Been a bit quiet on the posting front the last couple of days - this might have had something to do with dressing up in silly robes and being paraded about Durham Cathedral. Yesterday I finally graduated from Durham University so am officially no longer a student! The author Bill Bryson is the new Chancellor of the university so was in charge of the handshaking bit (poor guy!). He gave a pretty good speech which thankfully wasn’t to long. I’ve ended up with a BSc in Software Engineering which I’m pretty pleased with!
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Fashions come and go in Japan as frequently as the weather changes in Britain. Supposedly Japanese women are the most fashion conscious in the world, setting the trend for others. I’m not one to follow fashion, in fact I despise it more often than not, as for the most part it seems as shallow as the water on the bottom of a dried up riverbed. That said I thought I just had to pass comment on a new sub-culture fashion style in Japan known as “Decorer” (a Japanglish word) as photographed by MasaManiA. Basically it’s got something to do with ‘one who decorates, or is decorated’. Yeah…
Image Copyright (c) MasaManiA
Yes, it’s bright, lurid and bound to get you noticed. The funny thing about these sorts of fashions anywhere in the world is that for as many sub-cultures there are they all end up looking the same and thus negate their position as being anything more than teenager ‘rebellion’. Still, it is sort of cool, although I somehow doubt you’ll see anyone walking down the high-street in the UK looking like this!!
N.B. - Please remember this is not mainstream Japanese fashion I’m talking about, we don’t want to enforce any more stereotypes…!
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Although I have never had hay-fever in the past my eyes have been itching and watering almost constantly the last few days. Apparently it’s something to do with the current high pollen levels for which I was prescribed sodium cromoglycate eye drops. Whilst this is all well and good £6.50 for a tiny 13.5ml bottle of something which is little more than water (2% active ingredient) is pushing it in my opinion. You can easily see that for people who have persistent medical problems the costs are soon going to add up. Luckily for for us in the UK we have the NHS (National Health Service) which will cover you if you can’t afford to pay so I guess it all evens out in the end but I’d still like to know where the almost 100% profit from my eye drops goes.
We’ve been having a bit of a heat wave here recently and last Wednesday we went rowing on the river which was very pleasant. Today things took a turn for the worse but it’s still very hot and humid making it pretty uncomfortable around here. For better or for worse, the end of an era is coming - today I sold my academic gown and tonight is my last meal ever in college (although I can’t say I’ll be missing the food!). I graduate next Wednesday which should be interesting, if no a bit tedious probably! After that it’ll be time to finally say goodbye to Durham and move on to pastures new…
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Here’s a couple of photos I took yesterday which I though turned out pretty cool looking (especially the mad hair in the second shot)! They were taken with the camera facing directly in the direction of the sun but obscured by the subject, an effect I quite like a lot. I must stop taking silhouettes and do something a bit more interesting!
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Credit: Sandia Labs
The picture above shows The Z Machine which is an accelerator used to simulate the awesome power of a nuclear explosion using ridiculous amounts of electricity:
“The Z uses a short burst of intense electricity – only a few 10 billionths of a second long – that forces an ionized gas to implode. The process is called a z-pinch because the pulse creates a magnetic field that squeezes particles in the vertical direction… At the center of the z-pinch, in the space of a small soup can, gas particles race at each other at a million miles an hour. The collisions result in X-rays and extremely high temperatures.”
Wow. This reminds me of the documentary film ‘Trinity and Beyond‘ which charts the disturbing development of nuclear weapons in all their devastating forms. At the time I saw it I was shocked to learn just how much these things have been tested for real in the past and their huge impact on the places they were used. Whilst the Z Machine is not used for military applications it’s certainly a lot better than blowing up and radiating huge chunks of the earth!
More detail here and here.
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