17.4.12 Temporary Ageing

After a stressful day, full of aches and pains, there is nothing better than a nice long soak in the bath. I grew up in a house with just a bath, no shower. So it became an everyday occurrence that I massively enjoyed. Yes, they can be a pain in the arse to run when you’re in a rush but the effort is worth it. Once it’s run, to just recline and relax for 30 minutes or so is sheer bliss. It even became part of my post rugby ritual, shower to remove the mud, then soak in the bath when I got home.

Last night I was enjoying this exact experience at the end of a long, alcohol fuelled weekend, when I found myself looking at my hands and thinking – hands have started to go wrinkly, probably time to get out!! We all know tat if we stay in water for too long then this happens and usually use it as a sign to get out, but why does it happen?

Luckily the good people of Scientific American have interviewed Dermatologist Laurence Meyer (University of Utah) and here is the explanation he offered up:

The epidermis, or outer layer of the skin, is made up of cells called keratinocytes, which form a very strong intracellular skeleton made up of a protein called keratin. These cells divide rapidly at the bottom of epidermis, pushing the higher cells upward. After migrating about halfway from the bottom of this layer to the top, the cells undergo a programmed death. The nucleus involutes, leaving alternating layers of the cell membrane, made of lipids, and the inside, made largely of water-loving keratin. The outer layer of the epidermis, called the stratum corneum, is thus composed of these alternating bands.

When hands are soaked in water, the keratin absorbs it and swells. The inside of the fingers, however, does not swell. As a result, there is relatively too much stratum corneum and it wrinkles, just like a gathered skirt. This bunching up occurs on fingers and toes because the epidermis is much thicker on the hands and feet than elsewhere on the body. (The hair and nails, which contain different types of keratin, also absorb some water. This is why the nails get softer after bathing or doing the dishes.)

Soaking in the tub does hydrate the skin, but only briefly. All the added water quickly evaporates, leaving the skin dryer than before. The oils that hold the water in have usually been stripped out by the bath�especially if soap and hot water are involved. But if oil is added before the skin dries, much of the absorbed water is retained. Thus, applying a bath oil or heavy lotion directly after a bath or shower is a good method of hydrating the skin.

So in essence, this wrinkling is formed by ridges of skin absorbing water, separated by lines of skin tat don’t absorb water and swell. Today I guess I learnt that that wrinkling is nothing to worry about and it explained why it doesn’t happen to areas of skin such as your arms.

DC

16.4.12 When is a Goal, Not a Goal?

Time and time again the discussion comes up. Other sports have it and it works. We can’t continue with so many bad decisions and mistakes. It ruins the game etc. Goal line technology in football has become top of people’s hot topic list. From Lampard’s disallowed “goal” in the World Cup against Germany to Mata’s given attempt on Sunday vs Spurs in the cup. The interesting footnote against both goals? Yes, they happened when the games were still close but both games ended up as hammerings with the losing team being severely outplayed. England lost 4-1 and Spurs were on the wrong end of a 5-1 hiding.

Usually the argument centres around officials missing something or incorrectly viewing something and that this pivotal decision completely changes the complexion of the game. Other sports – tennis, cricket, American football etc. – have video reply to varying extent, usually a restricted number of reviews, so that teams can challenge refereeing decisions. The argument against merely seems to be that these challenges slow down play. What’s interesting is the talking point these situations provide. Would Spurs have gotten back into the game despite being outplayed? Or would they still have gotten over run.

My opinion usually falls that a limited number of replays should be allowed, as with American football it adds another dimension – do you challenge this decision knowing you might not get it and lose the chance to challenge something else. It’s very easy for managers to jump up and gesticulate, but if they had to be sure… Would they be.

Today’s learning is actually an interesting excuse/reason for the decision on the Mata goal. You see, the official had a clear view and ruled it a goal, when the tv angle made it look like the ball hadn’t crossed the line. This is one of the angles:

This angle makes it look like the ball hasn’t crossed the line (and incidentally is the view of the closest supporters). The suggestion I heard, and learning for today is that the two points are subject to a parallax error. A parallax error is an effect that allows one object to be viewed as placed differently from two different view points. It is measured by the angle of inclination between the two lines of sight. Nearby objects have a larger parallax than further away objects. This is shown in the below Wikipedia diagram:

This difference in perception can lead to one object appearing in a different place, comparative to say a white line, from two different view points. This appears to be the situation with Mata’s goal, meaning that the linesman saw it and to him it appeared over. This would make it harsh to deem this a human error. See the alternate angle below where the ball appears to be in:

So today I learnt that it’s not always ok to blame the officials, sometimes the way humans process information is to blame. I also learnt that an object can appear to be in two very different places, dependant in view point.

DC

15.4.12 Travelling on Foot

We all know my strong feelings towards sunglasses indoors, that much has been well documented. But on the whole, I am a huge fan of sunglasses. It’s everything, from the fact that they signify spending time outside in the sun, to the fact that they’re an excellent fashion accessory. I’ve always sought out a nice pair every summer but to be honest I tend to buy in the mid-range price bracket. My personal favourite look is over sized aviators, preferably in a sort of sunset fade.

My recent pair were the unfortunate victim of a tragic accident under foot and so I have been forced to venture out to the shops to look for an alternate pair. This time, however, I have the delightful treat of looking at designer shades. I’ve looked at everything from aviators to wrap arounds made by designers from Police to Ray Ban. The options are endless. And it’s raised some real questions around the design of some classic styles, but none more so than the now all too familiar Ray Ban Wayfarer.

These shades are now being worn by everyone, famous and non. But given their widespread popularity, they are a pretty weird design. Straight over the brow, rounded under the eye and the whole of the front is angled forward at the top. This quirky look, I feel, warranted a little more study to find out how it originated.

The look was pioneered by Ray Ban back in 1956, the non-metal frames being a complete change from previous sunglass design. They were designed by optician Raymond Stegeman who took advantage of plastic moulding technology to create the frames that design critic Stephen Bayley described as “distinctive trapezoidal frame spoke a non-verbal language that hinted at unstable dangerousness, but one nicely tempered by the sturdy arms which, according to the advertising, gave the frames a ‘masculine look.'”

The style enjoyed popularity through the 80s due to pop culture such as the Blues Brothers championing them and were the benefactors of product placement in numerous films. More recently the frames have been redesigned to reduce their size and decrease the tilt as the previous model had an over exaggerated front tilt. In 2007, Ray Ban introduced a new range of Wayfarers and aimed to target their marketing as a return to a classic rebellious design, and use edgy advertising and high profile PR to boost sales. This resulted in their renewed, modern popularity.

There you have it! The classic wayfarer was definitely considered but wasn’t my end choice. In actual fact, the sunglasses that I now have are somewhat reminiscent of wayfarers but have some key differences. But today I learnt just how storied a history those particular sunglasses have!

DC

14.4.12 Lovingly Gifted

I love a wedding. A chance for everyone to bask in a couples love, everyone all dressed up and most importantly – everyone getting very drunk and dancing! Hand in hand with my love of weddings is infant how nice it is to see that love last in this modern day and age. So it was with great pleasure that I attended my step-aunt and uncle’s (I know they’re not real ‘titles’) 40th wedding anniversary dinner. Which we can all agree is an excellent milestone to have reached, despite being slightly shorter than the 50 years I mistakenly claimed they had achieved in their card!

The dinner was lovely, with slightly too much wine, despite my ignorance at the intended dress code. To ensure we didn’t attend empty handed, we picked up some champagne glasses as a token of our congratulations. This gesture lead way to me considering what the actual appropriate present for 40 years of marriage is. I know that for one year it’s cotton and for 50 it’s golden but what are the others?

So here’s the list for the first ten years:

1st – Cotton
2nd – Paper
3rd – Leather
4th – Fruit and Flowers
5th – Wood
6th – Sugar
7th – Woollen
8th – Salt
9th – Copper
10th – Tin/Aluminium

Then things pick up at the big intervals:

20th – China
25th – Silver
30th – Pearl
40th – Ruby
50th – Golden
60th – Diamond

That’s an awful lot of presents!! Today I learnt the task list that faces married couples is daunting and that John and Danuta should have exchanged Ruby gifts (possibly more for Danuta than John).

DC

13.4.12 We’re Going to Wembley

“So why live the dream like you’re running out of sleep?
I’m not playing to pass time, I’m playing for keeps.” Live Fast, Die Old – Frank Turner

As he stood, staring out across the baying crowd with an astonished look upon his face, he still managed to bestride the stage like the proverbial colossus. You see, Frank Turner could be forgiven for thinking that all of this was more than a little strange. There appeared to be two choices for the packed crowd, hands up or hands down, with no room for indecision. But this was the word of mouth, punk/folk singer who was stood in front of a sold out 12,000 capacity Wembley Arena – he could barely contain his glee as every single one of the assemble mass chanted every lyric straight back at him.

NB. I know we long ago established that Today I Learnt was designed to be a listing of factual information that I learnt instead of existential leaps but I feel like today’s learning is an important one.

Frank Turner is one of my favourite artists. The former front man of the hardcore/punk band Million Dead first decided to go solo back in 2005. His formerly niche style of personable lyrics to acoustic guitar won him a solid, hardcore fan base but his first show was in front of a few people at a gig in 93 Fleet Eat in London. And this is how me and the few friends I went with (and probably half of Wembley) remember Frank. His songs about stumbling around on a hangover or singing to impress girls, resonating with 30 or so people in a pub, not in front of 12,000 at an arena.

Frank, now 30, didn’t come into fame young and because of a talent show, but through performing night in night out since 2005 to present day he has gathered momentum. His most recent album, England Keep My Bones, even reached number 12 in the hit charts.

The learning today is short and sweet. Frank Turner, through 7/8 years of incredibly hard work (and that’s just as a solo performer) has managed to cultivate something fairly niche into an arena show. If nothing else this proves that hard work and dedication can propel even the most unlikely thing to being a success. If that’s not inspirational I don’t know what is.

DC

12.4.12 Champers, No Dave

It was a Thursday and, as luck would have it, I had booked the Friday off work… This could mean only one thing, I was drinking. I had been invited out to a birthday and the girl in question had decided that her choice of destination for a pre-birthday meal drink would be a champagne bar. Lovely…. And in fact….. Stuff. Lovely stuff.

I’m not one for ostentatious cocktails – ok my friends know that’s a lie – but on this occasion I was reasonably restrained ordering things like whiskey sours, you know, like I thought I was a sophisticated gentleman or something. The girls on the other hand went for a classic, the Kir Royale. I know some of the basics of a Kir Royale (ie. what’s in it) but I don’t know an exact recipe and it’s also something that sounds like it would have an excellent backstory for how it came to be named as such.

The good people of greatcocktails.com provide the following recipe:

Kir Royale
1 part crème de cassis
4 parts champagne

Pour the iced champagne into a chilled flute glass. Slowly add the crème de cassis so that it gently mingles with the champagne resulting in a pale pink blush. Serve with a twist of lemon.

In terms of the drinks interesting background, it appears the Kir Royale is actually a derivative of the Kir which traditionally was a French drink consisting of white wine and creme de cassis. The Royale part merely refers to the white wine being replaced with champagne. The drink takes its name from Felix Kir a former mayor of Dijon in Burgundy, who served it at his drinks receptions. The invention of the drink was supposedly necessitated by the German occupation during the war, as they confiscated all of the regions great red wine. This led to the regions lesser white wines being masked by the casis. The drink became more widespread in 1841 when Creme de Cassis was commercialised across the nation.

So there you go. I learnt how to make, and the origins of, a French classic.

DC

11.4.12 How do you Pommel a Horse?

London 2012, it is even more pervasive than the Titanic, and that’s really saying something. I am a self professed sucker for the Olympics. For 2 weeks I will watch pretty much every hour I can (bar dressage – its not a sport, it’s awful). I can watch anything from Judo to track, from weightlifting to shooting – I love the Olympics. It’s watching the best in the world at their chosen category. During the 2008 games I stopped an entire Times Square bar to watch Usain Bolt run faster than any man had ever run before.

Unfortunately, as with all positives, comes a negative in short order. The ticket situation for London 2012 was a complete joke. Now I know I’m not alone in thinking this but I cannot explain the depths of my gripe. Along with everyone else, I applied for a ridiculous number of tickets – more than I could probably afford – but the two event I was really desperate to see were the weight lifting and gymnastics. I was informed, along with millions of others that I had been unsuccessful in getting either. So imagine my surprise when I received an email advertising the second wave of tickets that hadn’t been picked up and in front of my eyes were gymnastics and weightlifting!! I wanted to go to those. Why couldn’t they just say, you’re clearly a fan of both and although the session you wanted sold out, these are available? Instead of giving them to someone who only cares now they didn’t get football tickets!!

If I can cool my anger for a second, this exact rant lead way to today’s learning. A colleague, desperate to placate my anger and divert my attention, began to discuss my fascination with gymnastics. As I mentioned my disbelief at the athleticism each discipline requires, he imparted an unbelievable fact regarding a peculiar event – the pommel horse.

Apparently the pommel horse was originally used by militarises to practice their ability to mount and dismount a horse. It had just one handle and the earliest documentation of one is over 600 years ago – there are even stories of Alexander the Great using one. In the 19th century, Jahn – who is considered the father of modern gymnastics – managed to whittle down the three different types of horse to just one preferred design, akin to the one we know today.

Despite many different styles before the one we know in the Olympics today, there is still a familiar look to all of them dating back those 600 years I learnt today. It’s incredible to watch some of the amazing manoeuvres the athletes can do today and think that the contraption below them was designed for something as simple as mounting a horse.

DC

10.4.12 Large Number

You know when people say pick a number, any number? Well what is the extent of that question? How high can I go? Of course normally people mitigate against ludicrous numbers by saying, between 1 and 100 or something similar. However, the entry on the NFL draft got me to thinking about the escalation of words used to describe large numbers, ie. million, billion etc. I mean a decillion? That’s surely not a word.

A work colleague of mine, Andrew Green, has already taught me the linguistic end point to this but what joins millions, billions and trillions to the end point? This discussion was based on the draft blog but also the use of storage bands – yes boring, but we work for a technology company. So the storage size being defined by kilobytes-megabytes-gigabytes-terabytes-petabytes etc.

The answer in terms of numbers is very simple. The first part of the word is the lingual root, meaning that the trill par of trillion is derived from the number 3 (as in triple etc). So the next is quadrillion – quad for 4. Meaning that we get million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion etc. up until we reach decillion (10).

NB. I didn’t create this pie chart, but I whole heatedly endorse it’s sentiment.

The really interesting fact on this note is the definition of one of the largest numbers imaginable is actually also a very famous word, and most of us (me included) don’t even know. The word Google or it’s original root googol is actually a huge number – coined by Milton Sirotta – is 1 followed by 100 zeros, or 10 to the power of 100. Im sure we can all agree, a very large number, not just the name of one of the biggest technology companies in the world! An even larger number is a googleplex which is ten to the power of google.

Today I learnt where the word google comes from and that, even though we never use these ridiculously large numbers, someone has indeed coined terms for them!

DC

9.4.12 Spring Forward

Spring time is officially here – its warm outside, we’ve reached April and I’ve finally started wearing my shorts and flip flops. With Spring and April comes certain traditions, we’ve already been through Easter in its religious guise and also its stature as a family time but obviously this brings about bank holidays. After a long few days of excess and gluttony, the question of what to do on the Monday bank holiday arises. Naturally most are hungover, and shops only have short opening hours. You can’t get anything practical done as things like banks are shut, even the gym has short hours. So what could you possibly do? Yes, that’s right…… It’s time to spring clean!

Top to bottom, open all the windows and get out the Hoover and marigolds. I cleaned every room, obviously with the exception of Dave’s, and cleaned all of the surfaces. Collapsing onto the bed at 5 o’clock before cooking dinner, looked around with satisfaction as I felt that, for once, my entire life was in order. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then on this occasion I was in good company. It’s an odd tradition, but boy is it a satisfying one.

Who started this tradition though? Was it just one woman trying to trick her husband into helping around the house for at least one day a year? There are many different suggestions for the origin. Some suggest that it came from countries with colder climates who had no option but to wash/clean and dry all of their things when the weather had started to turn warmer. There are also indications that there are links to religious occasions, predominantly the Jewish holiday of Passover. Passover happens in March/April and traditionally, before the festival, homes were completely cleaned and all leavened bread was gotten rid of.

Another possibility is that it originates from Persian new year which occurs at the beginning of spring. Everything in the Persian house is cleaned in a tradition know as khooneh takouni which translates as “shaking the house”. Although it could simply just be linked to the prehistoric times where it was simply a time of year where there was increased light and warmth allowing for people to see the previously dark confines of their caves.

Today I learnt a few of the traditions that may well have lead to the ritual of spring cleaning. I know one thing for sure, it makes you feel amazing and the order allows you to feeling like everything is in its place. It’s worth the elbow grease.

DC

8.4.12 Sapp-Ing Funds

No matter how many times I still find it amazing. How often do you read a news report online or in print that detailed the downfall of Celebrity X, from multi-millionaire to bankrupt. At first glance, it always inspires anger that someone who made millions of pounds (or dollars) a year has frittered it all away and ended up with nothing. Someone who had everything any person could want, financially at least, has wasted it. In many ways, however, it is the ultimate in tragic tales. Often said celebrity came into fame young, got swept up in their celebrity and the flashing cameras, parties and an expensive lifestyle without planning for their futures. I’m not making excuses for this despicable expenditure of cash, but we can all identify with thinking “if I knew then, what I know now” and ruefully wishing we had made better choices.

The reson this has come again to the forefront of my mind is the story of one Warren Sapp. The once feared NFL defensive tackle practically revolutionalised the way his position was played, and he was rewarded hamsomly for doing do. Sapp’s career lasted 13 years and, despite a comparatively modest rookie contract, signed a $36m contract in 1997, and then another’s big contract with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers before one final deal worth $36.6m with the Oakland Raiders. Now that is a phenomenal amount of money!!

All of which leads you to question how Sapp, now a tv presenter too, could owe $6.7m to creditors and is filing for bankruptcy. He owns 240 pairs of Jordan Nike trainers worth $6,500, so that could well be a start. But comfort for Sapp should come in the shape of knowing that he is far from the only celebrity who has made such a gratuitous error in planning their fortunes, the list is seemingly endless.

Time Moneyland lists the Top 10 celebrity bankruptcies as:

– MC Hammer (Assets – $9.6m, Debts $13.7m)
– Mike Tyson (Career earnings $300-400m)
– Willie Nelson (Tax bill of $16.7m)
– Walt Disney (Walt freaking Disney)
– Larry King ($352k back in 1978)
– Jerry Lee Lewis ($3m of debt in 1988)
– Anna Nicole Smith ($850k with no inheritance from digging gold)
– Elton John (Credit card bills of £400k/month)
– Lawrence Taylor (a similar story to Sapps)
– Garry Coleman (at one point had a fortune of $7m)

I’m a little bit stunned – today i learnt the sheer toil and waste of the rich and the famous and it is incredible. Mind you, let’s end on a picture of MC Hammer’s old house….

DC