nocto

play sing-a-long-a-commonwealth-games with the words to many of the world’s national anthems. i can now do more than just the advance australia fair and o canada bits. so long as no one else is about to listen that is.

you’ll have to go elsewhere to get the words to what they’ve now allowed us to play as the “victory anthem of england” land of hope and glory (which is much better than the usual british dirge we get even when we’re being english).

heather champ combats the theft of images and bandwidth from her website by another website. it’s a good idea to look at your pages occassionally and check they look as you intended them to!

it’s been one long thunderstorm here for the past day or so and last
night i was driving home watching the lightning and feeling nice and safe
in my faraday cage of a car when i realised that a convertible with the cloth
roof up is not a faraday cage and would not be a faraday cage even if i put
a fibreglass hardtop on it. ooops. i might stay at the office until the storm has passed next time…

the idea behind a faraday cage is that electrical charge doesn’t
visit the inside of a metal object, it just distributes itself over the surface.
a metal car is a long way from a perfect faraday cage (it’s got windows for a start) but it’s enough of an approximation
to make you safe from lightning strikes inside it. i’ve found some suggesstion
that the science of faraday cages is irrelevant to lightning because it deals
with static electricity and that cars are actually safe because of a “skin effect” but this seems to be practically (if not fundamentally) the same thing to me.

i learnt a rule of thumb as a child (no idea who from, probably an equally
uninformed fellow child) that each second delay between the lightning and
the thunder meant the storm was a mile away. i’d never questioned this until
i was lying in bed this morning looking at the thunderstorm and doing maths
in my head (it beat getting up, ok?). sound travels at 330 metres per second
or thereabouts. so the sound of thunder will take three seconds to travel
a kilometre. so there’s no way it can travel a mile in a second. it takes
the sound of thunder five seconds to travel a mile.

that storm is closer than you think.