Day 384, Blake Street, gradient

Blake Street is quite steep.

There's a handrail along one footpath in case you need something to hold on to.  Perhaps to stop you sailing off into Ebenezer Elliot's* old house and potentially damaging a listed building.

A listed building you say, that'll be prime land, perhaps we can build on it?

No, get off, that's a genuine piece of history.

The street is approximately 184 metres long and has a rise of 33 metres.

That's a gradient of 0.18, or more familiarly as a percentage that's 18%, or 1 in 5 as it used to be shown on road signs.

Here are three signs.

Sign one, at the bottom of the street.

And sign two and three at the top.

The Blake Hotel, a fine pub selling lovely beers.  Much changed since the first time I went in it, there were bowls of tripe on the bar on that occasion, but now thankfully the rubbery tasteless stuff has gone.  

No idea what this used to be, it looks as though it ought to have been a pub.  Most likely a shop of some sort.  **Update - This used to be Whitehouse's Beer-Off and Grocery shop, my memory of it is non-existent though having walked past it hundreds of times.

The distance and height information were gathered using GPS devices.

The information about the pub was gathered from empirical data.


*Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer.


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Day 383, Keyhole bionics and the impact of neutrino mass on rose bushes

The modern world provides many of us with wonderful and innovative technology.  Whatever technology we have available we try to use in as many novel and diverse ways as possible.

Having a few electronic components kicking around, some free time, and some very sharp and narrow scalpel blades led me to experiment.

The result of the implants wasn't quite as expected.  My desire was that there would be super-strength, the ability to lift large objects, and world peace.  Unfortunately none of this was evident in the results of the experiment.

The rose bush had to be removed using the traditional method of brute force using a spade, a mattock, and a fork - this demonstrated that the super-strength element was missing.  The rocks were also no easier to move, disproving the ability to lift large objects.  The world peace part thus far has been inconclusive, my empirical evidence is that nobody has done anything in the street that disproves it.  But there are many areas out of sight, and in fact many other streets, not only here but around the world, which haven't been revealed.

Ok, I've just seen the news, so there is no world peace either.

My theories don't appear to have stood up to a great deal of testing.  A result is a result and should be taken as such, my theory was disproved.  Clearly just stuffing a load of diodes, transistors, capacitors and resistors into a newly dug set of cavities in my arm hadn't cut it.

While I was attempting to remove the rose bush Cato*, the new neighbour cat, mentioned something about neutrino mass.  However neutrino mass is so small that this can't have caused any issues for me when attempting to release the rose bush and was unlikely to have neutralised any potential effect of the implants.  *Cato has a keen interest in physics, specifically radioactive decay, possibly due to him sleeping in a sealed box.

No arms were actually harmed in the construction and collation of this story.



This blog is a placeholder for a better blog that I couldn't be arsed writing which would have been about the political state of the nation, the machinations of dubious landlords exploiting us (the public, the funders, benefactors and owners of the state) by rapaciously buying up former council properties, and the inventive use of language and sleight of hand in passing the responsibilities of the owner of the means of production onto the worker by the suggestion that your life will be improved by doing a selection of tasks (you know the sort, things that sound like they might be useful, time-management, multi-tasking, Vogon empathy, fast-response keyboard skills, Canadian air-force exercises, tai-chi, topological complexity disentanglement) by tapping into the vocabulary of self-help and 'healing' literature to make it appealing to the worker rather than actually addressing root causes.



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Day 382, Downhill perfected

Getting some late-year practise in for the competition in Chamonix so took off to the local Ski Village.

It has reasonable altitude, being at the top of a hill, and it is pretty steep in parts.  Oddly though, as it was not 3am, the gates were locked.

What is the problem?  It's almost as if the place has gone out of business, been derelict for years, had the ski-lift and all lighting removed, and the buildings set on fire dozens of times.

Surely that can't be the case?

Well, yes.

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Day 381, Bridge analogue

Some people have terrific modelling skills and incredible ability to recreate realistic landscapes.

Just take a look at this model railway bridge formed from a mashup of Hornby parts and lichen based shrubbery.

Hours of work and skilz.

Astounding.

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Day 380, Mud on the rocks

Put some whisky in my water, some sugar in my tea.

Take your muddy feet off the furniture and listen to me.

Go to the pub, that is an order.

Enjoy responsibly.

I'd join you but I'm afraid that two halves an evening is my limit.  That ain't the way to have fun.

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Day 379, Outward leaning

More rooms should be built with V shaped walkways, ones where walls lean outward.

Like living on a spacecraft.

Here's an example where you would least expect it.  A library, with shelves that lean slightly backwards?

Yes that's right, it's because the books are on geometry and aren't rectilinear.  If the shelves didn't lean back some would roll off and some other non-uniform shapes would slide off.

This is the library of the unknown and mysterious, where you should expect to find anything and everything.

And it's where I found this small robot creature patrolling.

A room with a droid.

And walls that lean outward.

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Day 378, Nutmeg grater

Do people still grate nutmeg?

If so then this handy car park will enable you to grate an enormous nutmeg on an industrial scale.

What is it with Sheffield and car parks that appear to have their designs based on food preparation tools?

The cheese grater, the nutmeg grater, the egg whisk.

Perhaps the architects had been taking hallucinogens.

There are a number of compounds in nutmeg which can cause hallucinogenic effects, and can create a selection of pleasant side-effects some of which may last several days.

Nutmeg is a bit of a haphazard way to get an hallucinogenic experience given the wide range of other available methods.

I would expect highly paid architects to be able to furnish themselves with designer drugs of more standardised quality.

If indeed they did such things.

Which I am not suggesting they do.

I expect the designer drugs of their trade are large cups of freshly ground coffee.

Which might explain the obsession with kitchen implements.

The egg whisk?

Perhaps that was an hallucination*.




* No nutmeg was harmed in the production of this blog.

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