noticeboard or stick to your fridge with that Xmas pudding fridge magnet you got in your stocking in 1997, you know the one that falls off when you try to stick anything heavier than a dead fly’s wing with it…

You can get 12-armed snow crystals that are essential a double 6 with a twist and triangular crystals are like compressed hexagons. If I remember, rightly it’s all in Deceived Wisdom where I quote from the main man in this area http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/class/class.htm

More poetic silliness with a scientific bent. This time another hero, one of the great polymath scientist and science communicators – Michael Faraday – who started out as a chemical assistant to Sir Humphry Davy, inventor of the eponymous miner’s lamp.

It’s a distant memory to me, but apparently barbers and hairdressers still chunter on to their customers as they snip and tease the cranial follicular extrusions: “Turned out nice again…although they’re forecasting snow…oh that Chancellor’s got a nerve cutting benefits and introducing new taxes, and have you seen the price of petrol these days…going anywhere nice on your holidays, then?

In case you hadn’t already guessed, hairdressers, like beauty therapists, nurses, taxi drivers and many others involved in one-to-one occupations (with the exception of doctors) are generally not interested in your responses to their verbal outpourings. The stream of consciousness, the unceasing gossip, the endless chit-chat is a barrier. An aural barrier they erect to create an auditory fog that lets them escape into their own world and focus on the task in hand whether that’s tussling with your tresses or taxiing you from A to Z…

There are many occupations that create a wall of sound around employees, factory work, construction, railway engineer etc and as such, those involved in that work are encapsulated by the sound or if it is above a certain threshold they wear ear protection which encapsulates them in what you might think of as a negative sound space. They might fancy a chat on the job but there’s no opportunity until a tea break comes along. For those who work in the not-so-splendid isolation of the office cubicle, the whirring of a printer, the background chatter of colleagues on the phone and the trundling of the post-room trolley set up the aural landscape for them. But, unless they’re engaged in a phone conversation themselves they need not create the kind of barrier needed by those working one-to-one, such as the hairdresser and taxi driver.

Recently, Harriet Shortt of the Department of Business and Management, at the University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus, in Bristol, UK, has focused specifically on the auditory landscape of the hairdressing salon. In her research, reported in the International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, Shortt explains how employees construct their auditory barriers, or one might say, their imaginary escape routes, to help them cope with the constant emotional labour of their task. This is an especially important consideration in ensuring employee wellbeing and mental health where an occupation requires the employee to be constantly on display and offers little refuge behind the walls of a cubicle or in front of a screen or in the more naturally noisy environment of the factory floor, for instance.

Shortt H. (2013). Sounds of the salon: the auditory routines of hairdressers at work, International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, 5 (4) 342. DOI: 10.1504/IJWOE.2013.057400

The original Movember hipsters?

Pictured: Croatian electromagnetic pioneer Nikola Tesla and British-born Hollywood great Charlie Chaplin.

Some start-the-week-fun with science. A few of my heroes immortalised in what I self-generously refer to as “verse”, as if any of them need me to “immortalise” them with rhyme…now with added Higgs.

 

Nik

Nikola Tesla had magnetic charm
A twentieth century star
His current alternating was so fascinating
And his name now quite grandly a car

Dick

Feynman never suffered any fool quite gladly
His diagrams confused but they were no fadly
And his bongos he’d bang and his hands hurt so badly
Though his memory lives on, he’s long gone very sadly

Ros

A dark lady slaved in the lab of a King
With the secret of life she did play
But, Watson and Crick a structure did bring
to deoxy-ribo-nuke-A

Higgs

Bosuns at sea, they’re always nautical
Bosons in fields are Higgs’ kind of article
They give matter its mass,
taking flight aeronautical
A Nobel pursuit good God, heavy particle!

Albert

Quantally speaking Albert couldn’t have cared
Any less of a man would have run away scared
But he saw the light and he speedily shared
Energy equals mass times velocity squared

Is there anything Nobel-winning, all-carbon, one-atom-thick, wonder material graphene won’t be able to do? Here’s a demonstration of a graphene “piano”…

In Robert Llewellyn’s eagerly awaited sequel to News From Gardenia, erstwhile engineer Gavin Meckler is trying to get back to the present in his Youneec aircraft, but something is amiss. He soon realises he has travelled sideways through time to another possible future, as unlike his visit to 2211 “Gardenia” as our own era.

Llewellyn, known to geeks everywhere as the actor who plays Kryten in the BBC comedy sci-fi Red Dwarf and as a big fan of sustainable technologies and electric vehicles, provides an intriguing perspective on a second possible future for humanity. In “Squares”, it’s no agrarian, hippy love-in, this time, men (who are all well over two metres tall, but outnumbered by females 10 to 1) are now playing the roles traditionally taken by women, while the women run the vast mega cities that evolved from our current metropolitan areas and covered each nations. Bio-inspired materials science allows the women of the future to grow buildings and a neck-wrenching terrestrial and sea-based transport system that outstrips our puny supersonic flight. It soon becomes apparent to Meckler that the world is soon to vote on whether to eradicate the male of the species once and for all…and his timely presence could change the course of history.

A quick and gripping read with some intriguing insights and even a neat reference to today’s wonder material graphene! Can’t wait to read the final part of the trilogy.

News from the Squares by Robert Llewellyn.

We’ve got it all wrong, it seems. We invest millions in recycling centres, refuse sorting facilities, and in some parts of the world in assimilating every last scrap of metal, plastic, glass and feeding it back into the system as usable source materials whether that’s for plastics recycling, remanufacturing, metal melting and smelting or simply grinding up green glass to make grit for under-road hardcore. Instead, we should be designing from the perspective, not of making products recyclable, but of making out lifestyles sustainable.

Obviously, this is easier said than done. After all, millions of people want the latest shiny toys, the smart phones to map their social networks, plot their routes around strange cities, and even call their friends for a chat. Millions hanker after the low-energy, efficiency-rated white goods that wash whiter, dry faster and purportedly make for domestic bliss, although the low-cost robot that loads and empties the dishwasher and irons its own dustcover is yet to be released on to a market that waits with baited breath, freshened with the autoflossing electric toothbrush.

It is time we overcame the idea that we – in the Western, Eastern, Northern and Southern world, developed or otherwise – must seek at the latest and greatest if we are to have happy fulfilled lives. There are, it seems, just too many issues that must be addressed before we can stop worrying. Dwindling fossil fuels, fracking friction, nuclear incidents, turbine trouble, cracked solar panels, rising sea levels, flooding, drought, oh and the relatively smaller matter of much of the world concerned with attacking its neighbours for whatever reason. Nevertheless, writing in the International Journal of Sustainable Design, Christa Liedtke, Johannes Buhl and Najine Ameli of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy in Germany, argue that instead of focusing on objects, designers must adopt a user-centric perspective. “A sustainable design of products and services requires the integration of production-orientated (efficiency and consistency) and consumption-orientated (sufficiency) strategies,” they explain. They introduce the concept of an indicator that can assess total lifecycle of a product and that can then integrate design and engineering into a strategically sustainable approach. “The goal is not to design sustainable products but rather to design systems that manage to foster sustainable lifestyles,” they say.

The team estimates that to provide a sustainable world, our lifestyles need an order of magnitude shift downwards in terms of the resources each of us in the West, and a growing number elsewhere in the world, use each day. An entirely new approach to design and products as well as a paradigm shift in our perspective as disposable consumers with an eye on the recycling centre will be needed. Recycling is not enough, we have to some design out desire…

Liedtke, C., Buhl, J. and Ameli, N., “Designing value through less by integrating sustainability strategies into lifestyles,” Int. J. Sustainable Design, 2013, 2, 167-180.