Ransen's Blog

I guess they had a 200x, 40Euro, USB microscope (I keep saying that because I find it amazing value). No insects were killed, all found dead or later released. Something that crash landed on a leaf:   Two things found floating in my cat's drinking water: A dead moth found on the stairs, what a lovely curly nose/mouth it's got! ...and what lovely wing textures too... A creepy crawlie found struggling in a puddle of water. This is really Men In Black: Lovely legs and antenna! I released him afterwards. Probably having a drink at a bar on Venus right now.

My family have accused me of turning the bathroom into an operating theatre, because I changed a light bulb. The light in the bathroom contains two bulbs, and for years they have been normal incandescent light bulbs (the type with the coil which glows). One of the pair burned out and I thought I'd so some energy saving so I put in one of those replacement neon lamps, coiled around itself to make it fit in the same space as a normal incandescent lamp. I noticed it had a bluish tinge, but thought nothing of it. There was a small revolution, it was decided by the rest of the family that the neon light made the bathroom look like an operating theatre or mortuary. Every single time that light was switched on I got a "this is a horrible terrible light" comment. Every single time! Eventually I gave in and bought a warm white LED lamp. But why was the neon bulb so badly recieved? I have a spectrometer I use for work, so I decided to look at the sp

I lived in Japan for a total of four years, in the 1980s. I learned 600 kanji, (Japanese ideograms) in those four years. Only 600. That meant I would not have been able to graduate from high school. High school graduates must know the 2000 standard kanji to graduate. And now I can remember maybe 100 and can write maybe 25. But foreign students of Japanese who live in Japan learn some kanji very quickly, like "exit", and "entrance", "restaurant", etc. And some kanji combinations ("phrase" is not the right word) stick in your mind too. This all came back to me on the Milano metro a few days ago when I saw a bloke with some badly copied kanji tatoos... …I looked and looked and was sure that I knew what they meant. I took a surreptitious photo (blurred and shakey as a consequence) so I could look it up when I got back home. But I didn't have to, the meaning of the mysterious kanji just popped back

- What do we want?! - Hearing aids! - When do we want them?! - Hearing aids!

The other day I noticed the dandelions on our lawn were ready to have their seeds blown away by the wind. Aha! Another target for my 40 Euro USB microscope! Look what nature has made...no words needed:

I can't help it, I love clouds and could stare at them for hours. And I think it demeans them to say "oooh, that one looks like a duck and that one looks like a face." They are amazing abstract shapes which exist in reality and don't need a petty narrow "imagination" to force them into something else. I mean, how can anyone not imagine going beyond these huge distant structures into some other world? I saw this scene coming back from work and drove around the block again so I could get a good photo of it. I think it must have something to do with the brain knowing that these things are huge, compared with the trees and other things on the horizon, but it just does not know how huge. And they, in our imagination, do not stop at the horizon, they carry on forever beyond it. It seems. To. Me. And when the huge clouds hang over and beyond a road with a vanishing point, I get the idea that the road could go on forever, again into some new and strange in

...luckily there's a delicious feast right near them.