The Brownlees moved to Loughborough so they started a blog. Now they've moved to Stirling but this is still your opportunity to keep up with all their goings on...
A couple of slightly techie things to catch up on too...
First, several years ago I was given a rack mount cabinet for some of my technology things. It's been a long time coming but finally it's up and running (okay, a very select group of people will appreciate this!)
I've also been on campus for the first time in months. I'm involved in teaching a course that has always been planned for "online" (rather than the webcam lectures I've been doing the past few weeks). My bit goes live in January, so I was in the film studio last week. Here was my view for that time - very professional stuff indeed.
This year I have finally said farewell to Bertha, a workhorse of a computer which was, for a long time, running away in our loft.
This machine was an original Pentium, so would date back to about 1993-1994. It was given to Jay for free in about 2002, and once we had something better for her, I took it on as a bit of a project. It was named Bertha after one of the earliest TV series I remember, and I upgraded the machine to a 150MHz CPU and 48MB of memory (up from 75MHz and 16MB), for a grand total on eBay of about £5 including postage. The only really expensive part was a half-terabyte hard drive so store all my stuff (the original drive in the machine having a capacity of about 1/2000 that).
It ran Debian Linux OS, and was all administered over the network. It did a lot of work in that time:
file server (including backups of all my data from my other machines and websites)
bittorrent client
music and video streaming
subversion server
secure VPN
test web server
email server
...and probably some other things too that I've forgotten! Yes, it really did run all those things - the only time its age really showed was when browsing the folders on the music server, and it took a few seconds to generate the pages. Here is the POST screen to prove its aged technology!
It was running constantly from about 2006 to 2013, when we moved to Stirling. After that its use became a bit intermittent as it was hard to find a spot to run it in our rented house here. Early this year I thought it would be worth firing up again for a return to service. Alas, its age had finally caught up with it: the battery in the BIOS (yes, actually built in to the chip package) was totally dead and irreplaceable. It gave me this screen:
(it says 1995, that's because I upgraded the firmware on the motherboard to the most recent version)
On closer inspection, the troublemaker was the chip with "ODIN" on it below...
I took the chip package apart to get at the battery but despite some hunting it proved too difficult to find a replacement. So, after all this time, Bertha is no more!
I have managed to dig out another machine - as recent as 2003 - to take Bertha's place. It's got a 2GHz CPU (so crudely speaking over 10x faster, in practice a good bit more) and 4GB RAM (so 100x more). Though with much of my stuff moving onto the cloud it probably won't be anywhere near as useful as Bertha was. Sad times!
A couple of months ago I was dropping Naomi off at Nursery, and her key worker came up to me. She said "Naomi tells me that she is very proud that her Mummy and Daddy are scientists, and as we are looking at science just now, I wondered if you would like to come and do a presentation for us?" Well, I suppose I am a computer scientist, Jay did chemistry at uni, and we do take a general interest in such things...
Being the extrovert that I am*, naturally I leapt at the chance. A couple of days later, Jay and I agreed that we could do something, probably mostly chemistry based. We settled on a date (21 October - after the tattie holidays but hopefully plenty of time before D-Day) and indicated that we'd do it. This would be for the whole nursery, so around 30 3-4 years olds.
*this may be sarcastic
We had a lot of fun trying out different experiments we could do. Try going for "kids experiments" in YouTube for some ideas! Eventually we settled on a set of four things that we could do. Here's a bit of a summary - it's all stuff using household things so you could replicate them quite easily. In the end we were quite pleased that we held the attention of a whole nursery for nearly 20 minutes. Result!
We explained who were were, that some people like science as a job and some people like it just for fun. It's all about understanding how things work, some of which you can see and some you can't. We then confused the children by telling them that I'm a "different kind of doctor". Following the obligatory disclaimer about not just doing experiments with any old stuff you find in the house, we got on with the experiments. As we always do with Naomi, we tried to explain what was going on, and were quite impressed with how much the children took in.
Iodine clock
This is explained in detail here. This one uses the most exotic chemicals of the lot, but all available from the pharmacist quite cheaply: iodine, vitamin C (we used soluble tablets), hydrogen peroxide (which can be used as a mouthwash), and corn starch (cornflour). The idea here is that you mix these together in two stages. The first one changes the iodine from brown to colourless instantly. The second mixing sets off two reactions, one of which you can't see but stops the other reaction happening straight away. After a while, the final reaction can get going and the mixture changes to blue-black quite dramatically. A video of a less-impressive version from one of our practice experiments is below. On the day, it worked perfectly: the delayed colour change kicked in after about 40s (the practices had it at anywhere between 30s and 5 minutes as I was being quite imprecise with measurements). This allowed just enough time to explain it and for some people to get bored and look away, only to be drawn back by the others going "ooooh". Great!
This starts straight after the mixing has happened. The first two minutes of this are pretty boring. Skip to near the end to see the colour change if you like!
House drawing
A node towards my work, we explained how computer programs work, I gave instructions to Jay on how to draw a house, and we worked it so that I just gave shapes rather than where to put them, and Jay ended up with a muddle rather than the nice house we'd prepared earlier. The idea was to show that computers are only as clever as the instructions that they're given, which must be right.
Vinegar battery
Okay, so not everyone has some LEDs lying around, but in this one we made a battery and lit up and LED with it. The same principle as the more well-known lemon battery (and most single-use batteries), this uses the effect that two different metals in an acid create a voltage between them. See here for a little more detail. Take some plastic cups, fill with water, vinegar and a little salt, and put in a galvanised nail and a piece of copper (I took some from a piece of twin and earth). Three of these in series is enough to light up a red LED, although not very visibly in a bright nursery!
Hot / cold water density
Demonstration that hot water is less dense than cold, so it floats, explained here. Take some tap-hot water and add red food colouring, and cold water with blue food colouring. Put into separate glasses (filled right up to the brim), put a plastic panel on top of the hot one (we used a cutout from a takeaway tub lid). Carefully tip the hot one upside down, place on top of the cold, and remove the panel. The hot and cold stay separate rather than mixing up, because the hot is less dense and floats on top of the cold. (time didn't allow this for us, but you can do it the other way round to show that the hot and cold swap around if the hot starts on the bottom, mixing up and turning purple in the process). Naomi remembered this one about a week later when we were talking about something else - I think it was about how balloons float!
We then finished with some general questions from the children:
Where can you buy a magic wand?
Why is the sky red at night?
How do planes stay in sky?
I think we did a reasonable job with these too :)
Obligatory photos follow. Obviously we can't show ones with non-Brownlee children in, so you'll just need to trust us when we say that they were captivated!
Naomi points to the "Science is Awesome" sign in the nursery
"You mix this in here, then this in there"
The battery
Adding some vinegar
Mixing up the iodine clock
Good explanations are always accompanied by gesticulations
Explanations were a little delayed in places because Miriam joined us and wanted to help. Mummy to the rescue!
The house that needed drawn
Trying to draw the house
Naomi was quite concerned that her Mummy couldn't draw the house, so she showed her how to do it.
A quick post of geeky mundanity. The university has had a new wifi network installed. In a seemingly awesome plan, new access points were installed throughout the building to best distribute the signal, but on top of that, all the access points from the old network were also replaced. This means that in many places, we have two access points within a metre or two of each other. I can look out may office doors and see about eight of the things. I can feel the room temperature rising with all those microwaves bouncing around! I shouldn't mock too much though, it does mean that emails appear on my phone super-quickly now.
The geeks among you will quite like this - it's all the wifi signals my phone picked up while I was in our common room making some tea. Awesome.
Note: the notifications in the top left don't mean I'm popular, just lazy when it comes to checking them.
This week has seen Sandy being off work, in part because I am a gazillion weeks pregnant (not really but it feels like it) and could do with some help around the house, in part because he had some leave that needed used up and in part because it was nice to do a few family things before the baby arrives and makes everything a good deal more complicated and harder to plan around for at least a couple of months.
So yesterday we decided to go to Glasgow Science Centre. (For our Aberdeen friends think Satrosphere but bigger and for our Loughborough friends think the national space centre but not just about space and bigger and WAY better!). Now anyone that knows us will know that this is the kind of environment that Sandy and I could happily visit all on our own but we did very much enjoy taking the girls and watching them explore all the different exhibits. I was particularly impressed that Naomi was engaged in *something* all day. She didn't even really ask for snacks. I have never known Naomi to have her attention held for so long and my geeky side loved that it was science that was holding it!
Anyway, enough explanation, let's look at some pictures of the girls!
Miriam was definitely at the younger end of being able to enjoy the day but lots of things were still fun for her to do, here she just enjoyed lining up the dice!
There was lots of fun to be had with mirrors
Floating
Where are my legs?
Are they over here?
What about my legs?
Look, they are down here!
Mirrors make us funny shapes
This one made Mummy look pregnant!
She was supposed to be lifting a heavy load but Miriam was more interested in "driving"
Safety first
Fun days out are fuelled by cake!
Miriam spent ages looking at this, in fact both the girls did. It was a big tunnel of air and the scarves went up. You could fiddle a dial that made the scarves go faster or slower but our girls were happy to just play!
Sandy enjoyed that the science centre was located next to BBC Scotland
And looked like a giant slug
Mummy and Miriam in the background using some big dishes to focus our voices so they could be heard from far away!
Floating a ball using air!
The girls went to a little talk on camouflage, Naomi was particularly good at finding animals in pictures and was even fairly good at listening to the talk. After the talk they got to make masks so they could camouflage themselves as animals!
Making tracks to run balls down
A very fun day was had by all and the girls were even good (mainly) when we got stuck in the M8 traffic at 4.30 on a Friday!
My top tip for anyone who wants to go is that you can exchange £2.50 of Tesco Clubcard vouchers for a £10 voucher towards which would have been a considerable saving and dealt with my only complaint about the place which is that it costs a FORTUNE! Make sure you do it a little in advance though as you have to have the vouchers posted to you and not emailed to you as I was expecting (as I tried to make use of the deal the evening before our trip! You live and learn.)
We open with a caption competition. What could possibly be up there?
I really like this picture, which you can probably guess immediately followed the one above. I was after a new background for my phone, and this made the cut.
Soon after, Naomi went on a picture taking exercise again...
"No pictures"
"Well, okay then"
"Look over there, a squirrel! Really!"
Some time after those pictures, we got a similar look of amazement from the girls during dinner. I turned around to see a hot air balloon - and quite an impressive one coming surprisingly close to the house.
It landed in a field a few minutes' walk away.
Breakfast. I like the improvised seats.
Every night now bedtime partly consists of the girls taking a few minutes to read themselves. We find this scene cute every time.
...and now some non-child randomness...
This plant live in our bathroom. I moved it there this time last year to get more sunlight than it was getting in our en-suite, because it looked like it was struggling. Soon after, it seemed to have died completely. I watered the bare earth in the pot for a while in case it came back, but probably stopped doing so around January. As a testament to our cleaning-motivation, the empty pot has sat there ever since, bone dry. Imagine our surprise then, when the plant sprung back to life in July, and has now grown to this! I've started watering it again, albeit very sparingly given that it seems to be happy without it. The lesson - don't tidy up dead plants!
To close - a nice Venn diagram that some may find amusing. If you can think of a good joke to fit in the middle I'd like to hear it!
After something of a busy summer with few blogposts, we've got a lot to catch up on. We'll make a start with a few assorted pictures that I've gather over the past couple of months that you might like to see. It's possible one or two will have appeared before but they're all good, so no matter. I've got a few other blog posts lined up - they should appear on a schedule over the next few days. Let's make a start...
As Naomi is a little older, we decided that we could replace the much-missed sunglasses that survived all of about five minutes last year.
Of course, Miriam latched on to them before long. Fortunately she does look after them pretty well for her big sister...
Jay and I made this for date night a few weeks ago. Yes, it was really good - thanks for asking!
I've helpfully added a teabag for scale.
At the start of June I was asked to help with the MAF Big Picture by one of the people at our church. An afternoon of button pushing, who could resist? Unfortunately it was a tad wet that day, so the makeshift desk was set up in the boot of a car! Much fun.
Yes, another shot of the nice view from my office window.
No comment.
Naomi made this for her Auntie Fay's birthday. Both the girls are ridiculously good at crafty things (in both senses...)
Naomi en route to the shops.
Naomi has recently started a ballet class. Those who know her well will be very surprised to learn that she was somewhat happy about this situation:
