About last night

It was half past ten yesterday evening when I got in. Where had I been out to until that ungodly hour? Picking up my son from a birthday party. No big issue with that – teenagers will be teenagers. Except that my boy is 10 years old. Please note that I’m observing and commenting here rather than complaining. And it’s not even something that I would have brought up if it were not for the fact that when we got home, my 8-year-old daughter was still out at the theatre in town.

Kids these days. They grow up so quickly don’t they?

I don’t think things happened like this when I was 8. Or 10.

Things like this did happen when I was a teenager, obviously, and I was thinking that last night’s “dirty stop out/dad’s taxi” antics would make for good training for those upcoming years.
But then, if they’re already partying up a late night storm at 8 and 10 years old, then what exactly will my kids’ teenage years bring? And then, taking the wholly unscientific extrapolation one step further, the student years.

Oh my goodness, I think I need to go and have a sit down.

It’s not going to stop

I hate to be the one to say it, but it’s really not.

2016 – “the year that killed so many celebrities” is going to stop. I think we can all be assured of that.
But the whole celebrity death thing? No. Of course not. It’s not like the Grim Reaper takes any note of the arbitrarily imposed boundaries that some of us humans use to measure and delineate time.

It’s been a bad year for celebrity death (or, I guess, a very good one, depending on your frame of reference) for two reasons. The first was explained in April. Namely, that as the notion of “celebrity” became popular, so more people became “celebrities” and there became a larger, now increasingly-aging pool to be knocked off by the bloke with the scythe. The second is down to our good old (but still very much alive) friend, Confirmation Bias:

the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories

That is, that once someone remarked on the extraordinarily high number of celebrities joining the choir invisible in 2016, suddenly every clog popping incident – even that of a pseudocelebrity – seemed to be added to the ever-growing list of high profile coffin inhabitors.

And the first celeb death in 2017, be it at 12:01 on New Years Day or (if we’re super lucky and get through to) quarter past three in the afternoon on the 6th or something is going to ignite the social media grief athletes once again and the process will half-continue, half-begin again.

“I thought we were past this. I thought we’d left it behind!” they will wail.
“OMG! It looks like 2017 is going to be just like another 2016” will be proclaimed.

And the Proclaimers (soon!) will be right, for exactly those reasons I gave above. And then there will be more of this sort of thing.

Death doesn’t care about the tickover from 2016 to 2017, even of the passage of one month to the next. Our pathetically needy society means that we have ever more celebrities, ever older celebrities, and – come 2017 – we’ll have ever more dead celebrities too.

I’m sorry that I had to be the one to break it to you.

Electronic Engineering Errors

Here’s the @sheffunilife twitter account. It’s one of those that get passed from person to person each week, allowing for a different perspective of life at Sheffield University:

This week: Ian Wraith, Electronics Technician .

TUoSEEE being The University of Sheffield Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department.

And his account of some odd electrical noise problems:

Noise issues can cause us real problems with parts of the dept researching very small signals.

Here’s the tale:

Oops! But beagle-eyed readers will recognise this artifact-based-erroneous-results-in-scientific-experimentation phenomenon from another time… Remember those Peryton Problems, when we were forced to ask: Just where do perytons come from?
Exactly.

Just for reference, we do occasionally get this sort of thing in the microbiology lab as well, but it’s mainly associated with someone sneezing while inoculating a plate.

None of your tram or microwave problems here.

Epique!

If you sell a range of 4 different sorts of pens, you will be able to demonstrate their capabilities fairly easily. Pop them in your pocket and you can take them most anywhere to show off just how good they are at… at… well, at writing stuff.

It’s more difficult when you’re selling passenger aircraft, including the Big Bird itself, the A380. But you still need to show potential buyers what they are buying. So Airbus slipped their metaphorical pens in their metaphorical pockets and gave us this:

The modern Airbus family includes the A320neo, A330-200, A350-900 and A380 aircraft, all of which the pilots flung around the skies above Toulouse.

And the airborne shots are impressive, but I actually really enjoyed watching them on the runway. The A320neo isn’t actually small, but you wouldn’t believe that when you see it with its big brothers.

5½ minutes of impressive flying and plenty of informative commentary.  iLike.