What we do: Harrogate Lunar Society.
Proceedings of the Harrogate Lunar Society from #120 to 165
29/5/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §165
10th of Prairal 227
The prevalence of negative words (dismantle, dishevelled, inept, disdain, unkempt, dismay...) with no positive counterpart (or, at least, not one that gets much usage) is an example of the second law of thermodynamics. Expressions that have no single word to describe them are known as antitrantle which is another example of the 2nd law - involving a negative prefix, too. On the other hand those that do have a meaning encapsulated in one word can be regarded as the reciprocal of the entropy. Positive and negative connotations are merely degrees of difference of entropy. We usually refer to a nuance of meaning in the difference between synonyms which are measured in bangelmetres. Mis-, dis-, un-, are all negative prefixes whereas epi-, hypo-, holo-, pro- are positive prefixes. The prevalence of negative prefixes in the language is reflected in evolution. It probably reflects the preference to escape death, rather than celebrate life - rather like the Duke of Plaza-Toro: “In enterprize of martial kind, When there was any fighting He led his regiment from behind He found it less exciting…”
He who fights and runs away - lives to fight another day! After all, if you escape death you can celebrate life. If you die first you can’t!
Small, slow, quiet phenomena sometimes demand big noisy explanations. Feigenbaum’s constant (§39) & the butterfly effect describe this through a strange property of natural systems like population growth or swinging pendulums.
150 million-year-old fossilised ink has been reconstituted and used to draw its cephalopod original owner. Millions of years ago an octopus died in the sea and its fossil has been dug up by Jørn Hurum. He gave the ink from it to artist Esther van Hulsen who drew a picture of the cephalopod from its prehistoric ink! Spirit in the sea instead of spirit in the sky!
Natural, bright shiny surfaces are described as chatoyant when they reflect light in an ozaic way. The light is refulgent and this recondite property is most unusual and can be seen in highly polished wood. Chatoyancy has been observed in mahogany veneer. Known also as schiller & jarnbrak (§130) which can be seen in the chalybeate springs in Crimple Valley.
17/5/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §164
28th of Floréal 227
As relativity and quantum theory are very new to us, compared with classical physics, we are quite likely to see anything that these former topics display as unusual - so unusual as to be expected! Whereas we rely on classical physics to bolster our common sense and when this is contradicted we are puzzled and deem it counter-intuitive (§159). Classical mechanics has more counter-intuitive phenomena than relativity or quantum theory.
Prince Rupert’s drop (PRD), a delicate glass ornament, can be hit by a hammer but not break. Thermal expansion on contact with cold water traps the heat, creating compressive and tensile stresses in all directions. Although glass is very brittle, PRD is extremely tough because of the locked in stresses. As soon as the tail is broken ie the detonator, the highly stored energy travels along the mechanical failure front at 1.03 miles per second!
In Prince Rupert’s cube, a larger cube can pass through it - without the original cube being broken! The statement itself is counter-intuitive! The cube is one of the five Platonic solids and in fact they all share the property that you can make a hole which will allow a bigger one to pass through. One way to demonstrate this for the cube is to allow the shadow of a cube (cast by a distant light) to fall on another cube and show that by suitably manipulating them, one is totally in the shadow of the other. If two points are placed on two adjacent edges of a unit cube, each at a distance of 3/4 from the point where the two edges meet, then the distance between the two points will be ~1.0606601. These two points, together with a second set of two points placed symmetrically on the opposite face of the cube, form the four vertices of a square that lies entirely within the unit cube. This square, extruded in both directions perpendicularly to itself, forms the hole through which a cube larger than the original one (up to side length ¼(3 x the square root of 2) may pass!
Poisson’s ratio is a measure of the elasticity of a substance eg rubber; when you stretch it - it gets thinner - common sense. What about the opposite? The Lunar Men have investigated various materials including foam and iron pyrites - and they have a negative Poisson ratio! We’ll leave readers to investigate further! Furthermore - there is a vacancy for the Foam and Froth Chair!
10/5/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §163
Seen through a jet of butane emerging from an unlit cigarette lighter; things in the distance dance around due to the refractive index of butane. In a similar way, reflections of distant things in the surface of water can reveal the distortion of the water surface which takes place when a magnet is brought near, due to water’s diamagnetism.
Careful observation will be rewarded. (§94, §121)
A magpie exhibited intelligent behaviour, by being unable to perch anywhere close to our bird fat feeder, it flew at the fat and stabbed at it with its beak, dislodging bits that fell to the ground. The magpie then flew down and ate the bits. It repeated this process four times!
Strong clear sugar solution left in the greenhouse in a sealed jar, has formed a cloud (with black spots) which sinks to the bottom at night, then rises during the day, occasionally hovering half way up. If you shake the jar to disperse the cloud, it reconstitutes itself in a few hours (as sponges do). A living colony?
A pre-coronavirus French study of the cheek kissing greeting found that in some cities the sequence starts predominantly on the left cheek, and in others on the right; showing that everyday laterality is not always genetically determined. A sign close to a railway track informs us that the gradient is 1/200 while the cant is 30mm - equivalent to camber on a road. Wire mesh barriers round a building site were turned into an Aeolian harp when the wind blew through them, creating a sound that it was impossible to localise; a similar sound was made by swinging a wire in-tray on the end of a string round a Lunar head. In designing a separation technique, the Lunar Men obeyed the principle that function must follow form. So, for example to separate random loose nuts from random loose bolts, the mixture was placed on a slope that was oscillated from side to side. The bolts rolled back and forth, gradually working their way to the bottom, while the nuts stayed where they were. Thus the functioning of each species reflects its form. Winnowing is another good example.
4/5/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §162
Around 5 grams of thulium were dissolved in molar hydrochloric acid. The solution turned yellow and after an hour or so turned greenish. Left overnight, the solution had turned white! Exact analysis of the yellow and green solutions is necessary but the Lunar Society doesnt have the apparatus for this. A mass spectrometer would be ideal for measuring the atomic structure of this substance to see if it tallies with the chemical abstract. The abstract is rather vague but it talks about intermediate states of oxidation including monovalent thulium. This is of the utmost significance as it educes the fact that the M&M2020 Periodic Table is correct. For futures sake it must replace the out of date table we use now. (§141)
I ask all members of the Lunar Society, indeed, colleagues and friends and anyone interested to take up this ideal cause. First - does anyone have access to a mass spectrometer?
29/4/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §161
10th of Floréal 227
The Lunar Men made a horizontal pendulum with a radio aerial and demonstrated air pressure with a balloon and a primus stove. More Observations included juggling with three balls as a method of holding three things in only two containers; similarly 5 old men can share a 4-seater park bench because one of them is always at the toilet!
If you have no box, you can store your steel nails round a magnet, like hefted sheep eg the Herdwick sheep of the English Lake District who can survive for days under snow by eating their own wool. The atmosphere in carding rooms of Victorian mills was so thick with airborne fibres that the workers didn’t need to take any lunch! It was also a good opportunity to see a Spectre of the Brocken. (§45, §107)
A U-shaped cold cathode fluorescent lamp, (CCFL) tube (back light from LCD TV) over a metre long, was illuminated by the spark from a piezo-electric barbecue igniter.
Lunar experiments rolling magnetized balls down slopes suggest that scree on magnetic mountains, eg the Isle of Skye, should be more prevalent on the east and west of the mountain.
A skipping rope passes through some strange shapes as you skip. A chain of razor blades used as a skipping rope would cut the grass.
A mains clock lost 24 seconds (compared to Greenwich Mean Time) between 6am and 1pm last Saturday; this corresponds to an average mains frequency of 49.99Hz. People with perfect pitch should notice shifts in mains frequency eg as mains hum on radio.
Ruminations:
Latest two-word sentence from Harrogate Lunar Society’ List Collection: Meagres drum.
Latest example of antithimeria from Nancy Sinatra: you keep samin’ when you oughta be a-changin’.
Collective noun for mallards: a sord
The Wikipedia Glossary of Sheep Husbandry would be of interest to any lexicographer.
Jigger (a rest) and jenny (an in-off) are billiard terms.
Continuing the theme of the antykythera: aspects of personality are reflected in the moves of chess pieces - a 5 dimensional idea summarized as Cartesian divisions.
20/4/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §160
1st Floreal 227
“The Chameleon” fly catcher can be made by sticking a blob of sellotape to a rubber band and flicking it at the insect like a chameleon’s tongue – early results are promising. Any source of sound inside a tube will produce a harmonic related to the length of the tube, so by varying the length – eg with a trombone style slider, or by using water as the “end” of the tube, – a tune can be played. A bee makes a convenient sound source.
On looking at juxtaposed colours: the boundary appears sometimes plain, sometimes black, sometimes has a “fringe” depending on the colours. Fringes also occur when you look at an intense point of light eg the sun reflected in a chromium convex surface with screwed up eyes. Striations have also been seen that move at a large angle related to the plane of polarization which could also help us to detect the magnetic field – like birds!
The Lunar Men have been browsing the Internet and a came across the artist M.C. Escher and the antykythera: https://worldchesshof.org/exhibit/mc-escher-infinite-variations
Linked with https://www.herakleidon-gr.org/home via a chess museum in St Louis!
Looking at reflections in double glazing with Pilkington K glass, the two reflections are different colours as well as being horizontally offset; because the two panes are not parallel and at different distances they have different curvatures. When a sieve is allowed to drain, the films that cover the holes of a wet sieve break at the top first; places with vertical wires crossing horizontal wires dry first; locations where the wires are at 45 degrees to the vertical/horizontal dry last. No chain reaction has been observed so far.
The three Lunar balls have been used to demonstrate the croquet shot (called a ‘roquet’) where a ball is struck while being held fixed by the striker’s foot: another apparently counter-intuitive dynamics phenomenon. Nickel particles on an aluminium sheet were attracted upwards to a magnetized point, forming a rough cone. When sunlight was focused onto the top of the cone – taking the nickel above its Curie temperature – they formed a kind of jerky fountain.
16/4/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §159
26th Germinal 227
Three 30mm metal balls, of three different weights, were procured. When the heaviest (m1) impacted directly on the lightest (m2), a certain amount of momentum was transferred; but when the intermediate ball (m3) was interposed ie as an obstruction, more momentum was transferred!
m1 x m2 = √m1m2
This counter-intuitive effect (§80, §102, §110, §111) is a maximum when the intermediate mass is the geometric mean of the other two, which is indeed the case with the three Lunar balls. Rolling them round a shallow curved bowl created a simulation of a three-body solar system.
When a person sneezes in sunlight, a rainbow should be visible. Observing a close-up rainbow with one then two eyes, shows that a rainbow is not a “thing” because it moves when the eyes are opened alternately in a manner different from a thing, and it looks quite different when both eyes are open because you are seeing two slightly displaced spectra. The rainbow observed in someone's sneeze should, in the present climate, be called ‘The Rainbow of Death’. Its spectrum might have diagnostic value. Just as a rainbow fails some of the tests for "thingness", so do reflections and shadows and silhouettes, real and virtual images, and holograms.
An amusing family quiz on chocolate occurred on Good Friday involving a shipload of Neapolitan ice-cream plundered by pirates, a bad hair day and French toast - and Easter eggs! The Lunar Men also came across sagaform, a strange, plastic-like substance that imitates ice cubes but doesnt melt! They’ve also created some ice spikes (§16, §28, §61) with Harrogate tapwater and are looking for Comet Atlas.
15/4/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §158
22nd Germinal 227
The Lunar Men dusted off their microscope and fitted it with polarizing eyepieces, and a polarizer in the light source. Next a small hot plate was made out of a broken hair straightener. Slides containing melting crystalline materials were heated and taken quickly to the microscope stage. As the melted materials cooled they formed crystals which rotated the plane of polarisation of the light, creating a moving highly coloured fringe. The effect was beautiful moving rainbow patterns of colour advancing across the slide. Many organic chemicals with low melting points can be used - such as polyethylene glycol, azobenzol, menthol, topanol, and aspirin.
Black packing paper from Amazon tends to float when it burns. Archimedes’ Principle cannot be applied as there is no fixed “body”. It’s the same problem when a floating ice cube is melting: the ice expands as it liquefies and produces thrust, undermining Archimedes. As the black paper smoulders, about 3mm ahead of the red oxidation front the paper turns grey. Thermal paper does something similar, turning black ahead of the combustion front.
Amazon’s paper retains some strength when burned.
A body can smoulder only when its density, specific calorific value, and porosity are in the correct ranges. Pipe smokers of course, know this. By clamping then bending a book, a wide range of mean parameter values can be obtained, but sustained smouldering never occurs. The reasons for this remain a mystery. On the contrary it can be argued that as long as you have a minimal air supply to keep burning then smouldering will continue eg peat bogs tend to dry out in the summer and burn or smoulder for ages. Coalfields in the orient have been burning or smouldering for years. However, all this argument depends on how you define smouldering esp as it describes a very specific form of combustion. There’s a vacancy for the Smouldering Chair!
Read it and our proceedings on our website at http://www.harlunsoc.com or https://sites.google.com/view/harrogatelunarsoc/gallery
Numquam lunae dormiens!
11/4/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §157
20th Germial 227
On rummaging through the q-index I found gold in the Sperrin mountains and Aberdeen (§65) and even all around us (§66-§68)! Gold is found in steeply dipping veins in North Wales as a result of the Caledonian orogeny. It occurs in Cambrian rocks with pyrites as microscopic blebs; with tellurobismuth mineralization in quartz veins; as imiscible droplets in sphalerite and associated with argentiferous galena. In Ogofau, in South Wales, as a result of isoclinal folding, gold occurs in Ordovician and Silurian rocks in pyritic shales, thin quartz veins and microscopic grains in arsenopyrite crystals.
Following on from geology - what could be better than more geology - esp when its about you, yourself! As a boy I wondered what would happen after death and being dug up by a future geologist. William Buckland (1784-1856), an eccentric geologist, liked the idea. The best way to become a fossil is to fall into a muddy pool, like many dinosaurs did, that won’t be disturbed for ages (~200,000 years) The soft organs and skin will have a remote chance of survival. The skeleton will turn to stone or even marble as the mud turns to clay or shale. This very slow process is known as induration. Dying in the sea isn’t good as you would be eaten by all kinds of marine creatures. If you got covered in sand or corals there is a chance that you would get a good fossil skeleton because sandstone and limestone are porous, percolating water could replace the bone material with minerals esp pyrite. Beautiful examples of glittering ammonites have been found on the Yorkshire coast. Conceivably, the minerals in the percolating water could contain gold. Imagine your descendents digging you up and finding a gold skeleton of you! Besides studying the best ways to become fossilized Buckland even had a poem written on the topic. Moreover, he liked to eat strange things - and he did eat - the heart of a king!
Continuing the theme of death: the duchess of Northumberland has grown a spooky garden, full of poisonous plants. Henbane, mandrake and other Potteresque plants grow in the garden. Reminiscent of the coronavirus: “...henbane, in the right dosage will take someone to the doors of death but not through them”. Very spooky! Plants include hemlock, belladona, giant hogweed and laburnum.
Next time from the qindex: paradoxes and dilemmas - an introduction to philosophy. And: Adventures in Pondoland - the upshot of being shipwrecked.
4/4/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §156
14th Germial 227
What is the human race doing during these times of lockdown? ― Jigsaws! Like them or loathe them, jigsaws have the curious property of absorbing entropy; so its been theorized that making the akles bigger will reduce entropy and maybe make a 2-dimensional black hole!
If a (completed) jigsaw has aspect ratio equal to the Golden Ratio, the number of pieces must be of the form N2xF1xF2 where F1 and F2 are consecutive Fibonacci numbers; and the number of edge pieces = Nx(F1+F2 )- 2. Each jigsaw piece has T tabs and H holes where 0 < T, H < 4 and where T+H = 4 for internal pieces, T+H =3 for edge pieces and T+H = 2 for corner pieces.
The total number of tabs = total number of holes.
When you assemble a jigsaw, its area shrinks by 33% This is a function of the tab and hole size as a fraction of the size of the piece. If the tabs and holes were bigger, greater area contractions would occur - raising the possibility of huge decreases in entropy with the possible formation of two dimensional black holes.
A 1-dimensional jigsaw is like dendrochronolgy even though the ‘pieces’ don’t interlock. Another possible example is a game of dominoes. The reverse of a jigsaw is a myriorama which is a puzzle of endless landscapes formed with 24 cards and more than 1.6 x 1024 combinations. Regardless of combinations there’s always a pattern whereas there’s only one version with jigsaws. Reverse jigsaw puzzles, with more pieces (or ‘cards’), would be in the realm of bar number combinations. (§98)
The Lunar Men also rolled magnetised spheres down inclines: their behaviour is very much influenced by the orientation of the incline with respect to magnetic north - a possible dynamic compass to be invented here.
The Lunar Men have considered video-conferencing but it uses excessive power and band-width compared with e-mails and telephone &c.
An exercise for the reader: invent a probabilistic (or statistical) lock.
24/3/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §155
Some of you will be wondering who won the limerick competition -
the winning entry was: {12 + 144 + 20 + 3✓4} { 7 } + 5 x 11 = 81 + 0
A dozen, a gross and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Is nine squared and not a bit more.
But I don't know the name of the winner!
Meanwhile, the Lunar Men have been looking at striations, thermistors, Steven Pinker and AI, kites and blackbirds; and playing with metallic spheres in a rotating magnetic field! Steven Pinker wrote a very convincing argument about artificial intelligence not taking over the World:
“...the scenario makes about as much sense as the worry that since jet planes have surpassed the flying ability of eagles, someday they will swoop out of the sky and seize our cattle. The fallacy is a confusion of intelligence with motivation—of beliefs with desires, inferences with goals, thinking with wanting. Even if we did invent superhumanly intelligent robots, why would they want to enslave their masters or take over the world? Intelligence is the ability to deploy novel means to attain a goal. But the goals are extraneous to the intelligence: being smart is not the same as wanting something. It just so happens that the intelligence in one system, Homo sapiens, is a product of Darwinian natural selection, an inherently competitive process. In the brains of that species, reasoning comes bundled (to varying degrees in different specimens) with goals such as dominating rivals and amassing resources. But it’s a mistake to confuse a circuit in the limbic brain of a certain species of primate with the very nature of intelligence. An artificially intelligent system that was designed rather than evolved could just as easily think like shmoos, the blobby altruists in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner, who deploy their considerable ingenuity to barbecue themselves for the benefit of human eaters. There is no law of complex systems that says intelligent agents must turn into ruthless conquistadors.”
Reassuring to me as I think differently. On a totally different track I came across this from Travels in the Malay Archipelago by AR Wallace: “After my long experience and numerous failures … and one enormous success - of the curiosity of a collector finding an obscure and totally unforseen item ie a small framed white verandah necessary” Just the sort of idea that appeals to the Lunar Men!
6/3/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §154
Meteorites land in the UK quite frequently. Now, according to the Yorkshire Post
we will be able to track them and find them with modern technology. There are special cameras that can photograph and triangulate the position of a meteorite in the sky and predict where it lands. One of these cameras is in Ripon! Lord Byron defined volume as the amount of sound. This is not quite right and Paul illustrated it thus: a volume control varies the gain of an amplifier, ie the ratio of output to input signal. So, high volume (eg 10) is high output, and vice-versa. At this point the output signal is still an electrical quantity and is inaudible. We need a transducer to convert the electrical signal into a variable longitudinal pressure wave, which is detected by the ears and processed by the brain as sound. Loudspeakers, headphones etc are such transducers, which, when the coil is energized by the audio amp's output current, causes a longitudinal displacement of the speaker's cone or diaphragm. This displacement varies the volume of air to be modulated in sympathy with the audio signal's frequency and amplitude, causing an air pressure wave which is then detected by the ears, ie heard. The Lunar Men also came across an engineer in New Scientist who was so fed up of circulars and demands at work to quote pressures &c in kgs m-2 that he decided to put all his measurements in stones per acre! Readers may like to know that 2.23 x 10-7 stones per acre is - air pressure! The Lunar Men have been looking at ball-bearings after visiting a factory in Vienna. I received a tungsten ball-bearing - 1.44 attoparsecs in diameter and a density of 150.3 ounces per fluid ounce - for my birthday! Other ozaic units can be found in cats whiskers [§137, §139]
8/2/20 Harrogate Lunar Society §153
I’m in Austria where our correspondent and I zŵf about the new Periodic Table viz - Döbereiner Revisited which is particularly apt as its his 200th anniversary. We read and discussed the history of the Kurile Islands, the philosophy of Karl Popper and ‘Any adults in the room’ by Yanis Varoufakis who explained the financial crisis in Greece. We also wandered in the woods of Vienna - thinking and wondering about ideas and the affluence of incohol.
The Affluence of Incohol
I had eighteen bottles of whiskey and was told by my wife to empty the contents down the sink or else.
I said I would and proceeded with this unpleasant task. I withdrew the cork from the first bottle and poured it down the sink, with the exception of one glass, which I drank. I then withdrew the cork from the second bottle and likewise with it, with the exception of one glass, which I drank.
I extracted the cork from the third bottle and poured the glass down the sink, which I drank. I pulled the cork from the fourth bottle down the sink and poured the bottle down the glass, which I drank. I pulled the cork from the next glass and drank one sink out of it and threw the rest down the bottle, which I drank. I pulled the sink out the next glass and poured the cork down the bottle.
Then I corked the sink with the glass, bottled the drink and drank the pour. When I had everything empty, I steadied the house with one hand, counted the glasses, corks, bottles, and sinks with the other, which was 29 and, as the house came by, I counted them again.
Finally, I had all the houses in one bottle, which I drank. I'm not half as think as you drunk I am. I fool so feelish I don't know who is me and the drunker I stand here the longer I get. I'm not under the affluence of incohol as some tinkle peep I am.
29/11/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §152
Holly doesn't whistle or catch hydrophobia! This yule tide plant underwent various experiments by the Lunar Men. They whirled it round on the end of a long pole and doused it in water. They used a long copper tube to observe the effect of magnets (§138) which were attached to outside of the tube. It was affected by friction of paper against the pipe but Faraday induction was observed due to varying magnetic fields. The Lunar Men looked through a projector at old slides and a mobile phone to create some. In preparing for the Lunar Band, they played a keyboard and an ocarinule which is a rocket balloon on the end of a straw. A reel of film was fixed to the ceiling and it spiralled in a swirling, tubular motion making piles here and there in an attractive random pattern. They discussed the peculiarities of languages and how they compared with mathematics. They came across some very odd ones including Ok, a Papuan language, which has a number system based on 27. They also discussed earworms - annoying tunes that persist in your ear. These are due to the physiology of consciousness, anatomy and peculiar chemicals known as biogenic amines. The Lunar Men wondered how many films/photographs there were in the World and how this could be estimated and expressed in a meaningful way. They reckon it would be tiny compared with bar numbers. A bit like categorizing big data in the way that makes the results useful but how the word useful is defined is a moot point. Numbers of the form: yx + xy ie Leyland numbers were discussed and Tim Berners-Lee was excellent on the telly last week esp because he was so positive and optimistic.
21/11/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §151
Ravel’s Bolero is played everywhere -throughout the World- on average, every 14 minutes but takes 15 minutes to play! So the sun never sets on Ravel’s bolero! This extraordinary piece of information makes people wonder at the effect it has. In chaos theory, a butterfly flapping its wings in an English garden can cause a tornado in Oklahoma! Potentially, big data, curiosity and the www can combine to make us superhuman! These totally unrelated facts fascinate the human mind because they are so unusual and counter intuitive. The ozaic nature of these events is personal and specific to consciousness and human thought. Much as music stimulates memory and the emotions. A Minnaert fence (§139) was used to observe the movement of cars with ‘stationary' wheels in Ripon! Infinity (§134) was discussed and the set of all integers is a smaller infinity than all the numbers between 0 and 1. This, too, sounds unbelievable to the man on the Clapham omnibus. Last week one of the zirkwinji (mystery objects) turned out to be an aircraft mechanical computer for gauging height and map scales or a specific kind of map to identify ground positions. The Lunar Men also made a telescope from old binoculars which projected an image of the sun onto a white screen. The size of the sun being that of a pumpkin and Mercury a dot 1½ mm in diameter.
14/11/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §150
The Lunar Men made ink by grinding iron fulmarate tablets with oak apples and studied the granular dynamics of lozenge shaped oval tablets. They conducted an experiment by vibrating the tablets. Vertical vibration caused them to be on edge whereas horizontal vibration ‘calmed them down’ causing them to lie on their side! A skiascope was set up to see the transit of Mercury but it was too cloudy to see anything. This year is the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table (§141) and the Lunar Men have made further studies of the properties of thulium using electrolysis (§145). As stated in M&M2010 Marks Bros predict monovalent thulium. Chemistry deals with stuff: vitamins, steels, plastics, gases, etc., etc. Chemists may look down spectroscopes at spectral lines and peer into cyclotrons at tracks in a bubble chamber but, from our childhood familiarity with the stuff of the world to our completing school chemistry, it is all about the manifest behaviour of macroscopic stuff. Our new table "Döbereiner revisited" (§125), classifies the elements on this criterion, not quantum mechanical considerations nor other unobservables.
2/11/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §149
The Lunar Men spent a lot of time talking about antithimeria - the use of a part of speech for another part of speech eg using a noun as a verb. Even Shakespeare did this but curiously used it in the negative form eg ‘I’ll unhair thy head’ (Anthony & Cleopatra II.v.) and ‘Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here,’ (Macbeth I. iv.). Afterwards Mike showed us some burnt offerings viz: ‘Quercuscum surprise’ which turned out to be delicious! These are roasted acorns: seasoned acorns are boiled until the water is clear, then roasted for about 15 minutes with a pinch of salt. The Lunar Men agreed that these are the new crisps and will make a fortune! Oak apples, not acorns, have been used to make ink. (§35, §105). They also discussed the possibility of fences of bees ie bee hives along crop fences to scare away elephants. Another topic included wire refrigerants. Nickel and titanium wires when twisted will cool water when released which is more energy efficient than traditional compressed gas systems. Nikki also dropped in for a coffee and taped the psshishhence of a boiling pot to make a video or song featuring the viaduct at Pannal. We also looked through a teleidoscope and took some fantastic pictures. All this activity involved a lot of new words - featured in MUD. So, if you wish - become a mudlark!
24/10/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §148
An old syrup tin was filled with used engine oil and a thick cotton wick was put in the middle of it. The wick was touched up with some gunwash solvent and lit. It produced a strong, solid flame. A glass tube was held such that one end touched the centre of a Bunsen burner flame. Unburnt gas flowed through the tube whereupon it was lit with a match - illustrating the principle of combustion that Michael Faraday demonstrated in his ‘Story of a Candle’ 200 years ago. However, it did not work with an ordinary candle demonstrated by the Lunar Men. Instead, they tried creating large antibubbles using a hose, a pyrex jug and a frying pan. This didn't work either but on the other hand, a huge, flipping, flopping bubble was created with a long piece of braid from an old chair and fire retardant foam. Later on they sifted through a series of mystery objects viz: a condom-like fungus growing on an ash tree instead of an elder. A group of mirrors in a circular pattern showed ATR ie infrared spectroscopic measurement of the consistency of surfaces. The Lunar Men couldn't understand how this worked but the odometer of an aircraft was clearly identified as a complex switch unit, found in J Birkett's shop in Lincoln. They finished off with a phenakistiscope which showed the first moving images developed by Joseph Plateau in 1833. As well as this they played about with antithimeria and ambigrams.
7/10/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §147
The Lunar Men spent a very pleasant day at Phil’s physics lab in Knaresborough and they related some amusing quotes (§100) eg ‘There’s only physics and everything else is stamp collecting’ and ‘A biscuit is the toast of the cake world.’ Phil has an Arduino circuit, which has multiple uses including the display of Lissajous figures (§64, §75). A BBC microbit was used with a Hall magnetic sensor plus a few extra components to devise a pendulum kicking device. This was a simple magnetic circuit focusing a magnetic pulse to the pivot of a pendulum. Faraday crispations (§42) were observed in a beaker of cornflower. As the frequency varied, the motion of the cornflour became more and more bizarre - showing hollows and cavities and a ‘determination’ to climb out of the beaker as a wobbling, twisting mess! This strange behaviour occurs because cornflour is a non-Newtonian fluid. Haidinger’s brush (§57) was observed with a piece of polaroid. It’s a very faint blue and yellow clover leaf in the sky. I found it very difficult to see. The best way to see it is to look at the blue sky at right angles to the sun.
A megaphone was demonstrated with the Johnsen-Rahbek effect which occurs when an electric potential is applied across the boundary between a metallic surface and the surface of a semiconducting material. Under these conditions an attractive force appears, whose magnitude depends on the voltage and the specific materials involved. This is shown by a touch lamp whereby you can feel the electricity flowing through the lamp as a series of ripples (fulloonji).
The Lunar Men were also curious about the sun and wondered when it was first thought of as a star. Records show that it was Nicolas da Cusa who first suggested this around 1450. Giordano Bruno also believed that the sun was a star but was put to death for it in 1600!
23/9/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §146
When you look through a fence at a car wheel rotating a strange optical illusion takes place. The Lunar Men used the grille of a barbecue as a portable Minnaert* fence. This worked a treat as the grille had just the spacings to tally with car wheel trims. Mesh from an old chair produced a counter intuitive image of the mesh itself fooling the observer into thinking the grid was behind when it was in front.
A colloid of gelatine was made with a solution of cadmium sulphide in preparation for quantum dots for experiments later on recycling plastics.
The Lunar Men used a spirograph to draw epicycles and a 3:2 ratio of a Lissajous figure; and played about with curves. A tractrix is an intriguing pattern that is illustrated by taking a dog for a walk! At every moment the lead, if it is straight and taut, will be a tangent to a curve called a tractrix. The evolute of the tractrix is the catenary. It is derived using differential equations and recondite expressions such as inverse hyperbolic secants.
The Lunar Men looked at the blue sky and trees in the distance. The trees looked black because they were so far away and the sky looked blue. However, on looking through a nigrometer - an instrument that only looks at reflected light, they looked the same! This is because you only see light, and deprived of context, the brain interprets everything the same - a strange, counter-intuitive illusion. Illusions are also induced by frosted glass and little bits of tinted glass that blur. Depth perception varies for everyone and everyone’s eyes are slightly different. The brain naturally interprets blurred images more quickly than clear ones which results in an illusion known as the reverse Pulfrich effect. The brain naturally corrects for this according to context. Egg shells were heated up in the sunlight and turned black and white! Firstly, the carbon content of the egg turned black and secondly, turned white becoming calcium oxide.
* see book by Prof. M Minnaert, “The Light & Colour in the Open Air”
26.8.19 Harrogate Lunar Society §145
The Lunar Men attempted to extract iodine. They burnt some seaweed, put it in a flask, added some distilled water and boiled it. A mole of dilute acid was added to the filtrate, then a few drops of hydrogen peroxide turning the solution brown. Gunwash solvent (xylene, toluene) was added, turning the brown colour a deep violet, and the whole lot left in the air to evaporate. Violet crystals appeared...if only...a yellowish stain was all that remained of the experiment!
A tin can was procured and in it a jelly baby was heated with some weedkiller (sodium chlorate). Sparks and bright yellow flames of sodium appeared. The same happened with potassium nitrate only this time the flames were lilac. The tin can was filled with potassium nitrate enough for an electrode to be buried in the crystals. A piece of thulium was gripped by the cathode and lowered into the potassium nitrate. The can was connected to a battery charger and as the crystals melted, the ammeter jumped indicating a current of 5 amps. After a while the thulium appeared to have a buff appearance with a whitish tint. This could be potassium thulide! (§97).
A bottle of cake mix was procured and on looking into the depths of the bottle, the yellow colour turned red! This is dichromatism (§119). Other topics discussed included the language of fans, walljumping Hopi Indians and the history of photography.
20.7.19 Harrogate Lunar Society §144
Hexagons were seen in the reflection of an old satellite dish. This is remarkable because the dish is made of a triangular grid. When the water surface is disturbed you see lots of hexagons. Why this is, the Lunar Men don’t know. The sun’s image was reflected onto a wall and the speed at which it moved across the wall was 2 millimetres a second! This was a rough estimate, as it was very cloudy. Videotapes were found to make very good yoyos including a double yoyo. Light shone through different papers produced different colours because the light reflects off the paper many times at different frequencies, depending on the material composing the paper. The Lunar Men tried a green and lilac reflector and also saw what happened when a yellow light from one paper was shone at a purple light. Nothing happened! The Lunar Men thought that the light would cancel out because purple and yellow are at opposite sides of the colour spectrum. Gold leaf cake was eaten but tasted of cake and not gold because the gold was so thin that there werent enough atoms of it to taste! Nicky converted a tumble dryer into a plant pot and a combi microwave oven a bbq or incinerator bin. The Lunar Men have also collected 17 broken springs - all having different frequencies when struck. Later on we talked about clathrates, bus stops and porcupines!
2.7.19 Harrogate Lunar Society §143
The Lunar Men collected 231 beads into an equilateral triangle and tried to fit a ball bearing into the middle of it. Surprisingly, the triangle kept its shape remarkably well. There were a few dislocations and gaps near the ball bearing but the overall shape didnt change. This has a bearing on the fact that molecules appear to ‘memorize’ the macroscopic group that they are in, which is a similar argument of homeopathy. Water molecules behave in this way. 231 is the 21st triangular number - 3 being the first, then 6, then 10 and then the fourth is 15 which snooker players will know as the number of red balls in the triangle at the start of the game. Triangular numbers are also used by chemists as a quick method of counting pills. A cistern was filled with water and a siphon attached to it. The siphon was coiled, such that it rose above the top of the water level and out of the cistern. As the water filled the cistern it filled the siphon, too. When full, the water flowed out of the both the cistern and siphon and the cycle started again. Simply the force of water pressure and gravity - put to good use. A small pencil was sharpened at both ends and set on a track. On tilting the track the pencil rolled in a strange way known as ‘hunting’. As one end tended to roll off the track, the other end reversed this effect and made the pencil sway from side to side, much as a train carriage does. Of course in a train carriage, the wheels are prevented from hunting by the shape of the rails. This little demonstration shows how to keep a train on the rails. A coffee pot filter was videoed spinning and it appeared to be stopped. This showed the stroboscopic effect of the motion.
20.6.19 Harrogate Lunar Society §142
Three match boxes were held in the hand. One had a heavy weight in it. On taking away the two empty boxes, the weight was heavier! This is an illusion of the touch. Because the single weight is more concentrated when alone it seems heavier to the touch; whereas the overall weight of the three boxes is spread more evenly when the other boxes are in the hand. It doesnt work so well if you have your eyes open as common sense will interrupt the haptic flow. Interaction and information from the senses of touch and sight contradict each other. This causes temporary confusion in the brain manifested as an illusion.
A jet from a camping gas cylinder was placed under water and little bubbles of air pumped through. The sizes of the bubbles were regular ~1cumm in size. By counting the bubbles an ideal method of calculating an unknown volume of gas is achieved. A pile of columbine seeds (black) and foxglove seeds (grey) were mixed and shaken, then they were vertically vibrated. After a while they separated out into volcanic piles. Separate little hillocks flowed like volcanoes because trapped air was forced to occupy the vacuum caused by the seeds rising on being shaken vertically. Consequently, the air pushes up little mounds that appear like volcanoes known as Faraday’s Heaps. The concave base of the gas cylinder was cut out. Its surface was so smooth that it could be placed on a sloping glass pane and rotated. The Lunar Men calculated that the base could rotate indefinitely but only came to a stop due to minimal friction. They predicted that concave discs would congregate into groups with similar rugosity. This was backed by mathematical analysis but so far results are inconclusive.
13.6.19 HARROGATE LUNAR SOCIETY §141
Last month, the Lunar Men went to a talk/discussion about the sesquicentenary of the Periodic Table. They were taken aback by the fact that most people had never heard of IUPAC - the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. At the meeting, the guest speaker explained how popular and widespread the Periodic Table is. There are hundreds, indeed, thousands of Periodic Tables and Mendeleev kept altering his to fit the properties of the elements. So, over the past 150 years the Table has evolved in a natural, random manner. With so many Tables to choose from, clarity is needed for a good, robust Table that serves Science properly. Indeed, Mendeleev would agree that chemists are behoven to have the best possible Periodic Table. Who decides? No one. At the moment we have a Table with 18 groups, little or no periodicity, no triads, no octaves, no music! It’s a discordant shambles!
IUPAC is the natural body to lead and approve the Periodic Table but their website says: ‘It’s not our job to tell chemists what Table to use. Anyone can choose any Table they like.’ As a result of this we have the hotchpotch of a Table that is simple but inadequate. IUPAC must swallow their democratic, moral principles and sally forth into the future by setting a New Standard Periodic Table that befits its 150th annivesary. ‘Döbereiner Revisited’ - as illustrated ( Θu - the new gold! ) at the FEVA festival in Knaresborough last summer - fits the bill.
11.6.19 HARROGATE LUNAR SOCIETY §140
The Lunar Men have been looking into the benefits of plastic and rubbish. Supermarket trolleys with a bit of old carpet make an excellent habitat for leeches. On Henderson Island, in the Pacific Ocean, hermit crabs use plastic lids as shells! The females find dayglo plastic lids more sexually attractive - creating a new sub-species! Microbeads cover a vast area per gram making them a vehicle for pathogens and beneficial fungi and microorganisms. Eventually evolution will take its course leading to animals that eat plastic esp as it contains similar elements and molecules as the animals themselves. Thus a new fauna will inhabit the Earth - maybe a new race of humans! - Homo Perspexus! As the elemental structure and origin of plants and plastic is so similar eg trees and forests are forerunners of oil; and plastic is ‘solidified’ oil (TOP). The Lunar Men wonder whether this is a reversible reaction - melting plastic into an oily mass to use as ‘fertilizer’ for trees (POT).
So is T--->O--->P reversible? ie TOP⟷POT?
4.6.19 Harrogate Lunar Society §139
The Lunar Men continued thinking of other strange units which are usually used in a specific context; or the unit definition is ‘part of the conversation’ eg what units are used to measure the strength of a joke? Are there units for happiness or grief? A sphinx was suggested to quantify fear; maybe a lion or a dinosaur could be used to measure terror! Halteres (about 7 inches) were used by high jumpers in the games of Ancient Greece. Here are some more cats whiskers:
How many sleeping dogs lie in a manger?
How many needles in a haystack make a dot on the landscape?
How many bounds are there in a giant leap?
How many drops in the ocean make a small pond?
How much faint praise will damn a shadow of yourself?
As well as these cats whiskers there are many weird and wonderful units as described in §137. As well as these there is the distance from here to Sirius and back - known as a siriometer, a unit of stellar distance = 15.8 light years; the area that a team of 8 oxen can plough in a season is known as a carucate and is roughly 1 square mile; and a pisan zapra is a unit of time used in Malaya which is the time it takes to eat a banana! A wheel was rolled behind a slatted table to observe the stroboscopic effect produced by the slats cf Ripon Cathedral and Minnaert’s observations (§118)
24.5.19 Harrogate Lunar Society §138
A 2-metre copper tube was held at 50⁰ and a series of magnets were timed as they slid down the tube. The magnets didnt slide uniformly down the tube but ‘flowed’. The Lunar Men took runs measuring up to 6 magnets as they ‘flowed’ down the tube. This flowing was balanced by the magnetic induction produced in the copper tube and countered by the weight of the magnets. When only 1 magnet slid the time was 5 seconds and reached a maximum of 23 seconds with 5 magnets. With 6 magnets the weight told and they moved faster taking only 20 seconds to flow down the tube. A small bit of a magnet (~ 8 cu mm) was placed on the floor and another series of magnets from 1-7 were held over it. The field strength was measured and produced a linear graph in teslas.
A pile of wood chips at the Yorkshire Agricultural Showground was observed to be steaming as it got hotter and hotter because the reaction is exothermic. Two magnets of matching polarity on either side of a thick non-ferrous vertical metal slab slide slowly downwards, damped by an eddy current, but remain opposite each other!
The Lunar Men looked at 2-word sentences eg muscle sinks. Fat floats. And even 1-word sentences: Go. Eat. Sail. Sell. Long distance cycle races such as the Tour de Yorkshire show the spontaneous occurrence of altruism.
16.5.19 Harrogate Lunar Society §137
“The Lunar Society never sleeps” is the motto followed by the Lunar Men who have been looking at unusual units of measurement and asking themselves the following questions:
How many beans make 5?
How many winks in a cat-nap?
How many big feet in a clodhopper?
How many slim chances are there in a close shave?
How many cats whiskers are there in a hair’s breadth?
These questions are known as cat’s whiskers. Other weird units include attoparsecs, nanocenturies and sverdlups. Even more: barleycorns, poppyseeds, points and twips. The lists of units are infinite. You may like to know that the average human foot is 23 barleycorns in length! You can find a list of cat’s whiskers on our website. Johann Goethe, the philosopher and playwright believed that we are descended from four-legged animals and he persisted in walking with a weird gait because of this belief. He was a great friend of another polymath - Alexander von Humboldt, and both these men greatly influenced Charles Darwin. Videotape, when twisted, minimizes its strain energy by breaking up into a 1-dimensional chain of triangles. A fax carbon sheet, when similarly stressed, breaks into a 2-dimensional array of lozenges. Why this is the Lunar Men dont know!
10.5.19 Harrogate Lunar Society §136
The golden ratio is 5:8 or 1:1.6. This has been known since ancient times and it appears to have great influence on the psyche of the human mind. A majority of people would agree that a portait or a landscape in this proportion is beautiful. Beauty is a wonderful intangible idea or concept what human beings aspire to or desire. It is intriguing that an ordinary piece of A4 paper, when cut and folded, retains its propotion. This is because the ratio of the sides of A4 paper is 1:√2.
Given two rectangles (A and B), each patitioned into sub-rectangles, some or all of A’s rectangles can be replaced by all of B (suitably adjusted in shape). This is a special instance of tensoring and since it is a generalization of multiplication, we can define primeness: an N-partition is prime iff it contains no partitioned sub-rectangles.
Theorem 1: Prime N-partitions exist for all values of N except N = 3, 4 and 6.
Theorem 1.1: The prime 5-partition is unique (apart from reflections and rotations).
Theorem 2: If every sub-rectangle has at least one pair of sides which are integer in length, then the main rectangle also has a pair of sides that are integer in length. The proof of this is based on treating the absence of property X as the presence of -X.
6.5.19 Harrogate Lunar Society §135
A blank diary was held open in bright sunlight. Other books were also held open or partially open. The Lunar Men noticed that some apparently white pages were yellow, some pink and some blue and it aroused their curiosity. Why the different colours? Books do have different colour pages (to transmitted light) even though they are all white (to incident light)! Light is reflected multiple times before emerging from the page and this property has a big impact on the light reflected from the page. It is the scattering analogue of dichromatism. A bowl of water was rocked to and fro and then left for the silt to settle. It settled as rillmarks as sand does on the seabed. The troughs and ridges tally with the waves and could be seen clearly.
As its around the 250th anniversary of the Industrial Revolution and the original Lunar Society, the Lunar Men suggested making a facsimile of Joseph Priestley’s laboratory in Leeds. This would necessitate Lottery funding &c but we wonder whether readers should like to offer alternatives. As well as this - this year is also the 150th anniversary of the Periodic Table and the Lunar Men have produced a new Periodic Table to mark the occasion.
Harrogate Lunar Society §134
The Lunar Men followed up their experiments with Runge by heating and burning the chromatograms. Caloric changed the colour pink to blue and intensified it. Black and brown also intensified. On cooling they went back to their original colours. Plastic bags, like naphtha, caught fire. Molten drops made a very distinct sound - known as prilling. A chain of beads dropped slowly from a sloping bar formed coils with swirling loops dependent on the rate of drop. This pattern of kinematic action varies and can be regular or chaotic or even regularly chaotic! This didnt happen if the bar sloped less than 45⁰. A dynamic version of chaos was illustrated by a pingpong ball rolling in a jar of water. The movements of the ball were tracked using a slomo camera. The tracks were difficult to follow but were typical consequences of fluid flow.
Absurd as a surd is
The infinity of infinities
Just as nought is nothing
The infinite is everything
Set in a way that
Can be understood
Theres an infinity
Of noughts that could
George Cantor
Sorted this out
But from 0 2 ∞
Is far far away
Tis no surprise
He lost his way
But it cant be bad
For a working day!
Harrogate Lunar Society §133
A rope, a metre in length, was soaked in light water foam. The rope had 4 bits of thread tied to it and linked to these 4 bits of thread was another ring of thread. On lifting the rope out of the foam a film was left filling it and the 5 areas between the threads. As the foam ran off it displayed beautiful irridescent colours but as it became thinner still it turned transparent or vanta black (§123) - a new colour created by the sculptor Anish Kapoor. This region is so thin that the wavelengths of light destructively interfere with each other effectively producing a 2D vacuum. A piece of an eggbox was used to break the large central area. Immediately it took the shape of a circle. The Lunar Men cut the threads holding the circle and it floated upwards because it was a vacuum! The only thing holding it down was rhe weight of the thread which was counterbalanced by the upthrust of the vacuum. The upthrust is proportional to the area of the bubble whereas the weight is proportional to the perimeter so the bigger the bubble the better (§99)! A fluid flow phenomenon causes paddles to shed vortices inducing opposite parities which the Lunar Men believe causes the huge hexagon at Saturn’s north pole. A message was written on thermal paper and on heating it disappeared! On adding a drop of gunwash it reappeared!! What’s more the paper turned a brilliant white - ‘vanta white’ ! A dead simple demonstration of invisible ink. A marble was put in a bottle and shaken in such a way that the marble spun round in a whizzing circular spiral with increasing speed until it touched the lid. A lovely demonstration of angular momentum (§76, §118). The Lunar Men played with hydrophobic sand (§64), demonstrated the Mould effect and made preliminary tests that the presence of sugar in water cannot be detected.
Further research is necessary.
Harrogate Lunar Society §132
Magnetic susceptibility (χ) is a dimensionless proportionality constant that indicates the degree of magnetization of a material in response to an applied magnetic field. The Lunar Men measured χ for a number of rare metals including platinum, gold, silver, bismuth, tantalum, tungsten, lutetium, hafnium and thulium. Some were paramagnetic ie they attracted a magnet, whereas, some, like bismuth were diamagnetic and repelled a magnet. Other materials included minerals eg cinnabar, pyrites and quartz. Alloys and common metals were tried too. Most surprising was aluminium which attracted a magnet in slow motion! This was due to eddy currents induced in the metal. A silver shilling showed signs of this, too. The Lunar Men also demonstrated the flowring (§124) - a curious discophoran spring on a carpet tube .
Philip brought over an electronic contraption called a Jacob’s ladder (§52, §64) powered from a 12-volt battery driving an oscillating transistor switch that feeds a transformer ie an automotive ignition coil. The ladder moved, the rungs of which were formed of highly charged electrons, to the top of the two diverging rods. On tilting the device at right angles the rungs stayed still. The Lunar Men passed heat sensitive bits of paper through the rungs which scorched the paper and set it on fire!
In the lab the Lunar Men demonstrated ‘floral patterns’ with chromatograms. They made beautiful colours and patterns with drops of potassium iodide and lead nitrate, sodium hydroxide and cobalt chloride, ammonium dichromate and silver nitrate. Runge, the father of chromatography (§75, §85), made a series of chromatograms and published them in a book of ‘self-grown’ pictures - and may also be regarded as the forerunner of ‘selfies’!
Later, in the pub, Mike, Terry & Gordon chatted about match rockets, vanta black, double-jointedness and the McGurk effect.
HARROGATE LUNAR SOCIETY §131
Fire foam and hydrogen were mixed in the lab and the bubbles lit up with a bright, fleeting flame. The Lunar Men stood in front of a heater and noticed how easily you could tell whether you were exposed or not - even when deprived of sight. Touch and feeling like all the senses are extremely sensitive to the minutest of variations. An old silver shilling was held between the fingers in contrast to a piece of polystyrene. The coin felt much colder. The kc number (the product of the conductivity and specific heat) is 1100 for silver and only 0.002 for polystyrene. Human flesh is 1. A coin made of tantalum, a dense, high melting metal was also held in the hand and it felt very cold, too, though not as cold as silver; tantalum has a kc number of 200. The Lunar Men collected together 6 contraptions to listen to the pips of the GMT time signal including the blerrup.They had an old radio, an FM radio, a telly, a laptop and a DAB digital radio. Instead of hearing 4 pips they heard 20 - because they’re all out of sync! A holly leaf stands on its side - the only leaf to do so - so the Lunar Men think - Prove them wrong! Other topics discussed included Roman engineering, Boyle’s law and the square root of two.
Harrogate Lunar Society §130
The Lunar Men were wondering whether its possible to train moles! Recently an active mole dug up quite a few mole hills in Follifoot cemetery. Its possible that wedding rings or earrings or coins could turn up in the hills - just a passing thought that could turn into a brainwave! A yellow solution of thulium nitrate was produced when nitric acid was poured onto a nugget of thulium. It effervesced immediately producing dark brown fumes of nitrogen dioxide. The holographic table was cleaned up such that 3D images were again visible despite ice sticking to the surface. A wooden plank was sawn such that it fitted into a Russian box containing the chemical elements. The Lunar Men are redesigning the box to display the new Periodic Table - M&M2010 - celebrating its sesquicentenary.
Chatoyant schiller was lifted off a beaker of water with an old xmas card. The pattern stayed on the card keeping its sheen. As it dried ferric flecks came off and floated like dust motes above a heater. Flakes of mica were poured into a jar of foamy water. On shaking the jar the liquid rotated producing underwater waves. The fluid dynamics are so complex that the swirls looked like pareidolic monsters fighting eachother with lights because the speckles of mica produced beautiful irridescent sparkles. Later on the 4 of us met and chatted about fonts, ice-pancakes, triangulating chimneys and sterving.
Harrogate Lunar Society §129
A beaker of soda water was sprinkled with iron filings and left exposed to the air. Very fine films of oxides and hydrates of iron formed appearing as a bronze-like lustre. These films form in the cleavage planes of rocks and minerals known as schiller and to the Icelanders as jarnbrak. It’s been observed in certain minerals such as hypersthene due to the presence of minute, parallel inclusions. The Lunar Men continued with game theory playing a misere variant of noughts and crosses and a continuous version of vectrace with a holy rectangle! Tennis players’ 1st serve very hard (H), if not in, then 2nd serve such that:
PSQS < 1_____
PHQH 1 - PS+PH
Where P is probability of serve being in and Q is the probability of winning the point.
Ludo and monopoly are examples of games played in 1 dimension. Chess and draughts in 2; football and cricket in 3; snooker in 4 and even games never dreamt of in 8 dimensions like Star Trek. The Lunar Men made a good crop of ice pillars this week, and Venus, even, twinkled - by disturbing its reflection in water! They demonstrated the Mould effect illustrating Newtons 3rd law using a bowl full of beads! They also made a list of animals that can kill from a distance (archer fish, bombardier beetles, net spider, pistol shrimp) and animals that can tie knots (orangutang, bonobos, chimps, weaver birds, hagfish, eels and earthworms).
Harrogate Lunar Society §128
2019 is the year of the Periodic Table. 150 years ago a Russian chemist, Dmitri Mendeleef, invented a table of chemical elements with predictive powers - by playing cards! The Lunar Men have been following in his footsteps by producing a number of games based on the Periodic Table egs Critical, Chobe, Slorch and U. They also drew up a series of games from chess to rugby and classified them according to choices per move (CPM), interaction (I), corporeality (C), randomness (R), groups & periods (PT), continuum (HR) and number (N). With 7 parameters its easy to predict which category each game will occupy. Predicting games that wont fit is a much more enlightening exercise - which can be applied to any enterprise. For instance the Herzsprung-Russel diagram is used to classify stars - and Herzsprung realized theres a relationship between the spectral lines and magnitude of stars. Parameters like this enabled him to predict where others were and what properties they had - just as Mendeleef did with the Periodic Table. The Lunar Men went through 24 different games ranging from cricket to snooker & marbles to noughts and crosses including turn-splitting games like oscar and quattro. Using these parameters they were able to invent a new game called cuborum by limiting 1 parameter. Just by changing a parameter or tweaking it (ie looking at the rules differently) its possible to discover a completely new game. The modern day equivalent is the new Periodic Table - predicting a new gold! [See M&M2010]. Other topics discussed included palindromes, saccades and ice pancakes.
20/1/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §127
Last Wednesday we met in Bangelstein, & Mike brought along a wonderful ‘map’ or collage of Hookstone Woods showing the leaves of all the trees found there. The distribution of the trees could be construed from the pattern of leaves forming the ‘map’. Vinegar, copper sulphate & hydroxylamine were mixed together in a futile attempt to produce copper tetrahedra in an experiment to make Liesegang bands. Tubs of ice were put in the freezer & on opening there were no ice pillars. I reckon this occurred because there were no restrictions in the tubs. The Lunar Men also produced frežapel by freezing cider and collecting the alcohol rich fluid known as applejack. They looked into lunes. Since time immemorial man has tried to square the circle - construct a square equal in area to a given circle with a ruler and compass only ie make it quadrable. A lune is quadrable by ruler and compass which is the area of a trapezium bounded by 2 circles. Hippocrates knew of 2 lunes and he discovered a 3rd. 2,000 years later the Russians found 2 more. Since then it has been mathematically proven that there are no more! Later we discussed Francis Galton the Victorian polymath who discovered fingerprints, he led wild adventures with the natives including measuring steatopygian Hottentots with a sextant! Other topics included bishops, swingwords, ASMR and soap cutting. We ended up playing little games and tricks with a banshee-sounding balloon!
14/1/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §126
Toothpicks packed in a tub turned clockwise as they were thrown in the air pointing to a left handed Archimedes screw. Reverse this and the screw switches from left to right! This didnt happen with cotton buds. A spinning kitchen whisk produced stroboscopic effects and striations and peculiar shadows that are disconnected and detached. They seemed to hover in mid-air like a hologram. An ultraviolet light was shone on various pieces of coloured paper. An A5 sheet of white paper appeared blue! A solution of bromophenol blue showed as a red colour but turned a deep blue on tilting the jar. Some colours varied on looking at them through an iPhone camera.
Long ago, in the days of ‘pea-soupers’ a blind man had a distinct advantage over a sighted person. You could cross the road without realizing it; however a blind man was far more wary and its wise to cross the road with him because he could hear cars coming which would be inaudible to us! As an empirical source of information, the Lunar Society uses library cards (3x5 inch oblongs) for references and links - all originating with Paul Otlet, a Belgian pioneer of information science he created the Universal Decimal Catalogue (UDC) representing systematic arrangement of all branches of knowledge eg faceted classification. Library cards and allied systems have all been superseded by computers and the Internet but they are still useful!
6/1/19 Harrogate Lunar Society §125
A piece of swarf (ie thulium turnings) was scrutinized for any change. It was in a sealed jar above a desiccant which in turn was surrounded by ammonia vapour. After a month sitting on the window sill no change was observed. This experiment refers to a paper called ‘Döbereiner Revisited’ which can be viewed on our website. A ‘lake’ of smoke - a curious, buff coloured, heavy vapour collected at the bottom of a sheet of crenulated cardboard. The vapour crept out like a kind of pudding with dense white swirls of milky looking gas. These caught fire and each spiral quickly turned into a firenado or fire tornado. Palladium showed paramagnetism on being doused in electrolytic hydrogen but after a few days this wore off. Slomo water drops were observed and the tongue of the drop equalled the diameter of the initial splash. This illustrates the K/T extinction event whereby the tongue of vaporized rock reached a height of 200 miles into the air. ‘Twinkling’ magpies were seen using hair dryers. On looking through the hot air above a hair dryer, the air immediately above it shimmers delivering a twinkling effect to anything behind it. This was tried on some branches which swayed about even though there was no wind. Chimney pots wobbled as though in a Disney film and a magpie looked attractive. In the pub afterwards the Lunar Men discussed steam rockets, bats, thistledown and the art of tinkering.
See Döbereiner Revisited and pictures of the fire tornado on our website.
3/12/18 Harrogate Lunar Society §124
Xmas dinner in Saranda was wonderful. It went down great guns; I having tzatziki and moussaka with vino followed by cheesecake. The Lunar Men - all five of us sang its praises. Later we finished off with vashilistrayshi - a Georgian spirit based on apples and it translates as ‘Stray apple’. We played with a flowring allowing it to travel down the outside of the skiascope. We filmed it in slow motion and the eerie sound of a wild animal or tiger could clearly be heard. Most surprising was the flowring, which whizzed discophoranically (ie like a jellyfish) down the tube making even stranger noises, and at the end it sprung off landing as a polyspherical orthomorphic toroid. This was such a surprise that it proved very difficult to describe when it started off as a series of interlinked rings. We, the Lunar Men also constructed a fire tornado, consisting of a metal wastepaper basket with a piece of inflammable rag in it and placed on the turntable of an old record player. Switching on the record player produced a swirling spiral of flame that could be controlled with the amount of flammable spirit (ie gunwash) added. Afterwards, we discussed Charles VI, the French king who thought he was made of glass! Sulphur hexafluoride; and the Age of Wonder involving the Montgolfier brothers and their attempts at flying balloons.
See pictures of the flowring and fire tornado
15.11.18 Harrogate Lunar Society §123
Bits of old springs from the suspension of cars were found in the road. When hit together they produced a high pitched, tinny noise but when filmed in slomo a low, tuneful sound was heard. Platinum dust from car exhausts is also likely to be found at roundabouts and similar places. A milk jug covered in an aureous sheen gave a resistance of 1.2 ohms per square and the matching sugar bowl a resistance of 1.4 ohms per square. These strange pieces of apparatus can be used to detect tides! Looking through a window with heavy rain falling on it - its surprising to see soliton waves. The Korteweg de Vries equation describes a shallow film of water flowing down a surface and correctly predicts the formation of solitons:
[d/dt](w) + [d3/dt3](w) = 6w[d/dx](w)
It is an example of Stigler’s law: which should be called the Boussinesq equation.
Mike and Maddox joined us in the pub last night and we discussed Modigliani’s and Picasso’s paintings and the strange views of the World that they must have had; and Anish Kapoor’s use of vanta black reminiscent of the ‘Uncanny Valley’ in robotics. The q-index was a source of a few gems which included a novel (~50,000 words) written without an E in it [‘Gadsby’ by EV Wright publd in 1939], the preparation of superconductors [q-32], and a story of 450 words about Winnie and Walter with every word beginning with a W. Robert Richardson wrote about it in the Independent referring to Don Lemon’s almanac (viz: Everybody’s scrapbook of curious facts) of a century ago. [q-100]
11.11.18 Harrogate Lunar Society §122
The Lunar Men placed a 4-metre cardboard tube from a new carpet vertically
down to the floor through a stairwell but they gave themselves a geometrical puzzle in getting the tube upstairs! A filter paper, in the shape of a cone hovered over the top of the tube when a hair dryer was blown through the bottom. The cone was also timed as it went down the tube and also when the tube was covered at the top end. The cone hovered at various places acting as an instrument used to measure air currents or the strength of fluid flow, i.e. as a rotameter. A piece of translucent paper was fixed a foot down the tube. At the
other end the Lunar Men covered it with an old sock to enable dark adaptation of the eyes. Now, it’s a skiascope ready to make a shadow of Sirius which is low in the morning sky.
The Lunar Men allowed gas from a lighter under a solution of foam to form small bubbles on the surface. It was inflammable froth. The butane acts as a very light solid making it much more manageable eg for a froth engine. Cobs of maize were rolled in leaves just like cigars which had an attractive, sweet smell. A paling fence shows a superposition of wheels rotating when looked at through the fence. A second fence, strategically placed shows the wheels in two places at once - a confirmation of quantum theory!
22/10/18 Harrogate Lunar Society §121
The Lunar Men made wonderful patterns of sand on a vibrating plate. Depending on the frequency of vibrations, the patterns changed accordingly. These patterns are known as Chladni figures and can be seen at the Lunar website listed below. Failure of a kettle boiling resulted in the invention of an automatic switch that switches it off. A convex bimetallic disc in a kettle suddenly becomes concave when heated, and this change triggers the switch. Strix, a firm in the Isle of Man developed this and were World leaders in the manufacture of kettles. The Lunar Men discussed Prof Minnaert’s* theory that the angular diameter of stars might be deduced from their twinkling behaviour. Recent research has shown this to be, as Minnaert intimated, overly optimistic. Plans are afoot to produce a Döbereiner’s lamp using electolytic hydrogen as well as demonstrating the diamagnetism of palladium hydride. It was agreed that Morse Code may be regarded as a one-dimensional font. As well as this corrasion, spectres and skeuomorphs were discussed.
These topics on the agenda were specifically to oil the discussions and still allow free thought to talk on anything they liked - just as the original Lunar Men did.
Glossary: For those of you who follow MUD - you’ll be pleased to know that the following have just been added:
yerzex: adj. The smell of fresh air on the moors.
mazint: adj. The smell of an ironmonger’s shop.
fauzant: adj. The smell of fresh air on the sea-shore.
* see book by Prof. M Minnaert, “The Light & Colour in the Open Air”
9/10/18 Harrogate Lunar Society §120
Jingle, a reader of the Lunar reports asks “In Döbereiner’s lamp what happens to the platinum?” - answer - nothing! The platinum catalyzes the reaction between hydrogen, and the oxygen of the air. As the reaction is exothermic, the gas mixture ie oxyhydrogen, burns producing water. The platinum glows creating light for the lamp.
Various materials including palladium wire, a cork and a CD case were procured from the lab and the palladium was suspended from a clamp into nascent hydrogen. No movement was observed by the Lunar Men as the hydrogen dissipated so quickly that signs of diamagnetism were absent.
Hearing of the experiments with the dice, another reader of the Lunar reports - Mick - demonstrated an experiment related to chance with a card-shuffling machine. This contraption was more successful than human shuffling which necessitates 7 shuffles for a random distribution. In the 1st shuffle, Mick’s machine produced 6x2, 1x4, 1x5 and 1x8. The 2nd shuffle: 3x2 and 1x7. The 3rd: 5x2 and 1x3. The 4th and last were 2x2 - Two pairs - thats much more likely to bring you luck!
Readers are encouraged to send in questions - the more the merrier!
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