Interesting times at the moment, don’t you think? Virus, lockdown, no pubs, no restaurants, nothing really.

I have been lucky that I can still go to work, others, like Mrs Giant68, have to stay at home and try and avoid going stir crazy.

So what have you all done to try and relieve the tedium? I guess that those with kids haven’t had much chance to suffer the boredom of being home as the young’uns will be taking up most of their time while the rest is spent chucking gin down their throats. But I haven’t done a lot really. I have been off work for a couple of weeks, working in a school I still get the school holiday off this time. I have binge-watched a few things on Netflix and Amazon. I subscribed to the Disney channel so that I could watch The Mandalorian which, I hasten to add, I quite enjoyed.

Back in the 1970s there was a TV program called James Burkes Connections. I vaguely remember watching it and enjoying it. It seemed to be the start of the popular science scene that has lead to Brian Cox. In the program, James would follow a twisting trail linking one scientific discovery to others. It would start with a Roman Chariot and end with the space shuttle, or it would if the shuttle had been around in the early seventies…

I like all this popular science stuff, not that keen on Brian Cox to be honest, but the science is good. I read an interesting book recently that showed that the origin of the production line and mass production goes back to the American War of independence and the musket.  I used to watch Tomorrow's World when I was a kid, I bet a lot of you won’t be old enough to remember that or it’s original presenter, Raymond Baxter. Yes, I am old.

The other day I found a series seemingly based around the concept of the James Burke program. It is called Revolutions, presented by Jim Al Kalili. It shows that the telescope could have been in existence a thousand years before Galileo made one and found that Jupiter had moons and Saturn had rings.

But the most interesting thing I have discovered via this program is that Hedy Lamarr, film star and once voted the most beautiful woman on the planet, was also an inventor. She devised a way of guiding torpedoes to their targets during WW2. She also came up with the spread spectrum method which allows our smartphones to work without clogging up the airwaves.

I am a sucker for trivia like that. These things stick in my brain. For instance, the first traffic lights were in Parliament Square in 1868. Gas-powered with semaphore like flags as well as the red and green lights. Unfortunately, the next year they exploded and killed a policeman.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977 is now in interstellar space, having left the solar system in 2012, and is just short of 14 billion miles from home. In 40000 years it will be near  AC +79 3888, a star just over 17.5 light-years away.

Now, you can’t deny that those facts are fascinating, can you?

What I should be doing is learning the ukulele, something I have been trying to do on and off for a couple of years. Or maybe taking advantage of the many offers of free online diplomas. But where’s the fun in that?

Regards

Giant68 J

I really need to change that profile pic!