Saturday 7 April 2012

Smoke ‘n’ mirrors: 00Семь: Less for more: Hotel Broadmoor: Watch this: and Quantum tunnelling.


More than a whimsy of wet stuff at the Castle this morn; dark and dingy too, in fact if it continues I may need a dinghy...

Finally finished the garden-spread the 8 bags of free compost around the beds and managed to go arse over tip while playing chase with his Maj on the moss-twisted an ankle and did even more damage to the right elbow.

The moral is-old farts shouldn’t forget that although the mind operates at the age of 12 years the body doesn’t...




And has had yet another pop at smokers, this time he reckons that putting nicotine stuff behind doors will: a; help more addicts give up, b; ensure “we no longer see smoking as a part of life”, and c; stop encouraging young people to start smoking, and has put totally imaginary adverts on the box pretending that we will kill all our babies.

Couple of points:
Smokers contribute Billions more in taxes than they take out from the NHS, they die younger and therefore reduce the pension bill and if everyone gave up tomorrow the money lost will have to be recouped from those miserable sods of non smokers and the even more miserable ex-smokers.


Serves em right...



Russia has as many spies operating in Britain today as it did during the Cold War, security services believe.
Up to half the staff at the Russian embassy in London could be involved in intelligence gathering, a senior source told The Daily Telegraph.
Around 40 Moscow spies are believed to be operating in this country at any one time. Some are involved in traditional state espionage, while others monitor London-based oligarchs or engage in industrial spying for the commercial benefit of Russian firms.
There are fears Russia will ramp up its efforts over the coming months while the UK security services focus on the Olympic Games and the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations.


Har, bleedin har-they are expecting to gather “intelligence” about the Piss Poor Policies Millionaires Club Coalition; I hope they copy all they have done-that will fuck up Russia even more...




Thanks to the Piss Poor Policies perpetrated by the self elected Millionaires Club Coalition spending on welfare payments, schools and hospitals will have to be slashed by billions of pounds more than the Government has planned for as a result of economic downturn, Treasury estimates revealed yesterday.
The cuts – more than £10bn a year by 2016 – are likely to result in further swingeing reductions to benefits and public sector services well beyond the next election.
A cut of £10bn in the welfare budget roughly equates to an average of £500 a year for each of the 18 million people on benefits – a £10-a-week prospective drop in income for the poorest families. The current spending round has already has seen £18bn in welfare cuts.
On top of this, further departmental spending cuts are expected to be necessary – at a rate similar to the current reductions.
Alien reptile in disguise George (Bullingdon club bore) Osborne said “at current rates the welfare budget was set to rise and consume a third of all public sector spending”.
"If nothing is done to curb welfare bills further, then the full weight of the spending restraint will fall on departmental budgets," he said.
He added that even if the rate of cuts imposed on departmental budgets were to continue beyond the current spending review period they would need to find further savings in welfare payments of £10 bn by 2016.
"The next spending review will have to confront this," the Chancellor said.


Still, it won’t be their problem by 2016...




Parts of Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital could be turned into hotel and housing under plans announced by its NHS owners.
West London Mental Health NHS Trust hopes to interest a developer to convert the old Grade II Victorian buildings at Crowthorne, Berks.
Officials said the plans would help fund a £254million redevelopment of the remaining facilities at the hospital.
The homes and hotel rooms would be just a few hundred metres away from the new psychiatric unit but would be shielded by trees outside the high security perimeter.
Last month Bracknell Forest Council approved plans for an upgrade of the hospital, which will have 10 new wards, providing accommodation for 210 patients.
Construction of the new building in the high security facility is expected to start in the autumn of 2013. It is expected to open to patients in late 2016.


Wonder if there be will a rush of bookings....




40-year-old Ukrainian artist Dmitriy Khristenkho creates intricate miniature models of motorcycles using component originating from watches. Khristenkho carefully breaks up the watches, shaping each part using a grindstone to ensure they are all the perfect size and shape before spending hours painstakingly gluing each component by hand. Each motorcycle can take anything up to 50 hours to complete. The complex creations sell for more than £300 each, with demand for personalized bespoke models rising.


That works out about six squids an hour...cheap at half the price.


And finally:



Scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge have used light to help push electrons through a classically impenetrable barrier. While quantum tunnelling is at the heart of the peculiar wave nature of particles, this is the first time that it has been controlled by light. Their research is published today, 05 April, in the journal Science.
Particles cannot normally pass through walls, but if they are small enough quantum mechanics says that it can happen. This occurs during the production of radioactive decay and in many chemical reactions as well as in scanning tunnelling microscopes.
According to team leader, Professor Jeremy Baumberg, “the trick to telling electrons how to pass through walls, is to now marry them with light”. 

This marriage is fated because the light is in the form of cavity photons, packets of light trapped to bounce back and forth between mirrors which sandwich the electrons oscillating through their wall.

Research scientist Peter Cristofolini added: “The offspring of this marriage are actually new indivisible particles, made of both light and matter, which disappear through the slab-like walls of semiconductor at will.”

One of the features of these new particles, which the team christened ‘dipolaritons’, is that they are stretched out in a specific direction rather like a bar magnet. And just like magnets, they feel extremely strong forces between each other.

Such strongly interacting particles are behind a whole slew of recent interest from semiconductor physicists who are trying to make condensates, the equivalent of superconductors and superfluids that travel without loss, in semiconductors.

Being in two places at once, these new electronic particles hold the promise of transferring ideas from atomic physics into practical devices, using quantum mechanics visible to the eye.


Yeah right...I think...beam me up Scotty...




And today’s thought: 

Natural physics




Angus

3 comments:

CherryPie said...

I don't think that hotel would be conducive to a good nights sleep.

Welshcakes Limoncello said...

Always an education to visit you at the Castle, Angus. Happy Easter Monday!

Angus Dei said...

Maybe they will keep the bars and locked doors CherryPie;)

Always a pleasure Welshcakes, happy religious thing to you too:)