All I remember of my dreams this morning is that Joshua Malina was in one of them. I was at a party, or something, and he was there too. I started to strike up a conversation, then woke up.

I mention this because there are apparently balloons floating above me, trying to stimulate dreams. There should be a “vast audio landscape across the town”, but a mile from the town centre I can’t see or hear anything atm. It is ‘music released from the confines of gravity’. It’s really not, but the concept sounds pleasant and I’ll go hunting in a bit. I’m currently waiting for an engineer to arrive to prevent my shower exploding - if he turns up late and makes me miss the balloons there will be trouble.

It’s also the happiest day of the year. Wheee.

The last time I went to my dance class by myself I had a terrible time. I became stuck in my classic I’m-unworthy-of-these-people’s-company mindset and couldn’t wrench myself out of it. Since then I’ve avoided the class whenever my dance partner Lynsey’s been away.

Lynsey’s currently on holiday for a couple of weeks, and before she left I didn’t know how I’d feel about going dancing on my own. However, I realised today that I wasn’t particularly worried about it, so I headed down there and had a really good time. I was happily chatting away and stayed far later than normal. Great! That’s exactly how I wanted to be, and it’s hard to say quite what changed. I think the last dancing weekend away helped, as I got to know people much better. Also, a couple of the others actively let me know they’d happily dance with me while Lynsey was away, which was a major confidence booster. Shame it’s taken me eighteen months to begin to relax properly, but at least I’m finally getting there.

News item of the day:

Insurers have withdrawn the cover on their virginity taken out by three sisters in the event of the second coming of Christ.

The grammar seems to suggest that the women were worried about Jesus turning up and bonking the staff of the insurance company (twice, perhaps). I don’t think this is the point. The women were concerned that, should they immaculately conceive the messiah, they would not have enough money to cover the cost of raising him. This is obviously a legitimate worry. I mean, there’d be press conferences, entertainments licenses, temple refittings, donkey-hire…That kid would be expensive. On the other hand, you’d think they’d cover some of it with reduced food bills.

The siblings had paid £100 annually since 2000. If they had secured a payout, they stood to receive £1m.

He added: “The Catholic Church is up in arms about what we’ve been doing. We have withdrawn the cover because it was causing a furore.

Things I don’t understand:

1. The Catholic Church declined to comment. Wow. Aside from that, what is their problem with this? Is having a child forced upon you not something that should be recompensed?
2. You’re telling me that an insurance company turned down money on a cover on which there was not the remotest chance they’d ever have to pay out? What kind of broken insurance company is this?

Learning anything about physics always involves grappling with the problem of scale. Whether incredibly small or ridiculously large, the human brain hasn’t evolved to cope with the kind of extreme number necessary for investigation into nature’s workings. Science writers do their best to think up real-world analogies, but the nature of the number makes this extremely difficult to do.

If you created a scale model of the solar system in which the sun was a metre wide, Earth would be just under 1cm across, 100m away; Jupiter would be 10cm across, 560m away; Pluto would be just over 1.6mm across, 4.5km (2.8 miles) in the distance. This is already getting hard to grasp - the sheer amount of empty space boggles the mind. Outside of the solar system, the nearest star - Alpha Centaurai - would be 29km (18 miles) away. The centre of the milky way? 188,340,398 kilometres away - on our scale model it would be placed about a fifth of the way between Mars and Jupiter. Current estimates are that there exist around 100 billion galaxies within the visible universe.

Time’s just as bad. The best analogy I’ve heard came from Richard Dawkins: if you stretch out your arm and use the distance from the centre of your body to your fingertip to represent the time since the formation of Earth, brushing the edge of your fingernail would wipe away the dust representing the entire period of man’s existence.

At the other end of the size scale are atoms and molecules. The average small glass of water contains about 225 cubic centimetres of water. This works out at 7,525,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water. This is far larger than the number of sand grains in the Sahara, and probably more than there are on the entire planet.

Richard Feynman came up with a good analogy for representing the size of an atom: if you enlarged an apple to the size of the Earth, the atoms would be roughly the size of the original apple. What’s amazing is that we can directly view atoms, in some cases, using electron microscopes. But that’s only half of it, because atoms themselves are almost completely empty, to a staggering degree. This website is a scale model of a hydrogen atom (on most computer monitors). Electrons and protons are close enough in size that they can be visualised in reference to each other, but the distance between them cannot. Make the electron the size of a pixel, and the proton about 1000 pixels across, and there’s still eleven miles of emptiness between the two.

The most insane analogy I ever read was from string theorist Brian Greene, when talking about the relative sizes of the theoretical strings which comprise all matter. He says that a string is to an atom as a tree is to the known universe. Unsurprisingly, nobody’s yet come up with a way to verify the existence of something so small.

Large numbers are sometimes useful for debunkage. Homeopathic ‘remedies’ supposedly increase in potency as they are diluted. A relatively standard amount of dilution is ‘30C’, which means that the amount of ‘remedy’ is to reduced 1 in 100, thirty times over. When you figure it out (I’m going by what somebody tells me on this one, since I keep messing up the calculations) this is equivalent to placing one cubic centimetre of substance into a sphere of water with a radius of 800 light years, stirring until randomly distributed, then taking a cupful. It’s highly unlikely there’ll even be one molecule of the original substance in the cup, and that’s amongst the aforementioned 7 million billion billion molecules. And there are other remedies which claim potencies of 200C.

Hopefully the maths in the above stands up to scrutiny - let me know if I’ve made any silly mistakes! For some reason these numbers are astonishing me even more than usual, today.

I’ve been toying with replacing some of my (in need of updating) blogroll with the javascript feed reader from Grazr.com. It has a decent interface, and is fast enough not to be annoying. I’m trying it with Bloggers4Labour links on my front page, and it seems to fit into the sidebar ok. I don’t know what happens if grazr.com is down, though - if it’s anything like other javascript includes it may stall the whole page.

Here’s a slightly larger version, with a subset of my own FeedLounge subscriptions. I can’t find a way to sort an OPML file alphabetically, so it’s in a weird order that’s indicative of nothing
edit: two minutes after posting, it appears to have stopped…hmmm
edit 2: is happy now

The free snippets convinced me to pick up The Feeling’s album: Twelve Stops and Home, and I’m really enjoying it. I think it’s great happy summer music, and I like the lead singer’s voice. There are all sorts of interesting musical moments, especially when you listen through headphones.

I bought Dad a very old-fashioned physical copy for Father’s Day, and discovered yesterday that it has a hidden extra track. The final song on the album is very long, and a new song turns up a minute or so after you think the CD has ended. This isn’t the case on the iTunes version, which is a shame. Given that there are two songs on one track it seems iTunes must have chopped it up manually, possibly because of their 79p-per-track policy, and it’s disappointing that the extra song isn’t available at all.

Still, the available tracks are a great sound, imho. Recommended by me

With apologies to the wonderfully-named-by-Lola Mr Grumpy Pants…

I saw a car with a number plate that included the letters ‘swf‘. I thought ‘that’s flashy’. That’s bad, isn’t it? Is bad.

Just a quick post to point out the existence of Envirophone.com. They’ll pay you for old mobile phones, then redistribute them around the world or, in some cases, recycle the components. The moneysavingexpert forums suggest that it may take a while for the money to come through. They have a price list for different models, and if yours isn’t listed (like my old 7110) you can still send it Freepost for recycling.

One of those magic tricks that’s just too amazing. There’s only one explanation, and it ends up as a gag rather than a proper trick, but is still funny as hell:

A free glass of wine with a main meal for the duration of the world cup at Ma Potters in Solihull. Except the small print says ‘offer applicable to two or more females dining, when not accompanied by a male’.

Somebody called Mark left this comment on the below post about Doctor Who:

You are of course free to post about Doctor Who on your own blog.
However, my concern as with lots of otherposts on blogs listed on “bloggers for Labour” is the impression this gives to passing possible Labour voters and how it makes us look to our opponents.
At present it makes us look like sad geeks, our opponents must be pissing themselves.

I was unaware that passing possible Labour voters, as well as opponents, still think in moronic playground cliché.

When I was seven or so, somebody bought me The Ali Bongo Book of Magic. It was full of easy magic tricks using everyday objects. I loved it. Magic became my main interest. I’d practice card tricks and card sleights until I had them perfect. I discovered Davenports magic shop in London, and spent most of my spare money picking up wonderful little illusions. In hindsight, I wasn’t bad. I performed annual shows at my secondary school. I won awards at the borough talent show. I was on stage at the Midlands Arts Centre. I won the British Magical Society’s Young Magician of the Year award (not as prestigious as it sounds, but not bad), and performed for the BMS senior section. I really enjoyed being on stage and delighted in entertaining. Then, I hit puberty.

There’d always been people who made fun. That’s what happens at school. For a good number of years it didn’t bother me, but once puberty kicked in I began to care what people thought. I realised that people weren’t poking good natured fun, they were genuinely being spiteful. For anybody who said they liked the magic, there’d be two popular jocks who’d hurl insults as all their friends laughed. I began to take it to heart. It didn’t matter what anybody else said - these were the people everybody liked, the cool crowd, and they hated me.

It happened very slowly, such that I didn’t really notice it, but I began to associate the magic with being ’sad’, or ‘pathetic’. I stopped caring about it so much. I think my parents realised what was going on, but peer pressure is almost impossible to fight. My school magic shows in years 7 and 8 (when I was 13 and 14) were, in hindsight, pretty good. But years 9 and 10 were dodgy. I hadn’t put in the practice. On the final day of school I cut my least favourite teacher’s head off with a guillotine, and I entirely relied upon the illusion - the surrounding act wasn’t up to much. I remember hearing the abuse as I carried the guillotine across the playground after the show, and thinking that it just wasn’t worth it. After secondary school I dropped out of my fortnightly magic club, and never really took it up again.

It was odd. All through school I wanted to keep doing the magic, as I enjoyed it, but I became ashamed of myself for doing so. Even now when I pick up a pack of cards there’s a behind-sense of shame, that people will justifiably laugh at me, that I’m a bad example of how to be.

Sad geeks? For liking Doctor Who? Screw you. It’s seven years since I left school and I can see this attitude for what it is. The implication is that normal, intelligent people do not like Doctor Who, nor anything else that may be ‘geeky’. I should rid myself of my likes and dislikes and conform to some dreary grey gob of nothingness. But it’s not normal, intelligent people who think this. It’s people too brainless to see beyond their own perspective, or who are so afraid they might be missing something that they resort to I’m-more-popular-than-you insults. I let people rip the joy from being a magician, but now I’m older, wiser and stronger. I’m not going to pander to this miserable short-sighted crap, whether it’s from passing Labour voters, opposition readers, or Guardian columnists - and I strongly suspect that most of these people do not, in fact, think in the way suggested. You think my liking Doctor Who gives the Labour party a bad name? I think it’s that kind of attitude that belittles politics in general.

I like Superman, Star Trek, Doctor Who and Firefly. I like sci-fi novels, comics and fantasy. I like toys. I like cartoons and superheroics. I like computers, technology and science. If you think these are unworthy and something that should be mocked, the problem lies with you. Anybody who uses ‘geek’ as a term of abuse demonstrates their lack of thought. I revel in my geekery, and good-natured ribbing is fun, but cross the line and you reveal your own ignorance. To call such an attitude childish is an insult to children. It’s just stupid.

Perhaps Mark was genuinely trying to offer advice, but the last sentence sounds spiteful, to me. You want to criticise me for my political opinions? Go ahead. Want to argue religion? Fine. But attacking me for taking pleasure in that which I enjoy is pathetic.

I’ve found this series of Doctor Who to be more variable in quality than the last. There’ve been truly excellent episodes, but also a couple that I’ll pretend never happened. However, I just watched the recent two-parter - The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit - and enjoyed it very much. The interesting dialogue and decent plot gave the always-excellent lead actors something to work with - I thought David Tennant’s performance in the climax was spot-on - and it was also bloody great when the Doctor came out as something of a humanist Most entertaining, although the portents…well, I’m nervous already.

It’s a really beautiful evening. I just walked down to the river and wandered in a slow circle back to the flat. I think you’d call it balmy, and at 22:30 there were many people around. Lots of interesting little moments. Two men walking a dog kept looking back at me over their shoulders. The restaurant cruiser passed, brimming with people dining in smoky red light. Some teenagers in the park had a shopping trolley overflowing with bunches of indistinguishable objects, and some of the kids - sixteen year olds are now apparently still kids in my eyes, and I remember how much I hated that attitude - are lying in sleeping bags. Somebody somewhere was having a barbecue. A guy in bermuda shorts passed me almost silently, and I jumped. Cutlery clattered from the Duck Pub (I always forget its real name) opposite. Voices and laughter echoed around the green, and one couple had a small fire. Two ducks spent half an hour stuck in a holding pattern around the park, one quacking wildly, the other in hot pursuit. I heard today that only ducks, as opposed to the male drakes, actually quack - is that true? The theatre glowed yellow, while mute swans drifted back and forth beneath it. There were a few stars that were probably planets. I sat on a bench by the water and tried not to feel conspicuous while eavesdropping on the conversations of passers by. Most seemed to be discussing relationship issues, and who likes whom, and what they should do about it. I felt like I wanted somebody to share it with, but simultaneously didn’t, as I was strangely content. I’m clearly feeling somewhat wistful, and it made for a pleasant hour.

If there are any owls reading, I have some advice: you do not help the whole endangered-species thing by sitting in the middle of the road while cars approach you. I would suggest that some people’s first reaction would be ‘wow, is that an owl’ (for you are cool creatures) instead of ‘I should take avoidance measures’. Happily, I did not run over one of your compatriots this evening, and I didn’t appreciate the ‘what the hell are you doing?’ stare as I passed him/her. I don’t know if you heard rumours of the eyes of cats, or what, but not so much with the roads. Trees. Telegraph poles. Mice family reunions. These are places to spend an evening.

I saw March of the Pingwings last night. It was full of oddness, and after trying to make five mental notes in as many minutes I grabbed my notebook. Perhaps it’s many years of David Attenborough documentaries, but the style of the film grated. I wanted more information.

Antarctica, we’re told, started in tropical climes and travelled southward. All animals but the pingwings fled. The pingwings ‘chose’ to stay, or ‘maybe they were just too stubborn’. I admit that my knowledge of pingwing evolution is patchy (read: not there) but I’m fairly sure there was no conscious decision making involved. I’d also guess that the other animals all died off, rather than leaving of their own accord as suggested. Pingwings survived because they happened to have adaptations that were beneficial in the cold, but even so it seems unlikely that they resembled modern pingwings.

The film centres around the 70-mile journeys undertaken by pingwings, as they travel from the sea to a mating ground. How do they know where to go? Narrator Morgan Freeman explained that we don’t know, but it could be by using the sun, the stars, or maybe an “invisible compass within them”. An invisible compass within them?! To paraphrase, the possibilities are: sun, stars or magic. Sorceror pingwings.

So the pingwings get together and mate. I was interested in pingwing sex - I mean, how could that not be a funny thing? - but it’s only vaguely alluded to. There’s a brief shot of cuddling pingwings and perhaps one lying down with the other standing up, and that’s all. I want the anatomical details, dammit. I wonder whether the rating would have been increased had there been some pingwing-on-pingwing action.

After ambling about for a bit an egg pops out. This is then transferred to the male, who looks after it while the female takes the 140-mile trip to find food. The whole procedure of egg transfer was mysterious, and badly explained. We’re told that it’s rehearsed ‘dozens of times’ before actually happening, but no further details were given. How did this work? Did they rehearse with the actual egg? If not, how? The loss of an egg during transfer also seemed bizarre, with no details given of why the egg should be ‘lost’.

There was some anthropomorphizing which seemed unjustified. The reunion of pingwing mates was ‘joyful’, the loss of a chick was ‘unbearable’ and leaving to collect food was ‘not easy to do’. I’m not convinced that pingwings feel that kind of emotion.

Once the chicks were cutely waddling around, the music changed to a minor key as a bird glided into view. This is a predator, we’re told. And that’s all we’re told. Birdy lands, eats a chick, and leaves. I didn’t even know there were birds in the Antarctic. What kind of bird is this? Is it feeding its own chicks? Does it survive purely on pingwing babies? The pingwing parents don’t seem to care - is there any reason they don’t fight Birdy off? I’m sure David Attenborough would have provided more information than ‘looklook it’s a baddy’.

Also, the credits contained a ‘digital special effects’ section. There were digital special effects?

The film was just interesting enough to keep my attention, and the pingwings were undeniably adorable, but the lack of any biological information resulted in it feeling hollow. I can’t help wondering whether anything relating to evolution was deliberately excluded because of the crazy-people market, but alternatively the intention could have been to make a simple documentary without information seen as off-putting to the general public. Whatever the reasoning, it didn’t work for me.