Has our state been captured?
Have our President and Government been acting to improperly benefit “others”?
Find out here [PDF, 2.65MB]
Spoiler: It’s basically a yes and a yes.
Author: 6000
Sheffield Paragraph
This, via Whatsapp late last night.
Usually when Mrs 6000’s married female friends message me late in the evening, I can’t share the contents.
This one is different:
Struggling with the teeny text? Allow me to assist.
“He is very obviously common. His speech is uneducated, he has an accent, he is probably from some ghastly place like Sheffield, and he carries himself in an ungentlemanly fashion, and he’s probably something perfectly frightful like a Primitive Methodist. I will not have such people coming to this house and bringing down the tone of it, and I will not have you associating with them. We – you – have a certain reputation to conserve, a certain position in the world.”
Nice. Thanks for that, Louis de Bernières.
I’m not one to get into silly rows over heritage and stuff, but Wikipedia tells me that you were born in 1950s South East London and that’s hardly a shining example of loveliness, now is it? Additionally, I have no huge problem with you slating my perceived lack of education, my timbre or my general appearance based solely upon the city of my birth, but I draw the line very firmly some distance in advance of your “Primitive Methodist” slur.
That, sir, was below the belt.
I fear that this may only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to unfounded defamation and character assassination of us fine, upstanding individuals from the Steel City, so if you have any other examples, please feel free to email me so that I can perhaps construct some sort of compendium of examples of this sort of libellous, pseudoxenophobic prejudice.
“Thanks” Carol
Overview
Overview: A New Perspective of Earth by Benjamin Grant contains more than 200 aerial images of industry, agriculture, architecture, and nature, featuring:
…breathtaking, high-definition satellite photographs of Earth and revealing man’s impact on our planet.
Yes, it’s amazing what a different perspective can offer. And looking down at things from a great height is certainly a different perspective for most of us.
For example, who would have thought that Antwerp giraffe sanctuary container port could look so pretty from a long way up?
Or that the 2,650 heliostat mirrors of the bird-frying Gemasolar Thermosolar Plant in Seville, Spain would look quite so… swirly when viewed from significant altitude?
Apologies for those massive images, but when you’ve got a blog post which is primarily about amazing images and when your blog has been recently optimised (in part) to facilitate massive images, it seemed foolish not to just go for it. ‘Sorry, not sorry’, then.
More pictures of stuff taken from a long way up here (or in the book, obviously).
Real science
You may have noticed that there’s been a dearth of good quality blog posts on this site throughout its entire history recently.
Sorry about that. Numerous reasons, none of them singularly adequate, but in combination, perfectly reasonable.
I’m hoping that normal service will be resumed tomorrow, but in the meantime, please enjoy this wholly accurate depiction of life in a laboratory.
Extra points are awarded if you use all those exclamations during a single experiment.
I have a lot of extra points.
Solar System Distances
Here’s a useful Solar System resource for you:
Average distances of the planets from the sun; Total distance traveled in one complete orbit by each of the planets; Total time for one complete orbit of the sun (one planetary year).
| OBJECT | Distance from Sun (average) in km | Distance traveled in one complete orbit of the Sun in km | Amount of time for one complete orbit of the Sun |
| Sun | 0 | ||
| Mercury | 59,221,114 | 359,993,563 | 3 Earth months. |
| Venus | 108,142,903 | 679,916,318 | 7 Earth months. |
| Earth | 149,662,053 | 939,813,325 | 1 Earth year (365.25 days) |
| Mars | 227,872,546 | 1,429,031,220 | 23 Earth months. Almost 2 Earth years. |
| Jupiter | 778,242,678 | 4,887,351,143 | 142 Earth months. Almost 12 Earth years. |
| Saturn | 1,426,617,316 | 8,957,032,507 | 354 Earth months. 29½ Earth years. |
| Uranus | 2,870,453,814 | 18,025,909,237 | 1009 Earth months. Over 84 Earth years. |
| Neptune | 4,498,229,804 | 28,262,471,838 | 1979 Earth months Almost 165 Earth years. |
Working on a school project, we needed these figures. Plenty of copies of this information are available, but all of it was on US sites and all of it was in miles. Want it in kilometres? Well, either you have to do it yourself (like I did) or (now) you can use the table above.
Happy to help.