Freemind – Mindmapping

A few weeks ago I explored the Via Ferrata du Moléson and these are the images I came back with.

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Weather is something I don’t really care to take note of because it doesn’t change much about my appearance. It does change what I drive though. In summer when the weather is nice and warm then I’d much rather drive the scooter than the car. That’s because if I see a mother distracted by children whilst pulling out onto the main road it’s easier to overtake her.

It’s also easier, when at traffic lights to get to the front of the queue rather than wait like an unambitious car driver, and before you object I’m very often trapped in traffic, so please remain polite in the comments (as if there were going to be any.

The interesting part.

Today and yesterday I was at an event in the lovely rain one day and sadistic rain the next. I call the rain sadistic because it resulted in many cycling injuries during a local race around the lake. One person at the event was playing with weather pro on the Iphone, and from the glimpse I caught I saw something useful. I’m home now and I downloaded the weather app on the Ipad, after all if you’re going to spend money on an app you might as well have a frame to display it.

I love how this app displays information. You have the weather graphic to show the main weather trends of the day. You have temperature information, rain information, wind direction, pressure, humidity and more. As an additional feature you have the ability to add your favourite cities, let’s say London, Geneva, Paris, South Africa (for the World Cup) and maybe one more. Click on the right side of the screen and you have information for each city.

There are three bonus buttons at the bottom of the screen, the weather button, whose features I have described. The radar tab shows you where the most recent precipitation has been. Satellite images show you what the clouds have been doing for a set time period.

We’ll see how often I use this app. I like that it has all these features.

Today was the Global Action day for Burma. The event was centered around a march from the Tate Britain, via the Houses of Parliament before arriving at Trafalgar Square at which point several speeches were made.

You can recognise those who were part of the protest for the red ribbons they wore and the t-shirts.

I met two friends who were taking photographs, Danfung Dennis and Crina Boros. Danfung has had quite a few interesting assignments. Crina was doing an MA whilst I was completing my final year of studies.

Last weekend I watched hours worth of
slow motion videos because I enjoy them. I also watched them because I was fighting one of the worst colds I’ve had in years. Slow motion videos are great because what is invisible to the eye, and hard to see in normal speed videos becomes boringly long when watched in slow motion. 

An event that would have taken a few hundredths of a second now takes seconds or even minutes to occur. We’re familiar with the photos of bullets going through apples from our childhood and we’re familiar with the footage of
slow motion rocket launches but have you seen the
saturn five launch where just the ignition sequence takes sixteen minutes? 

The video above shows the action in such slow motion that you can see everything that happens in a way that a live broadcast never could. Eight minutes from ignition to the moment the rocket leaves the shot. 

In this
video you see a nuclear blast for the first milliseconds. You can see the shape of the charge and the imperfections. It provides you with a different understanding of how these reactions occur. 

In the video above you see paint being flung from a drill in slow motion. The paint is flung upwards and sideways. You also see the drill as it oscillates up and down as well as from side to side. In
realtime you would just see a spray of paint but you would miss the intricacies of the globules of paint and how they move.  

In another
video you see how syringes of ink look as they spread in an aquarium of water. In slow motion you see the ink take on a velvet quality as it spreads within the water. It’s great to watch the first time you see such fluid behaviours. 

In another video, you can watch what happens when a drop of water falls into a body of water, how it goes down into the water, bounces back out and then hits another drop. Such motion is really interesting to watch. In real-time, we’re speaking of hundredths of a second but in slow motion, we’re speaking about seconds of motion.

In the video above we see how surface tension and bubbles of water interact. You start from a single drop of water that falls from a surface, bounces on the top of water multiple times and as it bounces halves and then halves again several times before finally disappearing into the water. This is behaviour that you would never notice with the naked eye but thanks to slow motion cameras you see it. 

When you watch the first slow-motion videos you don’t know what to expect but as you watch dozens, or even hundreds of events so you begin to understand how the world works at the nanosecond timescale. They’re worth watching
because your understanding of science and events increases.