Storms from a while ago

Originally taken from a Eurolink blog post, that I wrote about this time last year,  I thought it was a timely reminder of that storm after the wind and rain of St. Judes' Storm.

It was twenty five years ago (and a week ago) that the South East of England was hit, by what some newspapers called, a hurricane or a very strong storm. Michael Fish MBE is a weather forecaster who has worked for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and is still known for a comment before a forecast he made on the 15th of October 1987:

"Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way... well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't!"

It was suggested that Michael Fish was referring to Hurricane Floyd in Florida, USA that had developed off the coast of Nicaragua on the 9th of October and had been referred to in the One O'Clock News bulletin. But to his credit, Mr. Fish did warn people of high winds for the UK and to "batten down the hatches", but the storm did turn out to be a lot stronger than predicted.

The BBC On This Day website for the 16th of October records that "at least 13 people are known to have died and many dozens have been injured, mostly by falling trees and buildings...winds hit 94 miles per hour (151 kilometres per hour) in the capital and over 110 miles per hour (177 kilometres per hour) in the Channel Islands" and "In the London Borough of Ealing alone, 600 calls came from people whose homes and cars had been struck by falling trees and debris."
 
 The BBC Science and Environment website for the 15th of October 2012 records that "an estimated 15 million trees were uprooted...with winds recorded at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour (160 kilometres per hour or 86 knots)" and "at Toys Hill, the highest point in Kent, about 98% of the woodland...was lost".

It was suggested that this widespread devastation of woodlands was going to be disastrous, but with time it has been shown that the storm helped increase the woodland biota. Dr. Keith Kirby (of Natural England), a co-author on the Great Storm's ecological impact on woodlands (an interesting pdf on climate and woodland ecology can be found here) reported that the lack of woodland exploitation after the Second World War and decreased coppicing had led to the woodland canopy closing over and reducing the low-level biodiversity. The storm opened up the canopy and led to an increase in bluebell and primrose density as well as a temporary increase in the fritillary (a woodland butterfly)  population

Dr. Peter Buckley, the other co-author with Dr. Keith Kirby, found that the effects post storm changed the past monoculture of the woodlands. The tightly packed tall trees had shallow roots that led to them being easily ripped out, whereas as coppiced trees tend to be kept shorter and lead to less trees being damaged by the stronger winds. A lot of the woods regenerated naturally with pioneer species and since there were struggling with nature, there was less need for artificial management.

What are your memories of the Great Storm in 1987? Please add your comments.

Defrosting my Mother's fridge

Okay, not the most exciting title and its not a euphemism, but whilst my Mother's refrigerator has a chance to breathe new live into the assorted liquids, solids and those that live between the two states; it still needs to be defrosted as the ice box gains more ice than Chilean glacier during a period of hot sun.

It has an old pull handle reminiscent of the large and old American 'fridges that Smeg embraced when they redesigned the pantry hardware. You then pull on the vertically channeled handle and there is a reassuring clunk as the mechanism detaches from the lock. It does not have the same snug fit around the door seal as it would have done when it was first purchased due to the material becoming perished and that no doubt leads to the increased accumulation of the frozen water in the ice box.

Admittedly, the ice box currently has the unimaginable maw of a potential Abominable Snowman or a Yeti. Knowhow.com describes the two forms of ice buildup in fridges - powdered ice and solid ice. The former that looks like Jack Frost has been popping into the fridge and dusting the food with delicate ice crystals or maybe it was one of those delicate fairies from Fantasia. 

Basically it means that warm air has got in either due to lots of opening and closing from frequent trips to see if the light really stays on when it is closed (see further down for that point) or that you have a poor seal.

(Source - Flickr)

The latter, the scourge of solid ice, is due to the freezing of water that has found its way into the fridge. Bugger.

So as to the light conundrum, this fridge takes away the problem of the unknowingness of the light being on and/or off. It has a bayonet fitting at the back of the fridge, so you just take the bulb out and remember not to get a potential electric shock. Out of the time that the fridge has been in the pantry, over fifty years, no-one has had an electric shock. The controls for the fridge are equally easy - it has two settings on opposite ends of the spectrum.

This Methuselah of the domestic equipment is supplied by the GEC and is made to the British Standard 922

The BS933 seems to have been written in 1959, Amazon has a link to a binding of the British Standard for Electrical refrigerators and food freezers for household use. After two hours, the ice box still resembles a mouth of a yeti. (All uncredited photos are the authors, which I took with my slowly dying Bleckberry, may get a new one - things aren't built to last nowadays).

How animals use humans and the human environment?

Now I am sure there is a more technical and up to date term that describes the activity where an animal, or animals, use(s) human(s) and the environment created by humans - but for the moment I am going to use the term (that hopefully I have made up and doesn't exist already - this may be amended in later edits) Anthropic Faunal Behaviour (AFB). 

Anthropic - "Of or pertaining to mankind or humans, or the period of humanity's existence." (Wikipedia 2013a)

Faunal - "Pertaining to animals." (Wikitionary 2013)

I got to thinking about this AFB after watching the BBC 2 Horizon programme on cats and how they are monitored through camera and global positioning system (GPS) tracking) - this programme can also be viewed on YouTube. 

I was interested in two distinct types of AFB, which I have named Active and Passive AFB - henceforth known as aAFB or pAFB - where the animal, a cat in these first few examples, either actively uses humans and their environment or not. When a cat is fed by its owner, I am suggesting that this is an example of aAFB as the cat's brain is accepting the food offered by the human and bypassing the natural instinct of hunting and killing prey. The definition of aAFB, as I see it, is where the animals gains something useful directly from the human. 

However, if the cat were to jump on and use the fence to reach a roof, I would like to suggest that this is a form of pAFB as I think that cat sees the fence and roof as an extension of the natural habitat. Although it could posited that the cat's senses would pick up the difference between natural and man-made structures through hearing, sight, smell, taste and touch. The definition of pAFB, as I see it,  is where the animal uses human activity and/or human infrastructure/environment to gain something later in that animal's time line.

Although there could be an argument for a grey area between aAFB and pAFB, I currently searching for an example of this.

An example of pAFB with larger cats can be seen with the video of the cheetah as shot by novatolady and is shown below. The cheetah jumps up onto the Land Rover at around 22 seconds. Is the cheetah using it to escape the cheetah cub or is it using the elevated surface to look for prey and predators? Either way, I think the cheetah made a conscious effort to use the Land Rover for further activity but gains nothing directly from the humans.

I can say that this is not an individual event as a search on YouTube offered 397,000 videos although I cannot vouch for the authenticity of each of these videos as I haven't watched them all.

Next time - Avian aAFB & pAFB

Anthropic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2013a. Anthropic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic. [Accessed 30 June 2013].

faunal - Wiktionary. 2013. faunal - Wiktionary. [ONLINE] Available at: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/faunal. [Accessed 30 June 2013].

BBC Radio 4 follows Avian Tweets

Using the concepts of tweets from the social networking site that was devised by Jack Dorsey, Twitter, the BBC have used the time slot just after the Farming Today and just before Today of less than two minutes. 

In this time, you get to hear the chatter, chirping, chirrupping, clucking, cock-a-doodle-dooing, crying and cuckooing (and remember these are only the "C" words) of many an assorted bird. As well as a fact or two (see I refrained from a pun that could have included the name of an Australian avian) about British birds.

BBC Radio 4's Tweet of the Day uses the Natural History Unit's collection of its avian recordings to bring to life these birds over the working week. The first month's recordings were narrated by Sir David Attenborough with the second month being introduced by Miranda Krestovnikoff. 

The two minute recordings, in my humble opinion, would be ideal for playing during the registration of school classes for the younger years or during a quiet period in between the transition of two subjects. 

• The podcasts can be found here. 
• A list of future birds can be found here.
• A Tweet Of The Day quiz can be found on this page and you will have to submit an answer to find the correct answer. 
• There are a surprising number of uses that use birdsong including reducing the stress of needles and in BP petrol stations toilets, find out how birdsong can be used here.

 

Tea - the great hydrator

Making cups of tea all day in a marquee often leads to the tea-maker not drinking enough tea themselves that then leads to dehydration and will lead to a need, a need for hydration (apologies to you Top Gun fans for that poor mulchification of a quote).

Source

Tea is said to be, by some people, a great hydrator. But aim for caffeine-free teas as the caffeine can lead to dehydration - but I need to find proof for this. Maybe this could be a two-day blog post with an update later today...

And on Friday, we ate fish

On Fridays, people of the Roman Catholic faith are known to eat fish...but what if the fishermen were to become extinct due to a bureaucratic bungle of red tape. A film released by Greenpeace may make this last sentence make more sense:

So if you get a chance, go and see your local fishmonger and say thank you. Sleep well.

Has YouTube replaced The Muppet Show?

For the uninitiated, The Muppet Show was a television show in the seventies that copied the old style of theatrical variety shows. The show was populated with small musical numbers, some comedy routines, maybe a headliner celebrity, who gets pushed into a big budget number with added realism with the sideways glances to the edge of the stage. Albeit in the stage manager's office controlling Viking singing pigs or listening to the heckling of the two old men in the box. This environment, created by Jim Henson and financed by Lew Grade is mainly populated by actors and actresses lovingly recreated in natural and man-made fibres apart from the celebrities.

The video above shows part one (of three) for the first episode of the first season. Within two minutes, we are introduced to Mahna Mahna - you could say it is a version of Psy's Gangham Style. It is sung mainly by a Muppet who could be wearing sunglasses or has really dark eyes singing lyrics that don't make much sense to the uninitiated but it is quite catchy. Does that remind you of anything?

On the flip-side, there seems to be no need to describe YouTube, but I will. It is a collection of videos added to by the public, "but was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal" (Wikipedia 2013). These videos attract "more than 1 billion unique users who watch over 4 billion hours of video each month whilst 72 hours of video are uploaded each minute" (YouTube 2013). But remind yourself of what videos are on YouTube - small musical numbers, some comedy routines, maybe a headliner celebrity, small furry animals. Here is one of the videos you might find readily on YouTube:

Each media outlet, be it through television (120 episodes of the original Muppet Show series - Wikipedia 2013) or through the Internet (in 2011, it had more than 1 trillion views - YouTube 2013) has its similarities and its differences. But, if you are bored on a Friday afternoon before you go home from work and watch a cute kitten or watch a sheep baa, it is possibly because the kids in the seventies were brought up on furry animal sketches. Enjoy this Muppet song brought to you by the wonders of YouTube and spot the celebrity plug.

So can you answer my question, has YouTube replaced The Muppet Show?

The Muppet Show - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2013. The Muppet Show - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Muppet_Show. [Accessed 06 June 2013].

YouTube - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2013. YouTube - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube. [Accessed 06 June 2013].

Statistics - YouTube . 2013. Statistics - YouTube . [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html. [Accessed 06 June 2013].