The bane of my youth

(Mon 6th Sep 2010, 12:31, More)

» The B3TA Detective Agency

Speed of light from tomato soup
A couple of weeks ago, I was heating soup in the microwave. I set it for 20 mins, and wandered off. When I got back the soup had exploded out of the bowl, evenly coated the walls of the microwave, and continued to cook.

So I set to cleaning it. What I noticed was that, now that the soup was static on the walls and not being moved on a turntable, it didn't cook evenly. Some parts were frazzled like flakey paint, and the areas in between were still damp. The areas where the cooking was concentrated were about 2 thumb lengths apart, or 6 cm.

I was looking at the half-wavelength of the microwaves, which would travel at the speed of light. A full oscillation would be 12 cm, or 0.12m. Looking at the safety information of the microwave, it operated at 2450 Mhz. To put it another way, it could pump out 2.45 billion of these 12cm lengths every second.

So a beam would travel 0.12 * 2450000000 meters in a second, which is a speed of 294000000 m/s. The official speed of light is 299792458 m/s. So I was 2% off calculating the speed of light from a bowl of exploding soup. Not bad.

Edit : As has been pointed out, this bit of cleverness has been nullified by leaving the soup on for 20 minutes to begin with.
(Fri 14th Oct 2011, 10:52, More)

» Teenage Crushes - Part Two

Cyber stalking
Through my teenage years from 11- 18 there was just one girl I was besotted by. Others might come and go, but there was always her. Being the nerdy social death magnet that I was, she was always weary of me. After A-Levels we went our separate ways.

So one day last month I spent a lunch hour tracking her down. She had a fairly rare surname which makes it easier. Typing her name into 192.com, I can tell that she spent 4 years at university which means she will be extra qualified. She then spent 3 years in the south east at an address with a man's name on the electoral roll before moving back to her home region. Landlord or boyfriend? Well he left the university at the same time, so I'm guessing boyfriend relationship that didn't work out.

From her LinkedIn profile I can see her original job. The company location matches what 192 says about her being in the SE for 3 years, before moving back here and taking on a more impressive job title. With the extra university qualification I can see that she must be quite well paid now. And she works in IT, after belitting me over it for all those years.

A quick visit to nethouseprices.com, and there is the house shes living in, bought 4 years ago for a decent sum. I even download the title deeds from landregistry.gov.uk and confirm that it is her. I never knew before that she had a middle name. An aerial scan at various online mapping sites reveals a tidy garden and a sensible car which is always a good sign.

Finally I check with facebook. There she is, and her friend list is made up of people from her current company, tieing in with linkedin.com. Whilst I can't see her profile, I can see that of one of her friends. They went on holiday together recently, and there is a pool photo of her that would have wanked myself to a dry husk over in my teenage years.

And happily now I've moved on. Theres no payoff to this story that I'm going to go round there with an axe, or even contact her. After a dismal teenage decade, I'm taking this as a small success that I've got over it.
(Mon 9th Nov 2009, 12:53, More)

» Changing Your Mind

Swords to ploughshares and back again.
Not me, but my great grandad.

He was an ardent Marxist-socialist in the runup to the second world war. He viewed the Great War as being an attempt by the bourgeois elite to cull the working classes. He might have been right too. He also idolised Uncle Joe and the Soviet Union. So when Britain declared war on Germany he wasn’t too keen on the idea, especially since Germany and Russia were sort-of kind-of allies back then.

So he signed on as a concienscious objector. No coward he, he was sent to a farming community in the back-of-beyond in Lincolnshire to make sure he couldn’t spread his pernicious ideas. This was an ideal opportunity to lead by his example to a higher purpose of humanity. So, driven by the maxim of ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ he spent every available moment out in the fields, cutting down trees to make new fields and pretty much dragging the plough by himself. The only photo I have of him shows him as a poster boy for the Soviet revolution, all muscular and chiselled jaw, holding a rake as though it’s a weapon.

The catch with all this is that the other inmates in the camp were poets, university professors, shysters and, simply, layabouts. When he returned at dusk exhausted and mucky, he would find that the others hadn’t left their barracks but had instead debated a new manifesto, or composed a new anti-war song. And slowly, he got worn down.

Eventually, of course, Germany unexpectedly invaded Russia. And that solved all of Grandad’s moral conumdrums. He then gladly signed up, and fortunately all the RAF’s bombers were based nearby in Lincolnshire. So he joined up as ground crew and spent the rest of the war maintaining bombers. He could load the weapons bay of a Wellington bomber single handed, a task that would normally require a small team. A good part of the rain of bombs on Dresden would have his fingerprints on it. He proved the plough can just as easily be converted back into swords.
(Thu 2nd Apr 2015, 16:41, More)

» Made me laugh

My lovely wife
My wife has never seen Star Wars. I'm trying to indoctrinate her in the things in life that really matter.

Last weekend we were at a local shopping center. There were some people dressed in Star Wars outfits, trying to sell toys. Trying to put her new knowledge to use, she points to the tall, dark, cloaked figure in the middle and says :

"So, thats Gareth Vader".
(Mon 10th Dec 2012, 13:57, More)

» Celebrity Encounters III

Martha Lane Fox, Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho
It was a long Friday afternoon. I had three customer reports to finish and send out by the end of the day, and they were proving a struggle to complete.

As things would have it, the nation’s favourite technology czar, Martha Lane Fox, had called into my company for the day. She was collecting statistics for whatever her latest government programme was. To be honest, it sounded as boring as my job and she surely felt as under-employed in her role as I did in mine.

Well, as time was dragging by, she dropped by my desk. The office was deserted due to an earlier fire alarm, and there was only us.

“Hey Chut”

Shes aging a bit from the fresh faced posh totty of the nineties dotcom boom, but shes still got it in a distinguished mature way. I immediately gave her my most helpful smile.

“I need some… staples. Can you show me where they are?”

“Sure Martha, just this way”

So I lead her into our surprisingly spacious stationery cupboard.
She sidled in close to me as I reached up to the top shelf. I could feel her sweet breath in my ear.

“Christ, I’m bored of this life Chut. I’m 40 now, did you know that? Never married. No kids. I was the poster child of the dotcom boom. I could do anything. Then it all went tits up, and ever since the only job I’ve been able to do is to show old biddies how to use a mouse. They still shower me with plaudits, but what was it all really for? I’m bored in this gilded cage. “

She moved in close. Oh, she smelt good. Her hands weren’t reaching for the staples anymore.

“You’re like me. You could have done so much. But although you’ve got a way with the customers, all you are made to do is complete spreadsheets. Sometimes… I like to live dangerously.”

And then she was entwined around me. I tried to resist, but then gave in to her warm probing tongue. At first it was gentle, and then we made our embrace tighter.

And before I knew it, after a flurry of undressing, I had the Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho impaled on the end of my cock. She held around my hips and hissed into my ear :”Yess…”

We ground up the pace. She was becoming moister. The rolls of prit-stick started to fall over and roll off their shelves.

“Oh Chut, oh Chut, oh Chut…”

She powered up and down her impalement like a well oiled machine. The feel of her older flesh was magical. Her glorious blond hair flowed freely like the balls of postal twine that were being banged around their shelves.

“Oh Martha! Oh Martha!” I yelled as I neared my final release of digital inclusion.

And… well, I can dream. It’s a slow Friday afternoon, and these customer reports aren’t going to write themselves.
(Fri 6th Dec 2013, 16:03, More)