The Northern Pennines

A photo taken on 2007-07-29 from the path on the west side of Highcliff, above Guisborough, Cleveland, UK.  When I was younger I always assumed that the hill that stands out on the horizon (in the centre of this photo) was Cross Fell (893m), the highest point in the Pennines.  But, since taking this photo, I have worked out that this peak is actually Great Dun Fell (848m) and that Cross Fell is is the long flat hill that just peeps above the horizon near the right side of the photo. The hill in between is Little Dun Fell (842m) and the long hill to the left is Mickle Fell (788m).  Click on the image to go to an annotated version of the photo.

Added 2008-01-01:  This is part of another photo I took at the same time as the above one.  It  provides confirmation that the central peak is Great Dun Fell.   The white dot on the summit must be the radar station that is mentioned here.

Frederick Accum and Food Safety in 1820

I have just listened to a wonderful little radio program on Frederick Accum and Food Safety in 1820.  It is the first episode in a 5-part adaptation of Bee Wilson's Swindled: From Poisoned Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee being run as the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.  Recordings of the episodes can be found here for a week after they have been broadcast.  Accum used the methods of the then relatively new science of chemistry to uncover the widespread use of poisonous substances in foodstuffs in early 19th Century England.  He wrote a book on the subject:

A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons, Exhibiting the Fraudulent Sophistications of Bread, Beer, Wine, Spiritous Liquors, Tea, Coffee, Cream, Confectionery, Vinegar, Mustard, Pepper, Cheese, Olive Oil, Pickles, and Other Articles Employed in Domestic Economy

You can find a copy here.  Accum also played a part in the introduction of gas-lighting to London.  I think his name deserves to be more widely known.

Move over Feynman!

I have just come across Motion Mountain, Christoph Schiller's online physics text book and am deeply impressed.  Think of the Feynman Lectures in Physics re-done by a Donald Knuth and then released as a free PDF file.  To quote John Baez:

It's an enormous feast of ideas - romantic, wildly ambitious, and still not finished at 1459 pages.  Using a bare minimum of math, it conveys an enormous amount of physics, all focused on the question "what is motion?" This question is very deep.  We have made tremendous progress towards answering it, but are nowhere near done.

I have put a copy on my laptop and will be probably spending much of 2008 working my way through it on the train to and from work.  I do hope it eventually comes out as a proper book.

Swan

Enjoying the winter Sun on the middle lake in Whiteknights Park this afternoon.

Spice Girls Reunion Concert

Well, actually the Dance of Death from a copy of the Nuremburg Chronicle at the Morse Library, Beloit College.