member blog: Mykael
Mykael
From
Southend-On-Sea
Member since
6th Jul 2004
About
I'm not overly sure what to say here but if you have a question just ask me
Mykael's blog posts
Chicken salad pitas!
Tue 14 Jul 2009GENERAL BLOG
Ok I made these this weekend and they went down so well I thought I share them with you.
You will need :
Iceberg lettuce
Cucumber
Spring onions
Tomatoes
Cold roast chicken
Pita breads
A lemon
Sea salt and freshly ground white pepper
Thinly slice the iceberg lettuce, cucumber, spring onions and tomatoes; dress them in the lemon, sea salt and white pepper. Heat up the pita breads. Slice the cold chicken and now stuff the whole lot in the pita breads! I bet you will be thinking about having another one before you have even finished the first one!
Some more random thought and gibberish...
Mon 29 Jun 2009GENERAL BLOG
I will post something about food soon promise!
A Pants History of Time
(Pants = Briefs get it? No? That’s a shame as there is going to be a lot more of that sort of thing to come!)
or The Universe and Why it Really Doesn’t Works.
or What Are You Talking About!?
or The Book of Many Answers
Prologue
Our View of the Universe
Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory. On the other hand, you can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagrees with the predictions of the theory... Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.
These are the words of the great minded Stephen W. Hawking. And no I haven’t got a clue what he is on about either but it seemed a fitting way to start this journey into the thing we call the Life.
But this from the late great Douglas Adams is far more to my liking.
There is a theory that states; if any one ever finds out what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable.
There is another theory that states; that this has already happened.
Chapter one (for now)
The Age of Man (or Woman!)
I’m going to start at the end (or the beginning, it depends on where you are standing really), there comes a time in the life of every man (or woman) when the question of Life the Universe and Everything (thanks Douglas!) screams to be answered. It’s more to do with mans, (or woman’s….look I can’t keep nicking bits from Monty Python all the way though this so I think I will use the term Human from now on, until I actually mean man or woman. Ok?) …so let me start again.
*Coughs, re-sits bottom onto this god awful chair, thinks for a bit and then a bit more… and goes for a cup of tea* *which turns into lunch and two hour later….*
There comes a time in the life of every human when the great unanswered, and unanswerable, question ‘why?’ comes screaming into mind, this usually happens round two in the morning when you have to be up at six to go to work. The big problem with this is that there is no answer! The very act of posing the question is futile beyond belief but still we do it anyway, all of us do or will say “Why?” “What’s it all for and about?”. And now here in this little volume I (yes little old me) will try and give you the answers that you long for and I promise not to mention the number 42 once. Bugger it I just did! Ok I promise not to mention 42 more than once. Oh sod it!
So the human race is the most dominate race on the planet, we have the power to destroy all living things on this endlessly moving rock when ever we feel like it. We are at the top of our game, looking down on all other living things, the trick is to not kill everything, including ourselves, and keep this fragile haven of life going. Where we came from and how we got to where we are now is one of the strangest stories you are ever likely to hear. From slime to rodents to monkey to human and many steps in between.
The human race has, in terms of the Universe as a whole, not been around very long; in fact the hedgehog has been around longer than we have. But as we have not, as yet, been able to talk to the humble hedgehog and ask it what it has learnt in it’s time here, it is left up to us the Human Race to answer the question Why? Of course the most obvious answer is why not? But as that is also a question I don’t think it counts, it also makes most people really really angry! I have often wondered who was the first ever human to look around at their world, and marvel at the beauty and diversity of all living things, to worry about life’s daily struggle of staying alive, of finding shelter, water and food and of course a mate, coupled with the continual fight not to become something else’s next meal. They might have looked at their hands and then up at the never ending sky above and felt their spine tingle with the knowledge of ‘I think therefore I am’ to have had their first sense of ‘me’ that clearing of the mind from animal to human from instinct to reason. They looked with a new mind and eyes at ‘where?’, ‘how?’, ‘when?’ and ‘why?’ and said
“Sod this for a game of soldiers!” and went back to hitting things with sticks.
This is what most humans have done ever since.
Evolution has a lot to answer for, when Darwin saw that evolution was the answer he had been looking for, I think he must have opened his eyes wide in surprise scratched his arm pit said “Oook” fell off of his chair and went looking for a banana!
Talking of brilliant thinkers (see the subtle link there?) I have often thought how different the world would be if when that apple hit Sir Isaac Newton of head instead of him thinking... “The apple is accelerated, since its velocity changes from zero as it is hanging on the tree and moves toward the ground. Thus, by Newton's 2nd Law there must be a force that acts on the apple to cause this acceleration. Let's call this force "gravity", and the associated acceleration the "accleration due to gravity". Then imagine the apple tree is twice as high. Again, we expect the apple to be accelerated toward the ground, so this suggests that this force that we call gravity reaches to the top of the tallest apple tree.” He had just thought, like I am sure most of us would have done “ Oh LUNCH!”
More gribble as I am bored at work
Thu 25 Jun 2009GENERAL BLOG
The Greatest Light Show Humans Will Ever See,
Calendars and Maps,
And
The Future of Air Conditioning.
Time is relative (No that doesn’t mean it’s your cousin of your brothers grandfathers sons wife, which should in fact be your mother!) how time pasts depends on where you are standing at the…emmm… time.
Let me try to explain.
When we look up into the night sky and marvel at the wonders of the ever-moving pins of light in the never-ending darkness above and around us, what we are seeing is the past, but it is the now to us. The light we see has taken, in some cases, thousands if not millions of years to get to us. The further away the light source is, the longer the light takes to get to us right? So if light travels at light speed which is (insert MPH of light speed) and it has take it a thousands of years to get to us then we can take it that to point of origin is a very long way away! Light speed is a very weird thing and is so complicated that we don’t know if we are even close to being right about it yet. Like; can anything, other than light reach light speed? When does light stop moving? Does it ever stop? Is the light from the big bang still moving ever onwards? is it still out there somewhere? Well if that is the case shouldn’t we (not you and me but the human race) one day see the start of creation? If the big bang theory is right and the point in space where it happened is far far far away the light it generated is still travelling and will one day reach us, so the human race will be able to stand and watch the beginning of time, saying thing like “woooooo” and “arrrrrgh” as the fireworks of creation blaze around us. The greatest light show Humans will ever see!
Ok so this doesn’t really work as it would mean that matter (i.e. the planets and stars and all the stuff there is in the universe other than light) would have to travel faster than light for us to be ahead of the light in the first place, but it does go to show how complicated time and space is! Just when you think you have a handle on it, the handle breaks and comes off in your hand.
Time can also disappear completely! Just vanish, wink out of existents, which means, to my mind, that time travel is possible.
This happened to me not too long ago. I was at a party, a nice little birthday party BBQ, the sun was shining the food was lovely the people charming and pleasant. We laughed talked laughed some more and (this is the important bit so pay attention here) drank.
Out of politeness I had taken along 12 cans of beer, I was not intending to drink them all myself I add. As the afternoon pasted I slowly, well not slowly but steadily, drank the lot and moved on to cans that other party goers had kindly brought with them, bare in mind that this party started at 3pm and that I had ‘moved on’ as it were by about 7pm and you start to see where I’m going with this. The last thing I remember is getting yet another can from the fridge at about 9pm and talking to some lovely people in the kitchen. The next thing I know I am waking up in my bed, naked, at 4am with a sore throat and dying for some water (and after drinking loads of water throwing it all back up again, mostly out of my nose). It turns out that a while after my 9pm can, my (now ex) girlfriend sees how drunk I am getting and thinks it’s time for us to leave, a good move as it happens. The walk home should have taken about 20 minutes, two hours later she is still trying to get me home. There is more to this part of the story and my antics but as I only have her word for them I won’t tell you what they might be. My point is that for me time disappeared! I have no memory of it at all, not even the violent vomiting that just happened to block the bathroom sink! Nothing remains of that part of the day to me what so ever. Time is relative, how time pasts depends on where (and how) you are standing (swaying, staggering, vomiting…falling over) at the…emmm… time.
So is time travel possible? Not when you are sober it would seem!
There may come a time when the human race can harness the power of drunkenness and invent time travel or even instant interstellar travel, which due to the speed of light being unattainable (because things get weightier the closer they get to it so you need more power but the more power you put in the heaver you get and you need more power etc), is even harder to do. All passengers of the machine would have to first be very drunk which is the complete opposite of how we should travel today! In fact the crew would have to be even more drunk than the passengers and thinking about the **** machine would have to be drunk too. The future of travel is bright; the future is blurred and it smells like vomit with little bits of carrot in it.
Does alcohol have tiny wormholes of time and space floating in it? Are the bubbles in a glass of beer really interstellar voids waiting for us to step into? Is the teleporter on the Star Ship Enterprise powered by larger? Can being drunk have a positive side, at last? The answer is of course, as I am sure you already know, NO!
But it’s a nice idea isn’t it?
The Answer to time travel lies in Maths (Yawn!), but more accurately in calendars and maps. You see you can’t just travel in time, you have to travel in space too, mainly this is because if you want to go back in time the place you would want to travel to in time is still where it was in the Universe, but you are no longer any where near it because you have moved! Even as you are reading this you are moving, or I should say that the Earth is moving and you are on the Earth so you are too and the space that the Earth is move in is, in theory, also moving.
The Universe is a bugger like that it never stays still! It is a right bloody fidgit!
So to move back or forwards in time you first have to know where, not when, the time you want to go to is, or was, or will be. Which means you need a bloody good calendar and a spot on map to work it all out, i.e. maths!
Once you know where and when you want to go, which seems to me to be the hard part, getting there should be easy right? I doubt it! Even if you don’t have to be drunk to travel in time I have a feeling you would wish you were.
If you have ever travelled on public buses, trains, boats or planes you will know that getting there is far from easy, even if you do know where you are going and when. Can you imagine the irony of publicly run time travel?
“We apologise to passengers on platform ‘5’ waiting for the ‘10:15 to yesterday’ and would like to advise you that it is running approximately 1000 years late, but if you would kindly make your way to platform ‘6’ and catch the ‘10:35 to today at 10:10’ and come back to platform ‘5’, 45 minutes ago the ‘10:15 to yesterday’ should be waiting for you. Thank you.”
But of course you would have just missed it, because the ‘10:35 to today at 10:10’ breaks down and you end up having to wait for a week back in 1955. And when you finally get back home to your own time, you find that you have arrived two days before you left because you got on the wrong connection! And somehow your father is now your son and your mother won’t look you in the eye.
Which brings me to:
The Future of Air Conditioning
In the winter we spend large amounts of money heating up the air in our buildings and in the summer we spend even more trying to cool the air down again. Now what if you had a window, a very special window, (a drunken window maybe) which if you opened it in the height summer cold air would come in and in the cold of winter warm air would come in?
How?
Well if the window was a time portal (a small controllable drunken worm hole in space and time) and it opened up in to the past, say six months earlier, then in December warn June air would flow in to your house, and in the height of June’s blazing hot sun December’s icy cold breath would circulate around your home! Once installed you would have to wait six months before you could use but that is a small price to pay isn’t?
Why would you have to wait six months?
Well if you opened the widow to six months into the past as soon as it was installed it wouldn’t work because the window wouldn’t be there then, and if you opened into six in to the future you would have no way of telling that the day you were opening into would be warm or cold (depending on when you installed it). But there is one small problem that I can see with this system, say in late June someone was to break in to your house though the window you wouldn’t know about it until you came down to breakfast on the 25th of December and found all your Christmas present had been stolen six months earlier.
The window may make DIY easier mind, if you were going to hang a door all you would have to do is buy the door leave it where you were going to hang it, and then go out side and climb in the window (after setting it to tomorrow instead of six months earlier that is), help the you from tomorrow hang the door and then climb back out the window and go to bed, get up in the morning and help the you from yesterday hang the door. And hay pressdo the job is done in two days instead of one! Hang on that doesn’t seem right! I wonder if that is how British Rail works right now.
Sometimes people ask me strange things like: what you doing in my shed? Or how did you get into the boot of my car? Or what you doing with my wife? But what they are really saying is “isn’t life as we know it weird?”
sorry nothing to do with food I know
Wed 10 Jun 2009GENERAL BLOG
but I am working late and am bored so I came up with this (load of rubbish)
Me.
Since leaving school (with 8 ‘O’ levels in ‘not giving a toss’) I have had successful careers in many areas - poet, adventurer, swordsman, concert pianist, big game hunter, mountaineer, lone yachtsman, Shakespearean actor, topless go-go dancer, stuntman, playground designer, chicken rustler, Daniel Craig look alike, photographer, test pilot for slummberland, the guy who rubs the baby oil on the girls in a gogo club (god I miss that job!) and many more.
I recently discovered the solution to the entire Worlds problems, how the human race could all live happy useful lives in complete harmony with each other and commune with all living things with out a single one of us having to be nailed to a tree, but forgot to write it down as I was too busy wondering why I seem to the only guy in Essex who buys extra large Durex and the idea is now lost forever…sorry about that, my bad.
My hobbies include passive smoking, smoking, communicating with the dead, sometimes communicating with the living, drinking, eating meeting women and lying about my achievements. 