Everything into Storage

So here is an attempt at real time blogging.  As I write - sitting on the floor in the living room with the laptop really on my lap - three removals men are taking box after box from the house out to their lorry.

They arrived at ten to nine this morning and it is now ten past one and they are still going.  They have had to take the containers back to base and pick up some more.  A bit of underestimating how much stuff we have - Nick would say its all my books!

While they have been doing that I have cleaned the kitchen.  There was some discussion about whether it was better to carry boxes or clean the cooker.  It was generally agreed that carrying the boxes was preferrable  - I definitely concur and if I never clean another cooker it will be too soon!

  The men have had their lunch and a coffee break.  I am waiting till they have gone before I have mine, but it might turn out that I go out for afternoon tea at this rate.  Off for another chocolate biscuit to keep me going.

Francis goes Flying

Sunday morning and Francis Bacon reminded us that it is always sunny in Northumberland, even if the rest of the country is wet and grey.  So we packed his parachute and camera into the car and drove up to the beach at Alnmouth near Alnwick.  We hadn't been there for ages, but we found the track to a fantastic carpark quite easily and we walked through the dunes to see the sea. As it came into view Nick said, 'This is the best beach in the world...' and the sun was shining and the sky was blue and the tide was out.  He was right.

 Francis couldn't wait to get up in the air. 

Pre-flight planning chat

This is what he saw.

 He even saw us, both way below him and in close up when he came in to land.

You can see more shots from this second flight here.

Watch a short video of Francis flying:

Magic Toothbrush

If you believe in the Tooth Fairy - and who doesn't - you'll have no difficulty in accepting the premise of a magical toothbrush, and you may be interested to learn that Nick has one.

It looks like an ordinary Oral-B Pulsar, a manual brush with a small battery that makes it vibrate. However, whereas most users report a battery life of about two months, Nick's has been going strong since well before Christmas! He uses it twice a day, everyday, but it just keeps going.

So what's the problem? Well, the thing is, the battery - a standard AAA - isn't designed to be changed, and surely, one day, it's going to buzz it's last. Now, some people do change the battery - you'll find 'how to' videos on YouTube, if you look - but it's not recommended and he doesn't want to take two brushes.

He's bought a replacement brush (from a different manufacturer that rhymes with 'soul mate') which is designed to have it's battery changed, but what if that offends the Tooth Fairy? She seems to be kindly enough to small children with endearing, gappy grins, but an adult who's rejected her special gift? The consequences of insulting magical beings is well documented in literature. Tinkerbell getting the Lost Boys to shoot arrows at Wendy; Hippogriffs: "Don't never insult one, 'cause it might be the last thing yeh do."; and of course, we all know what happened to Lycurgus.

So, what should Nick do? Continue to believe in fairies and magic, or trust to reason and rationality?

Faith Vs Logic: discuss.

Dodecahedral Gnomonic Projections

Now, of course, most of you won't need me to tell you what these are, but for those of you who need a little refresher, one way to describe them is as a more accurate way to represent the Earth on a flat surface than stretching a rubber globe, with the added advantage that the flat shape can be made back up into something quite close to a sphere, in this case a regular dodecahedron. A regular dodecahedron – what an amazing word that is – it's a twelve (dodeca) faced (hedra) solid where all the sides are the same (regular).

Nick has always loved maps, and folding paper into solid shapes. As a boy, he used to draw maps of imaginary worlds, and, quite separately, used to work out how to arrange all the sides of complex boxes as a single, continuous shape on paper or card, including all the tabs needed to fold and glue it together. As a boy, he had no idea other boys his age we're doing this too. As a boy, he didn't have access to the World Wide Web, indeed, when he was a boy, the World Wide Web wasn't even a twinkle in Sir Tim Berners-Lee's eye.

Now, thanks to Sir Tim, we know there is a man in Brazil named Carlos Furuti, who may well have been playing with maps and folding paper at the same time Nick was. He – Mr Furuti – however, has taken this to an altogether higher level. He has assembled various computer programes, including some of his own, to create a number of Map fold-outs which may be printed, cut out, folded and stuck together to form pseudoglobes. (Follow the ‘fold-out’ link above for more on pseudoglobes.) We came across these when looking for a way to represent our round the world trip in 3D. Nick wrote to him asking for permission to digitally draw our route on one of his maps.

Now, Mr Furuti could have just said yes (or no) and left it at that, but he didn’t. He went several extra miles and took the co-ordinates for our route from our Google map, and made a special one-off version of one of his dodecahedron fold-outs just for us. He even spent part of his weekend creating it, and (so far) he hasn’t asked for a single centavo.

In this self-centred age, it’s all too easy to forget that there are good people out there, happy to do good things for other people.

Nice one, Mr F.

Happy folding.

Our 360 degrees in 360 days on a cut out and keep
dodecahedral gnomonic projection (PDF)
Copyright © Carlos Furuti 2012