Thursday, 5 January 2012

Synchronised cock up: Scrapped for cash: 'diamagnetic levitation': DIY art: Time cloak: and Snow monsters.


Gale is once again howling at the Castle this morn, the study is overweight with wonky what knots and his Maj has discovered the joy of changing the channel on the TV.



Thousands of people who bought tickets to see synchronised swimming at London 2012 have been asked to return them, after the organisers discovered that they had sold 10,000 too many.
The problem arose after the first round of ticket sales last spring.
Synchronised swimming was an event which was not initially oversubscribed.
When sessions for the sport were put back up for sale, a human data error meant thousands of extra tickets, which did not exist, were made available.
About 3,000 customers who bought the 10,000 tickets in the second round of sales have been contacted by Games organisers Locog.
They have been offered the chance to exchange their tickets for other events for which they also applied, and were originally unsuccessful.


Is it really that difficult to do it properly?
 

Britain's £5bn-a-year scrap industry is facing tougher regulation as part of a government crackdown on metal theft.
People selling scrap could be required to register and face identity checks.
And cash payments could be banned, to make metal transactions easier to trace, Home Office minister, Lord Henley told the BBC.
Tougher regulation would be welcome according to an industry spokesman, but a cash ban could be counter-productive, he warned - encouraging illegal trades.
Hospitals, the rail network, utility companies, churches and war memorials have all been targeted in recent years by thieves attracted by the rising prices of non-ferrous metals such as copper.


Copper load of that?



Scientists at the University of Nottingham have used Harry Potter-style powers to suspend fruit flies in mid air.
The technique they used, known as 'diamagnetic levitation', uses a strong magnetic field to allow the insects to become weightless and appear to walk on air.
Author of the research, Dr Richard Hill, and his colleagues, wrote: 'This study shows that the walking speed of fruit flies and their "activity" is altered significantly by counteracting gravitational force.'
He explained that the experiment shows that diamagnetic levitation can be used to investigate the influence of changing gravity of multi-cellular organisms.
Magnetic fields have been previously been used in a range of experiments to levitate organic materials, as well as small living organisms, including a frog, grasshoppers and fish.
Peter Main, a professor at the Institute of Physics who worked on earlier studies in the field, told Discovery News that it would be possible to levitate a human if there was a magnet big enough.

 Yet another load of old bollocks from the University of the bleedin useless.



Art student Andrzej Sobiepan didn't want to wait decades for his work to appear in museums. So he took matters in his own hands, covertly hanging one of his paintings in a major Polish gallery.
On Dec. 10, Sobiepan put it up in a room with contemporary Polish art when a guard at the museum was looking the other way. Museum officials didn't notice the new painting for three days.
By Wednesday, the young artist was getting plenty of attention after a nationwide TV channel reported on his stunt at the National Museum in the south-western city of Wroclaw. He told reporters he hoped galleries would give more exhibition space to young artists as a result.
"I decided that I will not wait 30 or 40 years for my works to appear at a place like this," Sobiepan told TVN24. "I want to benefit from them in the here and now."


I don’t know young people today-want, want, want....



Scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker.
Their time cloak lasted an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 trillionths of a second, according to a study appearing in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.
They tinkered with the speed of beams of light in a way that would make it appear to surveillance cameras or laser security beams that an event, such as an art heist, isn't happening.


I can do it several times a minute-it’s called blinking…


And finally:



Some snow monsters.










And today’s thought:






Angus

2 comments:

CherryPie said...

Love the snow monsters :-)

But I am a little confused on why so many people would fork out cash to watch ermm fancy swimming?

Angus Dei said...

great aren't they:) I think you will find its probably mainly men CherryPir;)