Huguenot

I should add, that it also gives us a pretty good idea of what david_carnell is made of. However, the effects are best achieved by evaporating materials into a bright light, and last time we did that to david_carnell he was really pissed off. BTW - It's called 'spectroscopy', and it's a really cool job. Knowing what things are made of gave us stuff like iron.

You're all bloody morons. ;-) Right. Next go. When light goes from one 'medium' to another, it changes speed. A 'medium' is glass, water or david_carnell. Think of this a bit like running into a swimming pool. You get slowed down. Light isn't made up of 'white' light, it's a mixture of other colours, and when you see them all together it looks white. For example a television has red green and blue colours, but when you see them all together they appear white. So when you shine white light through a 'medium' (e.g. glass or water), the red green and blue elements get slowed down by different amounts, and dependent upon the angle of viewing can get knocked of course by different amounts. This is what happens when you see a rainbow - the sunlight has shone through water droplets, and the red light has gone straight on, and the blue light has been deflected. So you see a rainbow. You can play the same trick with glass at an angle - so an angular peice of glass, for example a cheese shaped one (a prism) can break white sunlight into a rainbow arrangement of all the colours. So far so good, and a bit dull, because we all know this. So now the interesting part. If you play this game with sunlight it doesn't go into a complete rainbow, it has black lines in it. Black lines means no light is reaching at these colours. What we've discovered is that certain chemicals, or elements, absorb the light at certain colours. This is important, because it's what makes colours for us. For example if you shine a light on blue paint, the paint absorbs the energy from all the light except the blue light, which is reflected: so you see blue. So some chemicals absorb the light of some colours - almost like saying that the sun is 'coloured'. So by looking at the black lines, we know what chemicals are there. This is why we know what the sun is made of!! Cool huh?

He'll end up being banned from Denmark.....

Yeah. The really wierd thing is that although the bomb materials lose mass, they don't actually lose any material. This is because the 'mass' of an object isn't just defined by the particles it's made up of, but by the energy within them. A good example is water: water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. However, water (h2o) actually has lower mass than 2 x hydrogen and 1 x oxygen atoms, even though nothing has disappeared. As you've probably guessed, this is because they're in a lower 'energy state' - so energy is released when hydrogen and oxygen are combined to create water. This is how the Space Shuttle main engine works - it combines hydrogen and oxygen releasing the energy. Hence that big plume of 'smoke' out of the back isn't smoke at all - it's water. In a nuclear bomb the by products of nuclear fission have the same 'particles' that they had before: they just have lower mass. Freaky.

Today's fascinating physics fact... Nuclear bombs generate their 'blast energy' according to Einstein's equation e=mc2 (energy released = mass x speed of light squared). So a 20 kiloton bomb (the size they dropped on Nagasaki) lost about 0.8 grams of mass - about the weight of a five pound note. So as you stroll into the pub tonight, it's worth considering that you're packing the equivalent of 5 or 6 nuclear bombs in your wallet. Scary eh?

*tickle*

Alan Medic, I think kellygirl was suggesting I was jealous I'm not Irish. As I've already pointed out that I'm not someone who basks in reflected glory of other cultural achievements, she must have thought I wanted to be part of the Irish state. I was pointing out that so far as the Irish state goes that's not limited to the current government. From Charles Haughey and Micheal Lowry's cash for favours, Bertie Ahern's unpaid 'loans', FAS payments, Anglo Irish 'loans' and the Corrib Gas fiasco.... I don't think the Irish state has covered itself in glory. Do you? These aren't small time rumours, these are full scale criminal proceedings. As you point out, it's entirely possible I'm ignorant, and that all of these were false accusations? Also mate, just to highlight it, I've not called you any names. But in that last post you called me an ignorant waffler. I just want to remind you of that, because if you persist, you'll get really pissy when I return you the favour. ;-)

I'm certainly impressed by the astounding success, engagement and resilience of 'brand' Ireland. Of Ireland as a state I'm only lukewarm. I only believe in 'government' in its responsibility for organising services that are better overseeen as a society rather than as individuals - such as health, education, welfare, justice and international commercial relations. I think an effective state should do this with the mandate of the people and in a way that manifestly delivers results that advantage the whole of society. I think that Irish people themselves would be the first to ask whether this is what their current government has done, or whether they've steered somewhat to close to mismanagement and misappropriation.

"Cheap joke though unless you have some weird definition of success." That's just another example of the completely inappropriate sense of grievance the Irish claim. They're not hard done by at all. The last figures I've got for GDP per capita puts Ireland at $37,700 and UK at $32,800. That's post crash. That means everyone else suffered too!!! You're all doing fine. Yeah, Ireland needed a bailout, but that's essentially because the government lacked the will of leverage to enact sensible financial controls.

Not trying to be antagonistic. There is no antagonism in saying how successful Ireland is, and there is no antagonism in being disparaging of people who use history as an excuse to commit murderous crime. There is nothing antagonistic in pointing out that an awful lot of people claim Irish citizenship who couldn't possibly be Irish. And it certainly isn't antagonistic to say that constant references to the 'Irish Issue' are exasperating. That's the part of the issue about the 'Issue' huncamunca - people start spraying around violent terminology like 'antagonism' on behalf of other people. Just like you did.

Bet he got a few hits on his website though.

Aha - there you go proving my point ;-) Why does it matter, unless you plan to drag up the behaviour and activites of other people to give yourself an identity or a grudge? It's an habit I don't value in any society; the activities and behaviour of other British, London or ED people past or present don't define me. Neither, despite Quids insistence, does my choice of newspaper. Mind you, at least we don't have an 'ED Issue' as an excuse to inflict violence or control over others or campaign for ethnic and racial cleansing. Get out there and be yourself.

Barry Barry Road Race A brilliant confabulation that throws a particular East Dulwich slant on traditional British eccentricity.

Because other people keep bringing it up and it's exasperating. Particularly exasperating are the righteous, sanctimonius rich people who were never involved, have never been impacted by any 'Irish issue', have never done anything but benefit from being Irish, and have to enter into some tortuous exploration of their social network to find some weak justification for a bit of fist-pumping nationalism. One of the most famous internet portals has over 40m people registered on the network who have their nationality registered as 'Irish'. How annoying is that? They're clearly not - they've gained all the social benefits and opportunities that have been gifted them by another nation, and they're rude and ungracious enough to claim to be from somewhere else. They probably don't even have an 'Irish' culture. They have something that was made up to print on the back of exported whiskey. There's only 3.8 million people in Ireland. There's more people live in the West Midlands, and they don't have 'West Midlands' pubs all over the world, despite Burton producing some very fine ales. As I said - pretty exasperating if the "Irish" diaspora start bringing up the 'Irish issue'. WTF would they know?

Ireland is a successful modern nation. It has no more problems with genetic heritage, immigration or borders than anyone else does. The Irish are richer than most, travel the world freely, capitalise on their cultural heritage and live more fulfilling and self-determining lives than most of the 6 billion people in the world. There is no Irish 'issue'. Everything is bloody brilliant for the Irish. Except that is for people who want to capitalise on history to pursue an agenda that only has a downside: it cannot make the Irish more successful than they are, it can only create a power vacuum to be populated by violence and tyranny. The premise of that 'issue' is that some people 'own' something based on their bloodlines, that you can visit the sins of the parents upon the children. It's f*cking stupid, doesn't stand up under even the weakest scrutiny, and has no place in a modern world.

No Alan Medic, you're not thick anyway. You're just hoping that if I say it twice in different ways it'll be easier to find fault with it. ;-)

"Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia or in a Postal Museum "Archive Information Sheet". " You can be a bit frustrating sometimes John K, and I don't want to wind you up. However, if you know something better why don't you just tell us what it is? What is the information you have that's more accurate?

I never really got 7Up either. I always end up with this nagging doubt that anyone drinking it is a victim of something.

They'd probably be pretty pissed off about it, but they looked pretty inoffensive to me. I'm sure they could get wound up as a gang, as any group of lads could, but they weren't behaving in an overtly aggressive manner. Even the trigger-finger pose was gentle. They probably egg each other on to do daft things, but then so did I when I was a kid. I'd just try and make sure they didn't have access to lethal weapons when they did it. Nice technical work, demonstrating a bit of effort and application. Not sure there's any threat to society here.

Frankly I find the 'Irish Issue' dull and stupid. Do these people in high density housing shooting each other in the knees for peddling temazepam reaaly think their lives are going to get any better because their welfare payments are coming from slightly closer? No they don't. What they think is that the departure of social structures will leave them with a vacuum that they can populate with their own brand of tyranny. They manipulate stupid and ideological people alike in the pursuit of that goal.

Well, the same rules don't apply. Here a bottle of Oyster Bay is 22 quid (S$45.00) in the supermarket - it's always less than a tenner in the UK. Six quid in Sainsbury's a couple of months ago. Feck knows why. We're half the bloody distance. Virtually indistinguishable from hell. In fact I hear it's cheaper there. Not so much rapture as misery.

I'm not sure. It's a bit disappointing. It seems to be me having a glass of wine and a cigarette and still working at 12.20am. Whilst it may well be hell, it seems remarkably similar to real life. Which doesn't say much about real life of course ;-)

If in doubt, attack the man not the policy. It's a sad reflection of modern society that these approaches seem to be considered fashionable or clever. James doesn't set any policy unilaterally, can't make decisions for LTA or the Mayor, and only covers ED ward, not all the surrounding areas. You probably would feel differently about neighbourhood issues if you weren't so mobile, looked after kids, didn't think your car was a right instead of a privelege. You'd probably think differently if your green spaces had been turned into a rubbish tip by brainless ingrates, and the trees destroyed by thugs using the as a training ground for their dogs. Or maybe you wouldn't, maybe you just don't care. (That's what personal attacks feel like, if you don't like them, don't do them yourself ;-))

More intelligently, last year the Lib Dem Voice put out a study of over 500 party members to ask them how they describe themselves. The interesting thing is that whilst the results are subjective, a lot of these concepts are mutually exclusive. For example you can't be both a moderate and a radical. Very few of these concepts are scoring much over 50%. This means that whatever Clegg did, half the party were going to like him for it, and half were going to feel betrayed. As is probably apparent, most of my own views are nested at the top end of this table, which is probably why I was willing to identify with the LDs for this election - and what I will judge them on for the next. Ridiculous political cant has no place in this debate, but I hope this kind of data can bring something to the discussion: 87% ? Liberal 65% ? Progressive 64% ? Social liberal 60% ? Internationalist 55% ? Pragmatic 52% ? Reformer 45% ? Centre-left 44% ? Civil libertarian 44% ? Radical 41% ? Green 35% ? Economic liberal 34% ? Social democrat 33% ? Moderate 30% ? Moderniser 27% ? Centrist 25% ? Keynesian 21% ? Libertarian 20% ? Ideological 16% ? Mainstream 14% ? Free marketeer 9% ? Centre-right

What happens if you're on the wrong time zone? Is it possible the angels get to me first? Could I be some sort of canary for you? Merrily tweeting away un til the.... sff / / / *6454w4r ......