Sungkyunkwan Univeristy Logo on the Earth

Alaköl Audani bearing a very close resemblance to the Sungkyunkwan University Logo
I was browsing the Earth as you do (or at least as I do) following this tweet from Tim Peake on board the ISS:

Tims tweet
While trying to locate those mountains I zoomed in on a rather intriguing formation which looked like a bit of human engineering - it was indeed a river delta which has been massively utilised for farming right in the far reaches of the east of Kazakhstan near the border with China. I then realised that the formation looked quite like a ginkgo leaf which is the logo for my Father-in-law's university in South Korea - Sungkyunkwan (also the oldest). Sadly when I checked the logo online I realised that the land formation is instead the mirror reflection of the logo. Here they are side by side. For your interest the geographic coordinates are: 46.040012N, 81.036736E near the town of Alaköl Audani

Alaköl Audani bearing a very close resemblance to the Sungkyunkwan University Logo

Bad + Good or OK?

Here is a dilema I face remarkably often: if there is something I don't like, should I dilute it in order to make it weaker but longer, or have a short sharp but horrible hit? Most recently occurrence of this is with tea. My usual supplier, The Daily Bread Cooperative in Cambridge used to stock really nice "breakfast" tea, by which I believe they meant Assam. Either way, it was a really good taste, strong but smooth loose tea. Sadly some time last year their supplier failed meaning they were out of stock for months. Then when they finally got more stock in the quality was significantly reduced - much more dusty than it used to be making a much rougher cup (yes, this is going to be one of those dull blog posts I'm afraid). Dr K brought a bag recently and we found that not only is the quality still rubbish, but also it has gone up by nearly £1 (~+20%) [yes, this is a grumpy moan @DB_Cambridge].

Anyway, to my problem. It has crossed my mind that I could simply ditch the tea, but I hate being wasteful, so I feel compelled to consume it. Now should I buy some other tea which is nicer - say Clipper Loose Assam - and mix it together to make the worse tea better? Of course this also makes the nice tea worse and also last longer all round. Or shall I try and work through the worse tea keeping the nice stuff separate so that occasionally reward myself with a nice pot? The same thing has happened at work when I brought some Coop loose tea only to discover that, surprise surprise, it's equally dusty rubbish (actually, it's remarkably identically to the Daily Bread tea - suspicious?

Forget my dilemna. Where can I buy nice tea nowadays?

2016-03-11

Brimstone Moth

Using this rather nice simple website I was able to identify a moth I photographed 11 years ago as being a Brimstone. Go and check it out at animalphotos.me.

brimstone moth in 2005

2016-03-09

Forget Apollo 13

This is perhaps the most well orchestrated music video I have ever seen. As far as I can see there are no cuts, instead they all hold position while the plane bottoms out of the zero G parabola and the video is smoothly zoomed forward. Very very nice, hypnotic even. I like the uplifting music beat too.

2016-03-03

Grand Designs - It Still Holds Me

It felt like one of those evening in which I needed to watch Grand Designs, and I knew I happened to have one still saved from the the most recent series (County Antrim 2015). It pretty much followed the usual flow from massive undertaking, through huge debt to wondrous conclusion and amazing space. It really never fails to get me hooked.

I've been watching since the very beginning (I was enthralled by Kevin McCloud's previous series about scaling the UK's famous architecture which must have been in 2000 perhaps - Wikipedia reveals that to have been a BBC2 series called Don't Look Down). Dang! I should have been an architect.

The slight difference this evening was the feeling that perhaps I could still one day build my own home one day. I suppose I'm too late to be on GD as I've already had my first child (everyone knows that the "now his wife is pregnant" is the cliff hanger with which to go to the first advert break). But I could perhaps, if I sold our house and took out a new massive mortgage, build my own house one day. Friends of mine from Cheltenham did it only recently in their retirement - Colemans Hill Ecobuild. It would allow use to escape the stale confines of East Anglia where views don't exist and skies are not (despite what the locals will have you believe) enormous - for enormous skies go to Seattle where the sky reaches from the Space Needle right over to Mt Rainier 100 km's away. That would be something to aim for and what is money for other than for sinking into the folly of a grand designs project which shou ld outlive me. The only real decision would be where to move to?

2016-03-01