tallphil

Micro-Heart

Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:17:07 GMT

I was doing some RNA-FISH today and was using some random fluff to find the focal plane when I came across this fella - kind of looks like a heart, no? Except it's about 10µM across (roughly 10,000 times smaller than a human heart)

New Wallpaper

Thu, 20 May 2010 16:56:27 GMT

I don't change my work desktop wallpaper very often, and when I do I'm usually very picky. I spent a while digging around deviantART yesterday and came across a new one by ~pr09studio called It's my turn. Think this one's a keeper...

Colour Schemes

Thu, 20 May 2010 12:46:48 GMT

I've found a couple of nice colour scheme generators lately, I just stumbled across Colour Scheme Designer 3, which takes an established concept (complement, triads etc) but packages it all in a lovely product which is really intuitive - it even allows you to preview the scheme for people with different types of colour-blindness. Another cool tool is Adobe Ideas - an app more for the iPad than the iPhone, it has a tool to automatically generate colour schemes from photographs that works really well. I know I shouldn't until all of my current jobs are finished, but I can't help but find ideas for new websites popping into my head...

I like Internet Explorer 6 because...

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:45:26 GMT

A nice blog post on a (very) nice website designer's website: David DeSandro explains why he likes Microsoft Internet Explorer 6:

I enjoy a good challenge
I like surprises
It makes me think about people who are not like me
It gives us [website designers] bonding power

I have to say, I like how even his blog posts are displayed in an innovative and interesting way...

Riddles

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 22:37:41 GMT

A man goes to bed at night and turns his light off. 12 people died that night as a result... Explain! A lady draws up outside a hotel and parks her car - she immediately realises that she is bankrupt - how?

Cold Snap

Fri, 8 Jan 2010 10:07:15 GMT

We've had some brilliant weather in the UK recently, plenty of opportunities for rally-style handbrake turns on the way to work and lots of snowball fights! The BBC have got a great photo up of Britain covered in snow, seen on the right. You can see their page here.

Fairbairns 2009

Sat, 5 Dec 2009 22:57:36 GMT

Fairbairns is a head race on the river Cam that takes place at the end of Michaelmas term every year. As I had taken the morning off work to race, I headed down to the river a little earlier to see our senior women's VIII row. I remembered to take my camera this time and got a bit trigger happy, taking photos of nearly every crew that went past. You can see the whole lot on flickr and an abridged album of selected shots on facebook. The results of the Fairbairn cup can be found the Fairbairns website.

Hubble's Greatest Hits

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:11:01 GMT

The times have done a nice feature entitled Hubble's greatest hits with some fantastic images up... Well worth a look!

Excessive Celebration

Mon, 9 Mar 2009 16:16:03 GMT

This made me laugh for a long time - the fact that he's doing it to a silent shocked audience makes it even better, and the final shot of the scoreboard is the icing on the cake...

Nappy Cannon

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:19:57 GMT

Fantastic post on b3ta by lustfish today, made me laugh out loud for quite a while... Enjoy! I have a mate. He's a bad influence. When he and I get together, we're positively chaotic. This episode tells of a time shortly after he was blessed with his first child. Sit back and enjoy. So my mate lives on a fairly remote farm. Not served by regular trash pickup, he is quite canny with his rubbish. Once their little crotchfruit came along, however, he and the missus quickly (within three days) tired of terry-towelling nappies, and bought disposables. All was fine for four months. To deal with the disposables, he simply tossed them into a 55-gallon oil drum outside the house. Well, the inevitable happened and one day, the drum was full. This happily coincided with a hot autumn day, a visit from yours truly, and less happily, after quite a lot of beer had been drunk. What to do, what to do? Burying? Nope - not biodegradable. Can't take it to the tip, we're all too pissed. No more drums, so can't start another load. I know; let's burn it! It's, after all, a metal oil drum. That'll work great! Ah, but the drum is full - to the very brim - with sh*tty nappies. So Dumb and Dumber dug out a drill and cut a hole about a foot from the bottom of the drum. We then dribbled, over the course of the next two hours, five (FIVE!) gallons of petrol into the top of the barrel. Then - and we both thought we were SO very clever - we used some detonation cord, and ran it through the hole in the bottom of the drum to light the petrol from the base of the fire. Now - picture this in slow motion - the following things happened. The det cord lit. The burning ACME-like spark travelled prettily along the cord. It vanished into the freshly cut hole in the drum. There was a rumbling sound. That was the oh-no-second. We turned around and began to run. Behind us there was a sort of squishBOOM sound as the tragically explosive mixture of petrol and festering, rancid nappies exploded. So here's what happened next. It turns out that (who knew?) 55-gallon oil drums are stronger than nappies, especially when the top of the drum is missing. When you ignite a tightly packed drum full of nappies from the bottom, you have created a superb nappy cannon. As we found out. After the squishBOOM, there was a louder FLOOOOOOM sound. I looked over my shoulder to see a huge tongue of fire leaping out of the drum, and balls of fire above that. The balls of fire turned out to be flaming, shit filled nappies - which flew about 300 feet into the air and then started raining down on the house, the cars, the tractor, us and everything else. We also found out that stamping on them to put them out isn't nice. The smell was truly incredible. Some of those nappies had been festering throughout a British summer, at the bottom of the nappy cannon. The sound of the molotov shittails thumping down around us, along with the smell of roasting piss, shit and rotten nappy will stay with me forever. The final crowning glory was when his wife came out of the farmhouse, looked around at the still-unfolding carnage, muttered "fucking hell" and went back inside - not knowing that at least 30 flaming balls of shite were setting fire to the roof above her head. We eventually got the fires put out, with not too much damage to property, but I was banned for a LONG time.