09:00 Lois and I tumble out of the shower - we've brought forward the shower from tomorrow, because Lois has a zoom New Year's Eve party tonight with members of her sect - what a crazy world we live in !!! Unfortunately it's my turn to clean up after our shower - but fair's fair: Mark the Milkman unexpectedly left a double delivery of milk: 10 pints instead of 5, and poor Lois had to swab them down and cram them into one of our two fridges.
Mark's obviously not intending to deliver on Saturday, even though Saturday should be a normal working day. It's Friday (January 1st) that's the public holiday after all. What madness!!!!
11:00 Lois is so kind-hearted - I wish I could be more like her!!! She offered our services to take round a couple of Christmas crackers to Mari-Ann and Alf's house this morning: this is because during tonight's zoom New Year's Eve party, sect members are supposed to be pulling crackers, or at least waving them around in gay abandon!
a Christmas cracker with assorted crisps - yum yum!!!
We drive over to Up Hatherley. It's a 20-minute drive to Mari-Ann and Alf's house, but this will help to keep our under-used car "ticking over" - that's for sure. And when we ring Mari-Ann's door-bell she gives us a bag of mince pies in return, which is nice.
13:00 We come home and open yesterday's post after its 24 hour quarantine. There's a picture painted by my friend Yuko in northern Japan, who's an amateur artist. I think it's amazing to be able to keep up old friendships from long ago - I haven't seen Yuko for 49 years. I got to know her while I was a student in Tokyo 1970-1971, and we have exchanged Christmas cards every year since. She now has 3 grandchildren - yikes, how time flies!!!!
flashback to 1971 - I go on an outing with Yuko and her sister to Todawako Lake
19:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's New Years Eve party on zoom. I settle down on the couch and listen a bit to the radio, the latest programme in Melvyn Bragg's series "In Our Time", which each week takes a different historical, cultural or scientific topic and opens it up for discussion and examination by a panel of experts in the field.
Today's programme is all about eclipses, both solar and lunar.
I didn't know that we, who are alive today are a bit "lucky" to be able to experience total solar eclipses, because they won't go on for ever haha! It just so happens that our moon is 400 times smaller than the sun is, and is also 400 times nearer to us than the sun is. Because of this coincidence of perspective the moon can "currently" blot out the whole of the sun. However, the moon is gradually moving further away from Earth, although quite slowly - at about the same rate that our fingernails grow: my god! So in about a million years' time the moon will be too small to blot out the whole of the sun, which seems a pity - damn!!!
In the fourth century BC Aristotle established that the world was a sphere, because the shadow it casts on the moon is always round. And shortly afterwards Aristarchus estimated the size of the moon by timing how long it takes to pass through the earth's shadow; and then from seeing that the moon to us has the same size in the sky as the sun, to estimate the distance from Earth to moon relative to the distance to the sun.
Eclipses enable precise dating of events in ancient history. The Bible talks about "a great darkness ascending" at some point in Abraham's life, from which this point in time can be dated to 1533 BC. For the event mentioned in the account of the Crucifixion, there was a lunar eclipse in the region concerned that happened on Friday April 3rd 33AD, which is spooky, to put it mildly!
Telescopes came into play from the 1600's, with Kepler explaining planetary motion, and Newton providing gravity as the mechanism. Halley was able to predict the total eclipse of 1715. In the mid-19th century the observation of the light spectrum during eclipses enabled the discovery of helium, which was previously unknown, even though it's the second most abundant element in the universe.
Measurements of distances on earth were also facilitated by eclipses. The width of the Atlantic Ocean was first estimated from observation of an eclipse. English colonists in Virginia reported the time of an eclipse by their clocks, and this was compared to the timing by the clocks in Greenwich, England, to provide an estimate of the distance.
Mistakes were also made, however. In 150 AD Ptolemy used a lunar eclipse to estimate the length of the Mediterranean Sea and he estimated it at 1000km longer than it really is, due to poor data. But this estimate later led Columbus to underestimate the time it would take him to sail west from Spain to "China" - this was partly a good thing because it encouraged investors to give him funding that they might otherwise have withheld.
There are still questions to be resolved, however. We still don't know why the sun's corona (visible during eclipses) is so hot: it's 1 million Kelvin compared to the rest of the sun's temperature of "merely" 6,000 Kelvin. My god, that's hot!
Fascinating stuff!!!
21:00 Lois emerges from her virtual New Year's Eve party and we watch our favourite quiz, a programme in the special Christmas series of University Challenge, where participating colleges and universities are being represented not by current students but by "distinguished alumni" of the institutions concerned.
This evening Lois and I get 11 answers right that the alumni fail to get, so we're back up to form: 11 equals our previous record - hurrah!
1. According to George Orwell in a 1940 essay, which early work by Dickens is "not a story at all, just a series of sketches. The characters simply go on and on, behaving like idiots in a kind of eternity"?
Alumni: David Copperfield
Colin and Lois: Pickwick Papers
2. The Manx photographer Chris Killip, who died in 2020, documented the deindustrialisation of north-east England: which 1988 collection by Killip has a two-word Latin title often seen preceding the word "delicto"?
Alumni: In memoriam [Say what???!!!! - Ed]
Colin and Lois: "In flagrante"
3. For what common British bird did these words from an identification video refer? "With its deliberate walking action it often looks as if it's had deportment lessons"? Its cry is a distinctive ringing, far-carrying "caaaaah!", usually repeated three times.
Alumni: magpie (Manchester), heron (Loughborough)
Colin and Lois: Carrion crow
4. What common name is given to plants of the genus ornithogalum in the lily family?
Alumni: [pass]
Colin and Lois: Star-of-Bethlehem
5. Referring to the deep red colour of its pendulous flowers, what name is commonly given to the plant Amaranthus caudatus, also known as the tassel flower?
Alumni: [pass]
Colin and Lois: Love-lies-bleeding
6. What common name is given to flowers of the genus Myosotis?
Alumni: Lily of the Valley
Colin and Lois: forget-me-nots
7. [we hear one of Beethoven's symphonies and are asked to identify it]
Alumni: Eroica
Colin and Lois: Pastoral
8. The actress Maggie Smith was nominated for, but failed to win, the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in 1965 as which of Shakespeare's characters, alongside Laurence Olivier in the title role?
Alumni: Shylock [Say what???!!!! - Ed]
Colin and Lois: Desdemona
9. Name the broadcaster whose career began when she appeared on the documentary series, "Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts". Since then she's made investigative programmes on child labour, and women's issues.
Alumni: Stacey Solomon
Colin and Lois: Stacey Dooley
10. Denoting a family relationship, what word in English is the equivalent of "dada" in Swahili, "fratino" in Esperanto, and "zus" in Dutch,
Alumni: brother (Manchester), grandfather (Loughborough)
Colin and Lois: sister
11. The Russian city of Magnitogorsk lies on what river, a conventional boundary between Europe and Asia?
Alumni: the Volga
Colin and Lois: the Ural
Enough said - Lois and I are back in the saddle now, that's for sure!! But tomorrow it's the grand final, so maybe we'd better say nothing more for now. "Hubris" and all that hahaha!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!
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