A discussion in Another Place about leap seconds got me thinking about the Equation of Time again. It's been ages since I got in to that stuff about the position of the mean sun and the obliquity of the ecliptic, and it's lovely stuff.

It made me think I wanted to get a photo of the solar analemma. You could fairly easily job together a Raspberry ( Read more... )

A couple of years ago I posted an attempt at my nephew's question, "Which is hotter, 1000 miles from the surface of the sun, or the hottest rocks in the middle of the earth?". TL;DR - 1,000 miles from the surface of the sun is hotter ( Read more... )

Hovis has had an ad campaign for years with the tagline 'As good today as it's always been.' I've just put my finger on what bothers me about it.

I hear it as 'Only as good today as it's always been', which is perhaps unfair. But even with a generous interpretation, it's clearly saying it isn't substantially better than it used to be. They've been ( Read more... )

A group of 7-to-10-year-old nature enthusiasts is prompted to ask anything they like about penguins, and the questioning goes ( Read more... )

This year's RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch totals:

2 blue tits, 2 robins, 2 jackdaws, 2 white doves, 1 great tit, 1 house sparrow, 1 collared dove, 1 magpie.

Although the raw total isn't very different compared to last year, it seemed even more quiet in the garden - we had only a single jackdaw for the first 25 minutes, and the other birds we did see ( Read more... )

I really like wine. And if you really like wine and have my turn of mind, you quickly run up against two things. The first is the really up-themselves pretentious show-off wine buff, who intimidates you with a combination of an encyclopaedic knowledge of viticulture and French microgeography and an apparent ability to discriminate tastes and smells ( Read more... )

Any suggestions for pop-physics books for a fourteen-year-old ( Read more... )

My 8-year-old nephew asked "Which is hotter, 1000 miles from the surface of the sun, or the hottest rocks in the middle of the earth ( Read more... )

**FIXME was quizzing his little brother about the whole "tomato - fruit or vegetable?" issue. (Botanically it's a fruit, in culinary terms it's a vegetable.) But then he asked about cucumbers, which he claimed with some confidence were also technically fruit, as was, in fact, pretty much anything with seeds in ( Read more... )

Had a good time at BiFest yesterday - much thanks to organisers.

I was asked a really interesting question. trishpiglet noticed a really interesting thing about soap bubbles. When you blow soap bubbles, they are lovely, iridescent colours that shift and change. She pointed out that when you stick two bubbles together, or catch one on the blowing stick, they ( Read more... )