Saturday, 27 February 2010
One Soggy Morning
The park is like a river,
continually it flows,
pausing not once,
onward it goes.
Never caring for any man
be they in sandals or boots,
towards the sea it heads
past grass stems and tree roots.
© Martin Lilley 2009
continually it flows,
pausing not once,
onward it goes.
Never caring for any man
be they in sandals or boots,
towards the sea it heads
past grass stems and tree roots.
© Martin Lilley 2009
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
Owl or Lark?
As I have been growing up people have always talked about So'n'So being a morning person or an evening person - commonly known as Larks or Owls. I have also met the odd Nightingale as they shall now be called who spend more of the day sleeping than awake!
Walking into the office this morning at some ungodly hour (it was still dark..) I was struck by the fact that personally I am quite capable of adapting to suit the situation. Maybe the shift work on ships has helped but I can enjoy the day just as much when I get up early late, or even at Midnight.. This led me onto thinking that the labelling of a person is probably more down to their habits than actually when they can physically work better. It is possible that a certain time of day does suit some people, but how did they get to that situation in the first place? Is it simply being used to getting up at a certain time and then switching on mentally so-many-hours after that?
All in all I would suggest that your habits dictate the way you are. Anyone can be anything if they put their mind to it. Otherwise an owl would become a lark when working on the Western Seaboard of the US rather than London... Maybe it is simply conformity which results in our daily lives fitting around others and the working day.
When would you like to work/get up/have your free time? Give yourself a couple of weeks to adapt (just like jet-lag) and you can. Go on, go for it! ;) That is what flexi-time is for.
(This posting is brought to you by PhD-writeup-distractions.sea.sci.swampea)
Walking into the office this morning at some ungodly hour (it was still dark..) I was struck by the fact that personally I am quite capable of adapting to suit the situation. Maybe the shift work on ships has helped but I can enjoy the day just as much when I get up early late, or even at Midnight.. This led me onto thinking that the labelling of a person is probably more down to their habits than actually when they can physically work better. It is possible that a certain time of day does suit some people, but how did they get to that situation in the first place? Is it simply being used to getting up at a certain time and then switching on mentally so-many-hours after that?
All in all I would suggest that your habits dictate the way you are. Anyone can be anything if they put their mind to it. Otherwise an owl would become a lark when working on the Western Seaboard of the US rather than London... Maybe it is simply conformity which results in our daily lives fitting around others and the working day.
When would you like to work/get up/have your free time? Give yourself a couple of weeks to adapt (just like jet-lag) and you can. Go on, go for it! ;) That is what flexi-time is for.
(This posting is brought to you by PhD-writeup-distractions.sea.sci.swampea)
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
SI Units - Systeme Internationale or Systematic Insanity?
SI units or metrification as many of you will know it resulted in the overall adoption of seconds, grams, metres, litres and Pascals in place of the commonly used minutes, pounds/ounces, feet/inches, pints and pounds per square inch. Okay so some parts of the world have developed a certain reluctance in the uptake of these units despite their development way back in 1960 - the UK for one clinging to miles and pounds of fruit and veg. Aren't we backwards ;)
The reason for blogging has been the recent absolute frustration at the overlaps in the system. In this case it concerns the use of the letter k. k as everyone should know represents 1000. However this substitution takes place for one thousand metres (km), grams (kg) and bytes (kb) to mention just a few, but it also gets placed into the number (£3k) as well. Once the idea that something might be wrong gets into my head then I have great trouble proving to myself what the correct way actually is, despite probably using it without thinking for years. In the current situation I have been happily converting km2 to m2 (square kilometres to square metres - 1:1,000,000) for absolutely weeks.. until the idea got into my head (thanks guys...) that km2 could actually mean 1000m2 - i.e 1000 square metres rather than 1 million.
Believe me it messes with your head and the more you think the more you doubt!
The consequences, bar the inevitable overestimating in this case jellyfish abundances and biomass - x grams per m3 suddenly reduces to 1000x less grams per m3..., is that I have been doubting the validity of all the other sources of data I have been using. "Maybe they meant 1 thousand instead of 1 million, maybe they meant something else, how can I tell?". The answer to the later bit is simply that I can't. I have to trust that the published figures are as they were meant to be. Arrrghhh.
All I can say is that at some point in my thesis I am going to define and write in words Exactly what I mean by g 100m3 and km2 so that there can be no confusion with my interpretation of the presumably-correct published history.
What a week!
By the way.. 1 Tonne of jellyfish in a square kilometre is exactly the same density as 1 gram in a square metre. Now convert from T km-2 to g 100m-3 using the web to work out the depth of the water where the samples were taken from... or even better from grams of Carbon m-3 to grams of wet weight per m-3 when the authors haven't provided an equation between one and the other. Good luck!
The reason for blogging has been the recent absolute frustration at the overlaps in the system. In this case it concerns the use of the letter k. k as everyone should know represents 1000. However this substitution takes place for one thousand metres (km), grams (kg) and bytes (kb) to mention just a few, but it also gets placed into the number (£3k) as well. Once the idea that something might be wrong gets into my head then I have great trouble proving to myself what the correct way actually is, despite probably using it without thinking for years. In the current situation I have been happily converting km2 to m2 (square kilometres to square metres - 1:1,000,000) for absolutely weeks.. until the idea got into my head (thanks guys...) that km2 could actually mean 1000m2 - i.e 1000 square metres rather than 1 million.
Believe me it messes with your head and the more you think the more you doubt!
The consequences, bar the inevitable overestimating in this case jellyfish abundances and biomass - x grams per m3 suddenly reduces to 1000x less grams per m3..., is that I have been doubting the validity of all the other sources of data I have been using. "Maybe they meant 1 thousand instead of 1 million, maybe they meant something else, how can I tell?". The answer to the later bit is simply that I can't. I have to trust that the published figures are as they were meant to be. Arrrghhh.
All I can say is that at some point in my thesis I am going to define and write in words Exactly what I mean by g 100m3 and km2 so that there can be no confusion with my interpretation of the presumably-correct published history.
What a week!
By the way.. 1 Tonne of jellyfish in a square kilometre is exactly the same density as 1 gram in a square metre. Now convert from T km-2 to g 100m-3 using the web to work out the depth of the water where the samples were taken from... or even better from grams of Carbon m-3 to grams of wet weight per m-3 when the authors haven't provided an equation between one and the other. Good luck!
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