One of my FAVOURITE things about living in halls is having most of my best friends living within two minutes of me, it’s absolutely lovely and I like to abuse their proximity as much as possible… hence I love cooking for my friends!
The best thing we’ve ever done was a roast dinner. It was delicious and it’s DEFINITELY possible in a student kitchen if you follow these steps:
Find ten people to invite over for dinner. This is necessary as it cuts the cost of the whole roast down to about £2.50 per person, which is not expensive when everyone chips in.
Assign a head chef. This may be my controlling tendencies talking but I think that when you have so many people cooking, you need someone to oversee the operation and sort out timings for everything. And also shout at the boys when they insist on taking an incredibly long time to lovingly prepare a chicken, it’s two o’ clock and it still needs to cook for almost two hours. Which brings me to…
Shop in advance. We made a mistake by going shopping at about one o’ clock and not starting the cooking until two in the afternoon meaning we didn’t eat until four thirty by which time everyone was starting to fade away… (have snacks for the cooking process)
Get disposable cups and plates and ask people to bring cutlery. No one ever has enough cutlery or crockery to sufficiently feed so many people, so ask everyone to bring a knife and fork. I’ve found it’s useful to keep paper plates and cups in the cupboard as well, they’ll always come in useful at some point.
Get a production line going. Some people peeling, some people chopping, some people making sure potatoes don’t burn, some people making sure no one has expired from hunger because there is still an hour left to go before everything is cooked.
Clean the common room. Ok if you live in a hall where you have a decent sized kitchen this will not be a problem but chez Fisher, if you’re having more than like four people over, you move the party to the common room. I sent someone down there with a wet sponge to remove the worst of the sticky alcohol stains from the table.
Appoint one person to hold the door. We had to carry the food down two floors to the common room which was certainly interesting…
Enjoy the delicious dinner you have so cleverly prepared:
I’ve read a lot of popular science books, so I thought I would list some of the ones that I most enjoyed. They are mostly Physics based, but there are a couple that are more general and even one that I promise doesn’t mention Physics at all, so if you are stuck for interesting reading or hate reading but desperately need something to put on your personal statement, some of these could be useful!
What is life?
Erwin Schrodinger
This book is actually a recording of a series of public lectures that Schrodinger gave in the early 1940s. It might seem like a strange book for him to have published, because he was a physicist not a biologist, most famous for his thought experiment about a quantum cat in a box. However this book proved to be incredibly significant in the history of biology. In its first chapters Schrodinger lays out a theoretical framework for what genetic material should look like and how it should act, and when these things were subsequently discovered, both Watson and Crick acknowledged that Schrodinger’s lectures had been a major source of inspiration.
The workings of DNA only take up the first part of the book though. The next chapters describe Schrodinger’s definition for life- that it is ‘continually drawing from its environment negative entropy’ and goes on to talk about the thermodynamics of life which is fascinating!
This whole book is nicely and accessibly written and goes into depth quantifying his hypotheses. The last chapter outlines Schrodinger’s own beliefs about consciousness, whether we have free will and if we can survive death in some form. A very interesting little read.
The Hidden Reality
In my strange system, bottom corner folds= interesting pages to re-read. See how many there are?!?
Brian Greene
This is the book on this list that I have re-read the most times. I love Brian Greene and would read anything he’d written, no matter what it was -‘The Elegant Universe’ is another great one. He is a brilliant writer that really thinks about his audience— pointing out places where you can skip the in-depth explanation on a first read for example.
He always provides just enough background information on the stories and characters of the scientists to give it colour and not to detract or take too long a detour away from the facts, a balance which I find rare in popular science writing.
This particular book details different theories about parallel universes, and the evidence for and against them. He describes these fantastic ideas but also focuses on if they can be tested and the nature of scientific measurement and experiment. That’s not even to mention the use of talking flies to demonstrate that there aren’t an infinite number of different positions in a room and the imagined chat bringing Newton up to speed with gravity these days.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough! I even took it on holiday to Venice to read on the beach.
Thinking Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman
This is the promised book that entirely has no Physics in it on this list!
It is written by the guy that won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences for work in psychology about how we make decisions and judgements. It talks about a model of the human mind split up into two systems, System 1 which is completely irrational and works instinctively and System 2 which is who we think we are- the one that rationalises and articulates judgements and choices.
It describes how System 2 can trick us into thinking that we are being totally rational when really nothing could be further from the truth, and provides plenty of case studies, experiments and tests for the reader so that you cannot simply laugh at the idiots taking part in the studies and think ‘I would never be that stupid!’
In how easily it can trick you, it is a scary and thought-provoking book. In addition, it also describes in depth the experimental techniques used and the problems encountered, which, if you are unfamiliar with psychological studies or a little sceptical of social sciences, makes it an eye-opening read.
Mr Tompkins in Paperback
George Gamow
A famous scientist in his own right and one of the first to work on and accept the Big Bang theory, Gamov was born in the Soviet Union, which he and his wife once gloriously tried to escape from by kayaking across the Black Sea with supplies of chocolate and two bottles of brandy. (Not that this is mentioned in the book.)
This book takes the oft-repeated problem with Quantum Physics—that because it only happens on scales too small to see it, it is completely counterintuitive to us—and seeks to give people some realisation of what it would be like to live in world where quantum effects occur. Mr. Tompkins is a fictional bank clerk who attends physics lectures (some of which are also printed in the book) and then dreams about the strange world of Quantum Physics. The book is full of short stories in which we meet brakemen on trains who control the ageing of his passengers, tiny universes that take half an hour to return books thrown off a planet, songs about the steady state theory of the universe and a quantum tiger. It is sweet and funny and there is even a little love-story thrown in.
Ignorance, how it drives science
Stuart Firestein
This book comes from a course on ignorance that Firestein started in Columbia University to open his student’s eyes to the fact that the progression of science isn’t ‘facts and rules. It’s black cats in dark rooms.’ The book talks about how ignorance is important, different kinds of ignorance and finishes with four case studies from different areas of science that show how scientists today are working with ignorance.
It is a great book, well written with lots of anecdotes and is quite witty. This is quite a short, quick read, and broken up into different sections, so if you are looking to find out more about science but not a fan of a novel-length book, this one might be for you.
The Science of His Dark Materials
John and Mary Gribbin.
I put this book down because it is probably the first popular science book that I read, or at least the first one that I remember and that I would still re-read today. ‘His Dark Materials’ were my favourite books for a long time growing up and this book might be why I am studying Physics at university and not English, but I will admit that it is probably aimed at too young an audience for most people reading this blog.
John Gribbin is another of my favourite science writers though- you should try ‘The Universe: A biography’, or ‘Schrodinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality’.
The fundamental constants, a mystery of physics
Written by Harald Fritzsch and translated by Gregory Stodolsky.
This book is written as an imagined dialogue between Einstein, Newton and Haller who is a made-up modern day physicist. It deals with the constants in Physics and how they show what we know about the universe and also what we don’t know yet.
Why are the constants set to these values? Were they set at random in the Big Bang or can they be derived? Are they even constant?
The book talks about some fascinating Physics and has the added advantage of occasional lines like:
“Einstein: That’s a good idea. I’m getting hungry hearing about all these mysterious natural constants, a nice steak would be great.”
We need to talk about kelvin
Marcus Chown
Each chapter in this book focuses on a different everyday phenomena, like how you can simultaneously see through a window and see your reflection in it and links them to very interesting Physics. It covers the usual things in popular physics books- quantum mechanics, the double slit experiment, Pauli exclusion but also nuclear fusion in the sun, entropy and inflation. They are all neatly explained. Each chapter is mostly self-contained so you can skip to concepts or puzzles that are interesting to you.
The space race, the battle to rule the heavens
Deborah Cadbury
This book is a history of the cold war, but it focuses on the characters and doesn’t take sides. The main protagonists are the German Wernher von Braun and Soviet Sergei Korolev who were both obsessed with the idea of spaceflight and whose dreams were both swept up in politics. I suppose it is not really a science book, as it focuses on the daring escapes, trials and lives of the scientists involved in the space race, but it is a brilliant read!
So, there we go. I hope that was an interesting mix. For some reason I happen to be really picky about popular science books with many of the hugely hyped and well-reviewed ones leaving me totally cold, so you can be sure these came from a long long list that didn’t make the cut! Perhaps I will do a later blog featuring my least favourite…
Just to finish off on the book talk, lined up for the rest of this term, I have stolen ‘Shadows of the Mind’ by Roger Penrose (which I promised I would read in another blog) from Alex, and I am also planning to take ‘The Golem’ and’ Bad Science’ out of the Imperial library. From my sister (studying Biology) I have sneaked ‘DNA’ by James Watson to take me up to date with what happened in Biology in the 70 or so years since Schrodinger!
I’ve just finished ‘Out of Print’, which was an overview of journalism, from its beginnings to what may happen in the future now that the internet is messing newspaper’s business models up. I was really looking forward this book, but it actually turned out pretty disappointing. Some of the history of the press is fascinating, but facts presented in this book were mostly the number of copies sold and the amounts of money made, neither of which I found interesting enough to retain for a thousand old newspapers.
So a few days ago I began anatomy of the thorax…i.e. I took a trip up to the 14th floor and met the body my group would be working with for the next few weeks. It was incredible.
I have so much respect for people that donate their bodies to science and even after just one session I can see how useful it really is to have the opportunity to see. I was terrified though. Genuinely so nervous to have the responsibility of someone’s body in my hands only a term and a bit into my degree. However, it was incredible.
This was the first session so we were tasked with removing the outer layers of the body to reveal the organs. Luckily there was already skin flaps prepared. Walking up to the body I saw equipment like saws and bone cutters and just thought to myself..”what have I signed up to?!?” The session began with our instructor asking our B4 group ‘would any of the men like to start off with sawing the ribs’. That’s when my #strongindependentwoman kicked in. Even though I was so nervous, I was not going to let the guys go first out of principle. So I responded with ‘or the ladies? I could do it too’. The instructor apologised and I began to saw away somewhere near/at the manubrium…but nothing was happening. I tried to move positions but I was just (dare I say) too weak.
However, I did manage to break some of Jim’s (we named the cadaver Jim) ribs!! It was so fascinating and I’m so happy we have a chance to do this. I saw all of it from the pectoralis major muscle to the external intercostal muscles to the bits that I really didn’t know the names of. One thing that did surprise me was how hungry I got during the session-apparently it’s to do with the chemicals they use in the room?!?!
So, the day after, I went for my first ever steak. It was good.
On a serious note though, Imperial really is not flawed in the opportunities they give with anatomy and dissection. It is a real privilege to get to dissect a real human body. Just being able to touch a lung or feel the muscle fibres was incredible. I know I probably sound like an over excited puppy but ahhhhhh anatomy.
Okay, that is all.
Disclaimer: Get consent before dissecting a body.
Image from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1547412706001046
Only one more experiment to go this year and I am hopefully getting a lab partner again! I said I would tell you my final value of e so here goes: (1.93 ± 0.13) x10^-19C, within which you may notice, the currently accepted value does not fall. Oh well. Hurray for unknown sources of systematic error (potentially the oil droplets acting as a dielectric in the capacitor and changing the value of E?). My estimates of the Earth’s magnetic field were better I promise…
Now that that’s over it’s party time! And by party I mean making use of South Kensington’s proximity to sushi, Nutella pancakes and dinosaurs. I think me and Alex’s regular trips to the museum gift shops is single-handedly paying for exhibitions by this point—but really how can you resist buying dinosaur shaped ice-cube trays and ant robots that change direction when you touch them?
My new BFF the giant slothOh museum gift shops
In boring house news, everything has been broken, the washing machine, the internet and most definitely my will to spend hours on the phone complaining about things.
Anyway, I thought I would spend a little bit of time in this blog talking about Imperial Horizons, which are courses Imperial runs that aren’t necessarily directly related to maths, science or engineering. They can be taken for credit as a module in some courses (Chemistry and Biology are the ones I know of), or as an optional extra after lectures.
They are a term or two terms long, and range from learning a language like Japanese, from scratch or to a higher level, a humanity like Creative Writing or Music Technology, introductions to business or Global Challenges. Like anything, in general I think they can be a bit hit or miss—some people love their courses and some people find them a lot of extra time spent for something not so fun. I think last year was the first year they were introduced, so I am sure the courses are still being improved upon—Imperial are usually pretty good at taking feedback.
I love my Horizons though! As I’ve mentioned before I do Communicating Science, which involves studying how science is presented to the public, and how effective each method is. So far we have seen a museum exhibition, written a press release, looked at science in the newspapers, and in pictures, seen how science communication can go badly wrong and a lot more. Next week we are analysing science in literature—I am re-reading Solar for it tomorrow.
No matter how hectic my Monday, I always look forward to Horizons and getting to argue about how apt a choice Professor Brian Cox is for every possible form of TV. Though I enjoy a nice differential equation as much as the next person, it is also comforting to know that every so often I get to think about writing an essay or taking notes about philosophers.
I am now quite nervous of catching my EM lecturer’s eye after blogging about how cool he was— so I won’t be too effusive about my professor this time—but it is great to be taught by someone with such an interest and background knowledge to each topic that we study. She almost convinces me to transfer to the Science Communication Masters!
Last year I did Ethics, which I also enjoyed, but didn’t always actively look forward to like Communicating Science. Each week we studied a different philosopher’s take on how we should live and finally wrote an essay on an ethical dilemma at the end.
In conclusion, if you are coming to Imperial, you should definitely check out the Horizons programme.
On a final note, hello to Aunty Lizzy and Dorothy who came to visit me this week! It was lovely to see you and to show you my house a little bit. Hopefully next time it will be less horrific weather!
Now that I’ve finished my biochemistry and microbiology course, I’m no longer performing endless protein assays which require so much pipetting that you leave the lab with your hand seized up in to a crab claw because you’ve been holding a Gilson for two and a half hours. If you study biology, you will no doubt make acquaintances with Gilsons fairly early on in the year. This, my friends, is a Gilson pipette.
They come in a few different sizes and use very fine pipette tips to measure very small amounts of liquid (usually less than a millilitre). They have a dial on the top which you have to turn to set the volume you want to draw up and you have to depress the plunger before you put the tip into the liquid and then release it or you end up sucking stuff in to the barrel. One of your first labs will involve practicing this with water. If you learn nothing else from biochem and microbiology labs, do not depress the plunger in the liquid. This will be drummed in to you relentlessly. A lot. You don’t want to accidentally suck enzyme into the barrel which will then cause bubbles in the tip, so making the volume of anything else you pipette inaccurate and ruining your assay, as I may have done in one of my first labs. In any case, I’ve left the Gilsons behind in order to play with E. coli and yeast. FUN.
The first two labs of my cell biology and genetics course have involved practicing sterile culture technique and performing a bacterial transformation of E. coli using pGLO. Transformation using pGLO is something that you may have done at A Level. I know that I did it but I can’t remember how it fit in to the syllabus, I think we just thought it was cool to make bacteria that glow in the dark. pGLO is a genetically engineered plasmid (circular DNA structure found in bacteria) which contains a gene for Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP – a protein isolated from jellyfish that glows green under UV light) and also a gene for ampicillin resistance. The gene for GFP is under the control of a modified arabinose operon. An operon is a basically a unit of linked genes which together control the expression of other genes for protein synthesis. The arabinose operon works by a regulator protein (araC) binding to a certain area of the operon which prevents the expression of genes which code for proteins responsible for arabinose digestion (arabinose is just a type of sugar). If arabinose is present, it binds to araC which causes a shape change that makes it easier for RNA polyermase to bind to the gene sequence and start transcribing the genes responsible for arabinose digestion. Pretty clever right?
In the pGLO plasmid, the genes which code for arabinose digestion have been replaced by the genes which code for GFP which means that if the E. coli have successfully taken up the plasmid, they will glow green under UV light on a petri dish containing arabinose! In the lab, we cultured E. coli on to several different types of agar plates – some containing arabinose, some without arabinose, some with arabinose and glucose – to see how the different nutrients we applied affected the expression of GFP. Interestingly, if there is glucose present in the cell then the arabinose operon is repressed. It is much easier for the bacterial cell to use glucose as a carbon source, so there is need for the arabinose digestion genes to be expressed. Therefore, we didn’t get any expression of GFP on the plate which contained arabinose and glucose.
It was a very simple experiment but what I love about biology is how something that superficially seems very straight forward (GFP expressed in the presence of arabinose but not in the presence of glucose. SIMPLES.) has such a highly regulated and delicate control system to ensure that the cell makes the best use of the nutrients available to it. Cells are incredible when you consider that there are hundreds of mechanisms like this in every area of the cell to control different pathways. The cell is an absolute power house, and yet they are the smallest building block of the human body. Looking forward to getting deeper in to this course!
Stay sciencey friends (and have another cell bio joke to end with)
Sorry I’ve gone so long without writing–I’d descended feetfirst into the rollercoaster of emotions that constitutes exams season. Just kidding, your emotions don’t really rocket around during exam week. You won’t have emotions. Everything you hold dear will melt, slosh around, and consolidate into a little ball of stress ricocheting around your head. Embrace this–this is good! Stress has been empirically proven to be more dense than airy emotional baggage. It’ll leave space in your head for an extra biochemical pathway. Take your pick: lipid beta oxidation? Reductive biosynthesis? Amino acid catabolism?
Just kidding, you have to know it all anyway.
The exams themselves were suprisingly un-horrific. Between the free week we’d had before them (revision week is your frieeeend) and the breakfast I’d had, I felt rather well prepared. I don’t usually have breakfast, much less a balanced breakfast (with a blueberry smoothie thingy no less), so I think I shocked my body into thinking I was heading into my last moments and it fired up all the engines. Breakfast is recommended, as our metabolism lecturer gleefully reminded us ever morning (to a resounding retort of 100 stomachs’ grumbling).
Two things to consider for exams:
1) Don’t be afraid to go out, have human contact, and generally maintain your relatively normal life. I think this is essential and often ignored in favour of spending 18 hours a day locked in one’s room, revising until your vision goes. Revision week is not a vector of stressed living and shouldn’t be– even if you just revise during “normal college hours”, 9am-6pm, that’s nine hours of revision a day. That’s way more than enough, at least for the first semester of biochemistry. No one I know actually revised that much. This leaves a great deal of time for you to keep seeing friends, going out to things, and even to take a day off here and there to go see things in the beautiful city you’re living in. Don’t make your room an island fortress. Go out to the sports night/ACC, head to the union for a pint with your friends, etc. I know people who stopped partying three weeks before exams. Why??? (They were also the most stressed ones!)
2) One of the main methods of revision I found very useful was taking the past papers the lecturers put up online. One caveat, though: If you go way back (e.g. I looked at the 2010 papers), some of the questions will very obviously be things you’ve not been lectured on (e.g. asking you to describe the mechanism of siRNA cleavage when you’ve not even seen nucleic acids). The course evolves quite a significant amount with time and this is reflected in the papers. Two points. One, this effect is less obvious (but just as crucial) when you look at papers only a year or two previous. There will be tiny differences in how a concept is taught that can lead you into thinking you know how to do the problem, realizing you’re missing a bit of knowledge, and getting more stressed because you “don’t know” something. Relax–this particular approach to the concept may very well not have been taught this year! Two, this means that the exam you actually have to sit will almost invariably be the easiest of the papers you see, since every problem on there is guaranteed to be something you’ve specifically seen in a lecture or tutorial.
Phew, enough with the exam stuff! Reading a course at Imperial isn’t about exams, as my new lecturer (more on him later) said, albeit rather less eloquently.
A group of us went to Chinatown during the Chinese New Year festival. London Chinatown proper is actually very small, only about six or so streets in a rough grid. It cannot accommodate the entire united urban population of greater London, as six harrowed and very surprised-looking volunteers and a policeman found out on Sunday.
If receptor-mediated endocytosis can concentrate signal molecules a thousandfold, so too can taiyaki-mediated meatpacking concentrate Londoners to sort of desperately shuffling mass. I got my youtiao, though, so zero [redacted] given.
In other news, we’ve started two new lectures, and I can’t decide which one’s more awesome. Proteins and Enzymes, lectured (unfortunately only for a few lectures) by the indomitable Dr. Byrne, will make you confront your uncomfortably intense feelings for nature’s very own, very perfect nanotechnology. Day two and I’ve already come to terms with the fact that I will probably one day marry an affinity chromatography column. In the other corner of the ring we have Molecular Biology, given by force of nature, born entertainer, and accidental molecular biologist Dave Hartley. I don’t think I’ve ever instantly liked anything or anyone as instantly and permanently as Dave Hartley (except of course affinity chromatography shh shhh baby I’m here for you). “Biochemistry is f***ing difficult.” That’s all, ladies and gentlemen, take it or leave it. Need I say more?
[He reads the molecular biology of the cell textbook on the beach in the Caribbean though]
We have been getting results back from our formative exams/tasks over the past couple of weeks and I recently received this question:
“Dear Mala, I heard that every first year medic fails January exams at Imperial. Is this true because I don’t want to fail. Do first year medics even do any work?”
In short…the pass rate was around 58% in our year. For those of you that don’t know, formatives are basically “mock” tests that we have to gauge how well we are doing so far. They are supposed to give everyone a metaphorical ‘kick up the aorta’ and thus work harder. However, considering we are a month into the term it has been funny to see that this has just not been the case. The never ending excuses we all seem to find to avoid work have built up even though we all “promised we would work harder” this term.
I am sitting here right now procrastinating doing a piece of work that should in theory take me about 20 minutes to finish but has totalled up to over 2 hours so far because I keep getting distracted. This is probably my own fault. I have positioned my laptop in an ideal distraction position- to the left of me lies a box of Lindt chocolates which is perched next to a box of Belgium Marks and Spencer Biscuits. To my right is my nail varnish and the debris of post it notes from my game of post it note snap I played earlier…with myself.
I am also sitting on a swivelly chair…this is disastrous. I spin slightly in the clockwise direction and I am facing…the mirror. If my music is playing loud I may transform abruptly into a professional singer/performer when I catch myself in the mirror. If I swivel on my chair 180 degrees I can make eye contact with my pillow. If we stare at each other for a long enough time then taking a nap will only be a good idea. I also somehow have managed to accumulate a few newspapers that are great to read when you’re “not busy” (cause I can’t say no when Amrit the Metro Man offers me a Metro at Gloucester Road station).
So, anon, even if it may not sound like it… not every medic fails formatives. (I managed to pass formatives. I have even done some work too.) Getting a balance between working and having fun is hard so you should probably go shopping before you come to Imperial and grab yourself a box of post it notes too so that you keep working ‘interesting’.
Time seems to have flown by. It’s kind of strange to think that I’ve been back at uni for three weeks and I still haven’t started lectures… Due to the generous amount of study leave I’ve had, I’ve pretty much been sat at my desk for the past two and a half weeks trying to learn the order in which primates evolved and get my head around Michaelis-Menten kinetics. I can’t lie, I haven’t massively enjoyed my courses so far this academic year and it’s been tough. BUT exams are finally over and on Monday I’m starting my favourite thing ever, the main reason why I chose this subject… cell biology and genetics. Knowing that cell biology is coming next is what has kept me going as I tear my hair out trying to memorise various fungi life cycles and I’m so excited. Cells are my thing. I can’t even tell you how happy I was when I opened my biochemistry exam on Tuesday and found that one of the essay questions was on the Singer-Nicolson fluid mosaic model of the cell membrane.
This is actually a photo of me when I opened my biochem paper.
But I digress. Since I now have a bit more free time I’ve been trying to get out a bit more (man that sounds so sad but I have literally been living at my desk for the past three weeks) and I thought I’d tell you about some of the fun stuff I’ve been up to.
On Thursday night, following the last of my exams, some of us went out to Wafflemeister in South Kensington. I had been planning celebratory waffles with some of my Christian Union buddies for ages and we were going to have a girls night but we ended up bringing most of the CU with us which was awesome. Wafflemeister is pretty great, I would definitely recommend it. I had a cookies and cream flavoured waffle which had mini oreos on it and it was A M A Z I N G. After that we went to the pub where I decided to let my hair down on my first night of freedom from studying… and have a lemonade. Crazy, I know.
On Friday night I decided to culture myself a little and go to a concert with my friend who seems to know everyone in London who is doing interesting music things, so he often has cool concerts to go to
We went to St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate Church near St. Paul’s Cathedral to hear a choir called Londinium. They’re a chamber choir and they did a program of secular French music which I really enjoyed to my suprise! That’s one of the great things about London – there are so many different things going on that you can try out . You might not like what you go to, or you may discover your passion for French choral music. YOU DON’T KNOW TILL YOU TRY.
As for the rest of my weekend, I have finally got round to doing laundry and cleaning my room and tomorrow night I’m going to church as usual but with a special twist – the Bishop of Kensington is going to be there to do baptisms, confirmations and reaffirmations of faith! Can’t wait to be there with my beautiful church buddies (and no doubt eat some beautiful food afterwards)
Between doing all this, I’ve been marathoning Sherlock, drinking tea and doing some filing… It’s not been the wildest of post exam weekends but it has been perfect and I feel so refreshed and ready to get straight in to cell biology on Monday!
The last week has been fun—one of my friends from home came down on Tuesday and we went to see Taylor Swift in the O2! One of the best things about living in London is that you don’t have to force people to come and see you—they come themselves for the attractions and then can sleep on your floor. Taylor, as I now affectionately call her, was brilliant—a very professional performer and though she did talk some rubbish in between her music and dancing she was so compelling about it that I was completely swept along.
Terrible photo of the day award goes to me Yes, we were quite far back! I had to wear my glasses like the cool that I am.
Tubing there was easy—straight from labs to North Greenwich tube station, but unfortunately by the time we were heading home the infamous tube strike of last Tuesday/Wednesday had begun so we and a million other confused pop fans were stranded at the O2. Luckily, our carefully honed D of E skills set in, so we were able to navigate to alcohol and then, eventually home.
Continuing the good news theme, Atomic Physics has finished! Yey! *tiny celebration* It has been replaced by a new lecture course called Soild State, which so far seems to be about crystals and things.
Also I have discovered another physics mystery! In last week’s astrophysics course our lecturer announced that the sun’s temperature gets hotter the further you go away from it, and nobody really knows why.
I planned to elaborate on this, but the summary papers I tried to read are a bit beyond me at the moment (or else the fact they don’t know themselves makes it badly explained, but probably the beyond me thing). The exact problem is that what we think of as the surface of the sun (the photosphere) is about 5800K hot. This is fine, but the sun actually has three more chunks of atmosphere extending beyond that bit, called the chromosphere, the transition region and the corona, which stretch far out into space. The weird thing is that the temperature in the corona reaches 2 million kelvin.
That heat is not coming from the sun’s surface. My favourite second law of thermodynamics says that hot stuff can’t continuously heat up hotter stuff. So where is this energy coming from?
Well, if you read the sort of layman’s section of the NASA website about this topic it says something very intriguing. Most scientists think that the main source of heat comes from the rapidly changing magnetic field lines in this area of space generated by the swirling plasma in the sun. The laws of physics say that magnetic field lines cannot cross, so every time they are about to, something must intervene and rearrange them to stop this occurring, producing heat.
This effect is seen in other stars too, and seems to be more dramatic in those that are spinning faster, which does seem to suggest that the stretching and reshaping of magnetic field lines may have something to do with it.
I will probably have a look at some more papers on this later, because writing that down has made me interested again—but for the life of me I couldn’t tease out any explanation from all the maths that I saw. Hmm. The only thing I really understood was a tentative explanation for why no explanation has yet been found (an excuse in other words). It is likely that the important heating effects seem to happen at all scales—both incredibly large and incredibly small, which are almost impossible to simulate simultaneously on a computer and the small scales hard to observe by satellites.
And so it remains a mystery…
By the way, the histogram I showed you last time has turned out not to be quite as neat as I thought… I am just about to go and finish writing up the experiment, so I will fill you in on the final value of e that I manage to scrabble to.
There have been a few phrases that I have adopted since coming to University and they have been detrimental to my bank account balance and lifestyle choices. ‘I am treating myself‘ or ‘I deserve this’ have been absolutely awful. When I walk into Sainsbury’s and see a large Lindt bar on the shelf calling my name I manage to convince myself I need or deserve a treat…which is never, ever the case.
Another great phrase is ‘you’re only a fresher once’. Because…it’s true. It is an excuse to do pretty much anything ridiculous as you have the excuse that it is all part of a ‘fresher experience’.
However, this week for RAG Week I have had to confront a new phrase: ‘It’s for charity’. This one tugs at the heart strings and has led me to do some ridiculous things this week all in the name of charity.
‘Shall we go out tonight’
Normal reaction- I’m so tired and have important lectures tomorrow.. I can’t.
RAG Week reaction- It’s for charity…why not!
‘Go on stage and have a race to eat a burger covered with Gin with a stranger’
Normal reaction: eww no
RAG Week reaction- It’s for charity…why not!
‘Run around London dressed as a superhero and complete challenges (like interrupting a date and flirting with one of the people on the date).‘
Normal reaction: No, that’s not really acceptable human behaviour?
RAG Week reaction- It’s for charity…why not!
‘Shall we get on the circle line tube, but instead of having a destination we just get off at every stop and go to a pub…and let’s start at 10am.‘
Normal reaction: Do you need help, are you an actual alcoholic?
RAG Week reaction- It’s for charity…why not!
You get the picture… It’s been a great week full of fancy dress and outrageous events. It has been a week full of these ‘excuses’ to do things and I have noticed them more and more as I got to the final few days. I have come to adore and appreciate the phrases and will be sad now that the ‘it’s for charity’ excuse has gone.
However, just remember…if you think you do deserve a treat, you convince yourself you are doing something good for charity or you are just embracing the fresher experience you must be prepared to be in potentially very embarrassing situations (e.g. waking up drunk midweek and proceeding to send drunk videos…to everyone).
P.S. Below please find a Promo Video of a Hot Dog (my friend) being interviewed for Channel 5 during RAG Week…It was for charity.
![IMG_2958[1]](https://blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk/student-blogs/files/2014/02/IMG_29581.jpg)
