23.06.2003 - 9:32 a.m.

Hooray, managed nearly 4 hours of sleep last night, so today is already set to be a great day, there's only so much coffee I can drink before my stomach starts complaining and I've reached that already, I don't know how these 'party' people manage to keep it up for days on end, I usually start hallucinating after about 40 hours without sleep, not a problem in itself but hearing music in the shower can be a bit distracting.

I deleted the proto-entry from friday afternoon because it was rubbish, so here will be the new and revised version in full colour 'No-Work-O-Vision'.

A year or so ago I took out a subscription to New Scientist, this is one of the better ways I squander my hard-earned and each issue takes about a week to read so I'm never stuck for something to stare at while stuffing weetabix down my throat of a morning. It tells me all sorts of interesting things that reinforce my knowledge that I am a very small ( very very small ) self-aware entity, a single point trapped inside an ever expanding ( so far ), incredibly large 4-dimensional ( and upwards ) universe, it's all a bit humbling really. Every week a host of scientific type journo's tell me what other scientists think might be the current explanation du jour for the general state of the universe/planet/social order around me, this ties in nicely with my general interest in the world around me.

A consequence of my desire to get off this rock and go somewhere interesting is that I've filled off 500Mb of my hard drive with pretty images from Here not only do these give my head somewhere to go when pissed off with life at ground level but they invariably become wallpaper to get rid of lingering traces of corporate identity on my 'puter. Most of the nice ones are of massive clouds of dust and gas ( nebula ) illuminated by baby stars ( aaaaah ) the colours are representative of the elements present ( in real colour, most nebula look a reddish colour ), here then are some of the ones that made the grade :

[Update, except they don't any more as i need the space, consider yourself deleted pretty pictures]

And here are two earth based pics :

This is what you get when you take a picture at midday from the same position through the year, because of the tilt in the earth's axis the sun appears to wander back and forth, up and down through the sky -

Analemma

And this is a nice pic of the day / night boundry with associated sunset coloured clouds in the middle -

Earth terminator

Sandra Bullock had it, Lemmy has done lots of it and with cars, it kills. Speed or relative motion, sort of builds up in the background, we can't feel it as we can only detect acceleration but it's there all the same, and you thought you were sitting down. If you walk eastwards at 5 mph at the equator, due to the spin of the earth you are actually walking east at about 1005mph ( or thereabouts ), the earth, on it's yearly journey round the sun is moving at 1780km/s, the sun, in it's position in the Milky Way galaxy is being rotated with the movement of the galaxy at about 250km/s, our galaxy is dancing around the Virgo local group of galaxies and the whole lot is hurtling through space relative to the average velocity of the universe at about 600km/s, it's a wonder we don't fall over more often.

It was nicely summed up in a Monty Python song from the 'Meaning of Life', see it Here.

Sort of fell into watching a filim last night called 'A perfectly decent criminal' I only watched it because it had Kevin Spacey in it, but soon I realised he had stolen James Nesbitt's accent in an attempt to sound irish, Helen Baxendale had done something similar as had some other yank actress, this was clearly a filim squarely aimed at an american market, but it was good and it made me larf and it had a happy ending, I may even seek this out on video, praise indeed !

May need to cut back smoking, felt terrible sunday despite not smoking anything since saturday, short of breath, nasty tickle in bronchiol region, a bit disturbing, it doesn't normally affect me like that as i don't smoke much at all. Have found out today that lots of people with asthma were also suffering over the weekend so maybe I'm not caving into the big C just yet, still need to do more exercise though.