20 Posts in a Month!

A blog record, 20 posts in a month. Of course if I am to make 150 in a year then this is really making up for the first few months of this year.

Probably a little too high a target, means a post every 2.5 days compared to 3 of last year.

Also posts like this to make up the numbers are probably dubious, but I thought this was worth mentioning.

Royal Wedding

I am by no means a great fan of the monarchy - but not enough to want to see the back of them or the reduction of their mainly ceremonial role.

But I did watch the wedding coverage, as it is a part of history - and it was a well staged event, everyone commenting on this is something "Britain does well". Well there had to be something ;)

I am amazed that so many crowds turned up for what must have only been fleeting glimpses of the event.

My favourite banner in the crowd was "It's checkmate Kate, you've taken the King".

Says it all really!

Bike ride: Solent Route

12.5 miles, 20.2 km, time 62 minutes

This is my longest route that I have not completed in a few years, probably as many as 5 years. It goes to the next town then across the front of the Solent. A pretty flat route so one for higher average speeds. Interestingly I thought it was a longer route than 12 miles as it always felt more tiring. But today was good conditions not too hot and not too windy to avoid making the front a hard cycle.

The Carriers

Not too surprising but the carriers have their next cost increase exposed by the media:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2011/04/aircraft_carrier_costs_to_rise.html

It looks like to accommodate the version of JSF that the American military are likely to go for - the version that needs catapults rather than VTOL to take off.

So the overrun will only be £1bn if we convert just one of the ships, but we are building two - with one likely being an immediate sale to a foreign Navy, so it makes sense to convert both.

It does seem like we set our sights on a yet unbuilt aircraft rather than building something that could be used with a range of aircraft and now we are paying the price that we were hoping to save by being so specific.

Blair and Brown no Invitation

Both Blair and Brown have been omitted from the wedding guest list. Whereas Major and the now infirm Thatcher have been included.

That does seem a little unfair, maybe it would have been better to have Major/Blair. Is it all down to protocol with Major holding a knighthood title and Blair not?

In some ways thinking back to the death of Diana, and with Blair/Campbell at their spin doctor best, Blair did a lot to bring the royalty back to the real world and saving them from a PR disaster. Maybe those are painful memories and something they could never really thank him for.

Brown: The good points

Gordon Brown really did sink without trace, much as he promised he would if he walked away from politics (actually it was more like hounded out, but I'll try not to split hairs).

So I've been thinking of the good points and maybe doing a series of articles for some time now. The trouble is the good points are few and far between and barely cover one blog entry.

But here goes:

1. Stopping Blair from waltzing us into the single currency. Hard to believe it was ever on the agenda but it very much was in the early 2000s and Blair would have seen it as a defining moment of his time in number 10. Brown devised a few economic hurdles before he would consider it, I am not sure if they ever got much scrutiny - but they were a thinly veiled no.

His motivation here may have just been keeping Blair out of the treasury, or not losing power over the madness of joining the European experiment. But whatever it was it turned out to be the right decision.

And that's it, still it is a big one. I want to talk about his early months of prime minister where he looked steady but that does not stand alongside the first point.

Book read: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A book I knew of but have never read before. I had been put off by hearing that it was the most bought science book of its time but the least read.

In fairness I can see why, if this was your first book on this subject then it would be a tough one to read and take in all it was telling you.

It is however a really well written account of particle physics, time, quantum mechanics, and the lifetime of the universe. The best thing about the book is it starts off with the astronomical observations which then led to the esoteric theories which I think is essential in motivating the harder to comprehend physics.

The observational astronomy ranges from the earth orbiting the sun, Hubble's expanding universe, and Einstein's light being affected by gravity.

The other main theme of the book is the still unfinished work of unifying the large scale physics theory of gravitation with the quantum particle world. All this really boils down to is to understanding how gravity works at the quantum level. The best way of thinking of this is that we think on the large scale as gravity as a force that is not conveyed by a particle just an omnipresent force.

The foreword of the book is by Carl Sagan, now sadly dead. The book is very concise and well written, and Hawking is a man who despite his obvious disability has achieved a huge amount in the field - most of it after the time he was expected to have lived, as he was given a couple of years life after diagnosis of his disease.