Poor Penguins

I will let other blogs with more understanding of what the Tariffs imposed by Donald Trump means although from what I am hearing it is stiffing Americans who will know have to pay more  for things while the things they export will be boycotted but what they hey, that's for them to debate but i was amused to hear that the brains behind Liberation Day sought to impose tariffs on places which not only don't export anything to them but has no humans living there anyway.  
Not sure what the Penguins and Seals of the Australian Island  Heard and McDonald Islands in the Antarctic thought of Trump imposing 10% tariffs on them but the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, called them 'a bit strange'.
He also said that Europe doesn't buy American Beef and Chicken which is true because us Europeans don't much like the taste of Chlorine in our Chicken or steroids in our beef so both practices are banned this side of the Ocean.
Interesting that Russia was exempt but Ukraine wasn't but every news outlet is mulling over that so i'm just going to leave them to it and just hope that the Seal and Penguins can find another outlet for their goods...whatever that is.

You Could Be Mine (For £96,546)

How much are you worth? Obviously priceless is the correct answer but in 2013 the Royal Society of Chemistry worked out how much it would cost to build a human from scratch using all the constituent elements and it came out to £96,546.79 for materials alone.
Apparently all the chemicals needed to make a human body could be bought in a hardware store but before you turn up in B&Q with a shopping list and a plan to build your own person, what would you actually need?   
Sugar and spice and everything nice for a girl and frogs and snails and puppy dog tails for a boy you might think if that rhyme is to be believed but the RSC calculations include fifty-nine elements with Carbon, Oxygen, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium and Phosphorus accounting for 99.1% of what makes us so that would be the best aisles to visit first but what goes into the other 0.9%?
In the shopping trolley would need to go a few atoms of Molybdenum, Vanadium, Manganese, Cesium, Zirconium, Arsenic, Uranium Tin and Copper and twenty atoms of cobalt and thirty of Chromium which means you now have the material for your self made human.   
After taking it home and spreading out the materials on your kitchen side, the problem you got now is how to actually make the human from all those bits because you won't just be chucking it all it a bowl and giving it a good mix and unfortunately you won't find the answer on the Internet and even if you have the telephone number of the cleverest Scientists on the Planet, they won't be much help because nobody yet knows how to make a single living cell from scratch, let alone the 50 trillion human cells needed for an average sized human.
Hopefully you have kept the receipt.

56 Today!

Today is the end of my 55th trip around the Sun and the start of my 56th and the latest meeting of the 01/04 Club which consists of Me, Chris, Phil, Susan, David and Beth meeting up in the same coffee house, sing Happy Birthday to each other over a couple of lattes and a bit of Birthday Cake, shoot the breeze and then go back to our lives and agree to meet up next year.
It's kind of macabre but as i have made it through 55 still alive, I have lived longer than people such as Henry VIII, Tammy Wynette, Francis Drake, Bill Haley, Friedrich Nietzsche, Del Shannon, Johnny Ramone and Steve Strange who all died in their 55th year so now my next goal is to navigate the next 12 months and be able to list Abraham Lincoln, Steve Jobs, Beethoven, Sinead O' Connor, Linda McCartney and Rik Mayall who will forever be 56.
If you happen to be in the South Western side of the Country today and pass a cafe this afternoon and you hear the strains of 'Happy Birthday' and see a group of people slurping latte's and laughing raucously, pop over and say hi and if you are also celebrating a birthday today, pull up a chair.

Welcome Sir Killalot

Seems like hardly a day goes by without someone mentioning the words Artificial Intelligence and there was a scientist on the radio this morning claiming  that within our lifetimes we’ll be fitted with brain-enhancing microchips which will 'wake up' with us every morning which puts an image in my head of hearing and seeing the Microsoft Windows start-up screen in your head instead of the alarm clock.
The scientist was full of the benefits of Artificial Intelligence and was quite excited about the integration of machines and humans (Cyborgs?) and was quick to dismiss fears that robots will soon be out-thinking humans and experiencing emotions and in no way will our new metal chums be using us as squishy playthings as we will ultimately still be in control of them.
So for him no oppressing us with powerful laser eyes or giant metal claws and I think he may have a point because every computer I have ever owned has either crashed when I have tried to run more than two programs at the same time or stopped to tell me i need to download a driver, the one I downloaded three times already that morning.
Obviously the solution to make sure the Robots don't get too big for their boots and take over is to get the new robots to run on the Windows Operating Systems but then when you think of some of the people currently running the World, being lauded over by Sir Killalot and Wheelosaurus from Robot Wars and their army of USB 2.0 Stormtroopers may not be so bad after all.

Ho Ho Ho And A Bottle Of Arghhhh!

We are off on our first Cruise to the Norwegian Fjords in June and we are hopeful of maybe seeing some dolphins or whales which sometimes come alongside Cruise Ships so I have been informed but what I am not expecting to see is Pirates because it isn't 1680 and because you don't seem to get many splicing the main-brace or whatever they do in the North Sea.  
I imagine the passengers on the Cunard Cruise Ship, Queen Anne, are also hoping not to see any but a warning has gone out to passengers to turn off their cabin lights and close the curtains because of the risk of pirates in the area they are heading, the Sulu-Celebes Sea off the coast of The Philippines.
The problem with calling them Pirates is that for some reason, Pirates conjure up visions of swashbuckling adventure movies even if modern pirates don’t do any of the stuff the old, fictional ones used to do, like burying treasure or making people walk the plank or hobbling around on one leg with a parrot on their shoulder.
Modern pirates are not salty sea-dogs using flintlock pistols and saying things like Shiver Me Timbers, they are hardened terrorists using rocket launchers which isn't  really much fun at all and digging up recent Pirate attacks over the last 30 years, there have been over 13,000 attacks on vessels with the overwhelming majority in South Asia and off the coasts of Africa.
The trip to Norway and back then should be fine and Pirate free and the only ho ho ho and a bottle of rum will be in the bar. 

Too Much Of Anything Can Kill You

A common refrain in the world of science is: 'It's the dose makes the poison' meaning that almost anything can kill you, the question is how much it takes. Scientists at ASPScience have crunched the numbers and have compiled a list of just how much of something is enough to actually bring your living to an abrupt end.

11,000 Oranges
2,555 Skittles.
1,800 Cups of rice
588 Cherry Pips
480 Bananas
100 Apple pips
81 Cups of coffee
78 Espressos
48 Tablespoons of seasoning
47 Teaspoons of salt
40 Energy drinks
40 Bars of milk chocolate
29 Tablespoons of pepper
27 Big Macs
25 Green potatoes
24 Tubes of Toothpaste
14 Ounces of black licorice
13 Shots of alcohol in two hours
6 Litres (10 pints) of water
6 Cups of sugar
6 Carrots
6 Brazil nuts
5 Cigarettes (eaten)
0.5 Cigar (eaten)

Clocks Spring Forward Tonight

If there is a nicer couple of words to say than 'Circadian Rhythm' I haven't found them, i imagine it is something to do with the hard C in the first word and the pleasing mmmm sound at the end but if I ever changed the name of my blog, it would be that although what the rhythm of your body's natural 24-hour clock has to do with the tree hugging lefty stuff I put out I would need to work on but with the clocks due to go forward in the UK tonight, Circadian Rhythms are in the news.   
It may seem like a minor adjustment, we lose an hours sleep tonight but apparently scientific studies show that the alteration to our alarm clocks can take days to adjust to and for some people the transition period can last for weeks.
As usual, it all comes down to the brain and in particular the bit that regulates hormone release, body temperature and metabolism and if your  circadian rhythm is out of kilter, those things will be disrupted too.
Exposure to natural light is one of the most important factors in helping the body adjust to a new time so the more morning sunlight a person gets, the faster their circadian rhythm realigns.
German researchers monitored 50 healthy adults for four weeks before and after each transition and found that Spring losing an hour adaptation took longer than the Autumnal extra hour adaptation but even more worrying they found that the seems to create a slightly increased risk for those with life-threatening health conditions and a 2024 study analysing 14 million deaths in the US from 2015 to 2019 found a slight increase in all deaths after the spring transition but a decrease in mortality after the autumn transition.
In further news, i checked and i could not find a blog called Circadian Rhythms so...

Greenland's Own MAGA

The first words of the American Vice President, JD Vance, when he landed in Greenland was to mumbles that: 'It's cold as shit here' so to go with his cold fingers and toes was a cold shoulder which was delivered courtesy of the Greenlander's themselves who had their own idea of MAGA, their's was 'Making Arseholes Go Away' which they did in a hastily rearranged trip.  
The initial plan was for Mrs Vance to pop over with her son and attend the Avannaata Qimussersua dog sled race and grab a few photo ops of her interacting with smiling and happy looking Greenlander's to promote the boneheaded narrative that Greenlander's want to join the U.S. which they are openly trying to annex.
Everything changed though when the organisers of the dogsled race said the Americans weren't invited and a reported advance-party of officials were unable to find a local family who would be pleased to welcome them and suddenly the Vance offspring had to stay at home and go to school so dad and his friends would be going instead.
Rather than tasting Greenland culture and seeing the welcoming faces of the locals, due to angry locals protesting about the taking over of their country by the Jaffa Caked coloured moron and his best friend (who apparently no longer thinks Trump is an idiot, reprehensible and comparable to Hitler like he said a while ago), the visiting party were greeted by their own troops while making a whistle-stop tour of an American Military Facility and then swiftly danced out again before they got dinged on the head by a snowball.
While the rest of the World look on at the people running America now and making that universal sign of twirling your finger around your temple and making cuckoo noises, Donald Trump's new best friend and cheerleader in the Kremlin observed that:  'America’s plans in relation to Greenland are serious. These plans have deep historical roots. And it’s clear that the US will continue to systematically pursue its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Аrctic'.
While Vance was avoiding meeting people in Greenland, Donald Trump was making a speech where he said that with regards to Greenland, America needs it for: 'National security purposes' but he didn't explain who they needed security from, surely they don't need to be safe from those nice Russians do they?

Partal Eclipse

Scrabble players should pay particular attention to the Solar Eclipse today because you will probably hear a word to tuck away in your memory banks and is worth 25 points, Syzygy.
Pronounced Siz-ə-jee, it is a Greek word which means a roughly straight-line of three or more celestial bodies which is what is happening around 11am today in the British Isles as the Moon manoeuvres itself partially between the Earth and the Sun.
From where I am sat on the South Coast of the UK, approximately 30% of the Sun will be blocked so it isn't a total eclipse but should still be impressive if the weather plays along, which it is forecast to do.
It is a strange quirk which never fails to impress me that the Sun is 400 times bigger than the Moon but at this moment in time, the Sun is 400 times farther away so both are the same size but as the Moon is inching away, our future relatives will never experience a full Solar Eclipse as the Moon will appear too small to cover the Suns disk.
It should be emphasised that looking directly at something with a surface temperature of 5,500°C and a brightness of 35,730,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lumens (imagine sitting directly in front of your car headlights and switching them on full beam and it still doesn't match the Suns brightness) might not be the cleverest thing to do so and your run of the mill sunglasses won’t cut it, you need eclipse glasses which are specifically designed to allow you to look at the Sun safely.

Coming Soon: More Special Guest Bloggers

Ever since I started this blog in January 2007, I have had a healthy number of posts written ready to post for when I didn't have time to scratch out something.
There was also many half written ones or a few paragraphs to expand on and some ideas for blog posts but the Folder on my Desktop is becoming very bare as I haven't really had the time to replenish them.
I have been writing a bunch in one sitting when I get the chance and post dating them so some of the Christmas ones from last December were tapped out in the Summer and the idea is always to use them and fill in the gaps with freshly written topical ones but for the first time in 18 years, I am running out.   
Not running out of ideas, I have plenty of them and there is no end of things to write about but it is finding the time to do them.
The posts which were most time consuming were the Special Guest Blogger ones although I did enjoy doing them, the Rev would email me the person and all the highlights (and lowlights) of their lives and I would arrange it into a 500 word satire of them and the Rev would nick the best bits on the Saints and Religious figures for his Services as a thank you.  
The number we wrote hit 720 and people seemed to like them and to be fair they were lots of fun to write, he even arranged them into some sort of order and created some free Ebooks for people to download and so we are doing some more with the idea of making up the round 1,000.
Whether we can think of another 280 dead people to write about is another matter, i kinda think we have hit all the main people from Kings and Queens to Actors, Musicians and even Saints and Deity's but trawling around for famous dead people is his job, mine is to try and stay as historically accurate as possible while making the posts entertaining to read by, basically, taking liberties with them and their achievements.   
I imagine we will delve into mythology quite a bit as they are the most fun ones to write but we plan to start posting them around Summer.