Bipolarity and spectrums.

Bipolar.

It's a rather self explanatory term, used to indicate that something has two distinct and - usually - opposite aspects.

It's also a diagnosis. Since the diagnosis has become popular, it seems that the word itself has suffered rather. I am, I should note, bipolar. What I am not is pathologically bipolar.

The distinction comes - as you must have known to would - in statistics. So we have to start by establishing our sample; the whole planet.

You see, to say that the whole planet is bipolar means more than that the Earth itself has both a North and South end (although being only barely off-spherical, the earth physically speaking does not really have poles... it's only because of the weather and magnetism that we can really identify the points of convergence of positively charged ions and lines of longtitude...

Where was I? Oh yes, the whole planet is bipolar. I refer here, in an intentionally confusing (and, if you think about it, rather inaccurate) manner, to the entire human population (although many of my arguments apply to a diversity of related lifeforms, too).

Humans, bags of meat, salt and water, exist in a state of "Homeostasis", and we are kept in this state by the fact that we die if we leave it. As such, evolution has prolonged the lives of humans that are better at maintaining homeostasis, with the result that we are, on the whole, now very good at it.

The only trouble about homeostasis is that it sounds as though we exist at a comfortable  "zero deviation from ideal". In practice, we're almost never actually at zero, but, should we start sprinting away from it in any given direction, the various squidgy bits (technical term) inside us pull the other way with all their might, and we spring back with almost as much speed in the opposite direction, and then back again when our body corrects for that overshoot, in ever decreasing swings of the pendulum until something else sends us rocketing off in a new direction.

This brings me to an interesting point about hormones. They come, broadly speaking, in pairs: uppers and downers. Adrenaline and Noradrenaline (or Epinephrine/Norepinephrin if you really must) are the classic example (and, more to the point, the only two that I can confidently talk about. Physiology and Pharmacology was a LONG time ago). One brings you up and, to make sure that you don't do yourself too much damage, the other one sits in its receptors and says "No. This is an intervention. You're above normal levels, and I'm not leaving until you calm down."

Except without the speaking.

The point - which was supposed to be short - is that the way our bodies are designed means that they fluctuate around the ideal, and never really get time to settle on the ideal before something else comes along and sets us off.





As a result, an awful lot of human - and wider - traits are best defined by spectrums. If you want to be statistical about it - and I really do, because it's much easier than borrowing a psychiatry word that is designed to talk about light - a magical bell curve exists for every single trait. A lot like this:






And, to anyone who wishes to point out that Microsoft Paint has a handy function where you can write words in typeface on your bitmaps, I know. But I'm at the hardcore end of the pro-choice spectrum. Labelled here as "Really odd people".

This is, by the way, a perfectly PC description, because the proper name for a bell curve is a normal curve, because it represents the distribution of a trait within a "normal" population - normally, a lot of people are normal, but it's also very normal for a smaller number of people to be odd, and an even smaller number of people to be very odd. The squiggly line in the yellow area is there to point out that there is no clear point where "normal" ends and "odd" begins.

The point - which is at the end of a very squiggly (another technical term) argument, is that for there to be a normal, there must be an odd and a really odd, and something in between.

In human traits, the things we diagnose are the "really odd", because they're either potentially dangerous (to society and/or an individual) or because we think they're really awesome and people should know that they're fanta-pants-fantastic (e.g. MENSA people).

This is why a lot of modern psychiatry scores people on a scale. Bearing in mind that I am a hypochondriac, I score:

43 on this bipolar depression test online (moderate to severe bipolar depression... but it's an online test, and like British meteorologists post Michael Fish, they tend to overstate. That's what I tell myself, anyway).

63 on the same websites depression test (severe depression).

37 on the Autism Quotient (very high).


Which are all some distance from the maximum, and some distance from the normal. Am I clinically any of these things? No. I am fully capable of carrying on functioning and, as much as I have bad days (emerging from the job centre and finding lying my head under the moving wheel of a passenger bus a comforting mental image), the chances of me harming myself or anyone else intentionally are at virtually nil.

I fall on the skinny-but-not-anorexic end of the bell-curve. (not bodywise. I fall on the healthy-weight-but-could-cut-down-on-the-starbursts end, there). If my traits were an actress, they'd be Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal - thin, but not to such an extent that you wonder if they're skipping meals.

Which brings me - finally - to my ORIGINAL point (as opposed to the many little points that have popped up the whole way through): I am bipolar, autistic, and on occasion depressed, and I wish that psychiatrists could sodding well learn that when they diagnose someone with one of these, they mean that the person is CLINICALLY or PATHOLOGICALLY bipolar, autistic, depressed, etc. ...






BECAUSE WITHOUT THAT, THEY'RE JUST ADJECTIVES. 


Adjectives that it is my human right (well... ) to use as appropriate. 

And if one more person with a Clinically/Pathologically Bipolar, Paranoid, Depressed, Autistic - or other - friend or relative gets all antsy with me for describing myself as bipolar, paranoid, depressed or autistic, I will ask for their psychiatrist's number and verbally abuse the offending doctor.

Actually I won't because I'm non-confrontational. 

To tell the truth, the majority of people who got antsy because I was "misusing" the adjectives were either a) My sister; b) people writing articles with the opposite message to this one; c) fictional characters in TV shows/films or  d) my own fictional representations of the public. So it may be that I'm attacking a straw man.   

Which is not the point.  

Je suis un volunteer... humide.

It's not in French, just so you know... and the title just means "I am a damp volunteer".

Which is true.

I've been volunteering lately... which for someone who is not naturally generous, is a big step.

And for someone who is generally a little bit scared of people (not pathologically), it's a VERY big step.

Well, not so much at Brent Lodge, the local (awesome) animal hospital. They have a fox that likes to sit in a little tree. Which is hilarious beyond compare.

As well as Brent Lodge, I've been a-volunteering at Barnardos (at least three days of actual volunteering, more than that including days going in as a volunteer and filling out the associated paperwork).

I've volunteered once at Age UK. Unlike Barnardos, they had me straight in doing stuff... which has its positives, in that you feel useful straight away, but also has its negatives, in that you're basically "Hi, I'd like to volunteer," and they're "Great, there's the toilet, there's the steamer, there's the till. Have fun!" and you're basically "AAARGH MY BRAIN IS MELTING!"

But with less teenagerish use of the word basically.

I think my feet have developed hypothermia, by the way. On the long (Well... fifteen minutes if you are a normal person, six if you're me) walk from Barnardos to the train station, there was a thunderstorm. Which was awesome.

And the puddles had begun to join up into a meta-puddle.

Which was awesome.

And I was wearing converses.

Which was less awesome.

One train ride, Pasty, asparagus cup-a-soup and flop onto bed later, and my feet are distinctly chilly.

Which is irrelevant. But then so is this entire post.


But never mind, because my brain has fallen out and I've got to fill out an application form for the Co-op AND the (only?) registration form for Age UK before tomorrow...

Nergh. I'm going to play computer games now and panic about that closer to the end of today.

And... Finished! Huzzah!

So, having just complained that I am a flake that can't meet deadlines...

I've finished the Microeufs animation (Youtube viewing here ). I am awesome beyond compare, etc, etc, but I still have to go and sign on tomorrow and point out that the leaflet does actually say that volunteering is encouraged because it expands your CV.

Anyhoo, I'm going to make with the embedding (and quickly, because the internet will probably be turned off shortly):

Wahey, embedded!


It's simpler than the Merde song, also it's in English (by the way: Microeufs/Microeufs = Litigation avoiding term for the awesomeness that is Cadbury's Mini-eggs and also happens to fry my brain...)


That's all, folks!


Smivel.

Animation progress - with sneak preview/teaser

I don't work well with deadlines.


Not even self imposed ones.


I should have learnt this a while ago when working on the second in a (not really readable) sequence of books. I told the interested parties (although not very interested, as it turns out) that the second and final part would be done by march that year, because based on previous work and current rate of progress, that was when I expected to have it finished.

Six (or possibly seven) years later, I've lost interest, left it unfinished for two years, lost the file for another year and then found and deleted it. The awful first book remains the only one in its series, with no hope of being joined by any further drivel about angst, werewolves and space travel (I was a teenager. It happens to us all at some point).

The point is not the awful book. The point is deadline fail. .

When I finished animating the critically acclaimed (slight exaggeration for dramatic effect) foreign language short "That Merde Song" (here), which pokes fun at pop artists who sing in foreign languages by sounding like catchy eurotrash while being about a soiled bicyle, I assured the composer that I would have completed the animation for our second video within a couple of weeks.

This was not unrealistic. The second animation is infinitely simpler, consists of only three scenes and tends to have only one element moving at any given time (even if repeated). This is as opposed to the afore-mentioned That Merde Song, which consists of:

• A twenty second intro depicting two dung flies discoving that they were made for each other only to have their hearts broken, Joss Whedon style...
• A twenty-four frame loop and a six-frame loop playing at different speeds for the first two choruses, including sixteen frames where a character's mouth in synched to the music, and several overlaid frames of an asynchronous villain character.
• A first verse divided into three scenes: a) a Lowry-inspired computer-generated cityscape with two moving characters, one of which sings; b) a close up of said character singing and c) a fairly awesome black-and-white parody of Munch's "The Scream", with one character singing.
• A second verse divided into three completely different scenes: 1) two rabbits discussing the title theme; 2) A theologically interesting meme-duck and 3) a character singing while being complimented by an ASDF-inspired stereotyped frenchman (Eiffel Tower included) who then starts smoking before the entire landscape is covered in custard.
• A third chorus integrating the six-frame loop and an asynchronous villain character.
• A short scene on the birth of a burlesque sausage (No idea why...)
• A final chorus set to a Clint Eastwood-esque Wild West showdown between singer and villain, including close ups of two very disparate weapons firing...

Point is, it wasn't simple.
Hence the underlining.

The current project (well, the main current project) is a much simpler hybrid of an ASDF tribute and a campaign for year-long access to Easter-themed Cadbury's Projects. It really should have been doable within a day. If my computer wasn't full up of 60GB or thereabouts of photographs, not to mention hundreds of redundant Windows features and several independent programs.

Even without that, a week was pretty generous. And I finished the main animations within that period (roughly). But the bookends have been stalling... stalling... stalling... and I've taken up Sporcle... and a wierd Risk-style game on my computer... and volunteering... and basically I've been doing everything and anything to put it off.

But, yesterday evening I felt like doing some animation.

And now it's almost finished.

And so, because you are my loyal nonexistent readers, I thought I'd give you a special sneak preview before it goes up on Youtube (whenever that happens). Sound effects and so forth still need a little work on their timing.

Enjoy this 15 second intro.

And if you work for Cadbury, tell them that I really like Mini-Eggs and want them all year round.

Smivel and spread the word that I am awesome beyond compare. For a flake.

Brave - Reviewdom

So I was going to write about age-based discrimination (and will probably follow with a short post on it) but I realised that I hadn't revied the awesome Brave yet. 

BRAVE

                 -Disney/Pixar,
                 -conceived by Brenda Chapman,
                 -directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman.


The first thing I have to say is that it doesn't remotely seem 93 minutes long, which has two implications 1) at no point is the plot uninteresting and 2) You leave feeling a tiny bit cheated because it was over so soon.

This possibly has something to do with a short animation (a delightful little piece entitled "La Luna") at the beginning, which accounts for about ten minutes of that running time, not to mention that credits always take much longer for animated features. But La Luna is worth seeing (7/10 at least), and Brave isn't all that short... it just finishes before you're prepared to leave.

The premise:

Our heroine, the fiesty Scottish Merida, who is also a princess, considers it grossly unfair that she has to get married just because otherwise her peaceful land will be torn asunder by war. This seems a little brattish, but we soon meet the suitors, whereupon we instantly forgive her.

Anyway, Merida picks up on the fact that her father is more interested in belching, role-play and hunting bears than he is in actually keeping the kingdom afloat, and thereby deduces that it is because of her mother, Queen Elinor (Shock, horror, a Disney flick with a living mother???). She quickly offends almost everyone present by ably demonstrating that anything men can do, she can do better, and with the assistance of teenage hormones and her lovable horse Angus, she storms out of the castle to have a private rant. 

The rest of the basic premise is pretty standard - she looks for a quick fix to her problems, it all goes horribly wrong and everyone learns something about themself in the process. But, in fairness to Brenda Chapman's story, no plotline is really original when you break it down to a single sentence. 

The finer details...

The major focus of this film - in a break from both Pixar's and Disney's general ideas - is the mother-daughter dynamic. As is Pixar's trademark, though, there are very few points in the film where the major focus is the only thing happening, and it does its best to make you laugh, cry and think all at the same time. 

Kelly Macdonald and Emma Thompson (Merida and Elinor, respectively) dominate the plot, and, in good old Disney fashion, their performances are perfect. Billy Connolly and Julie Walters, despite having a lot less to do with the plot directly, both voice very memorable characters that entertain without upstaging the main pair. Characters gain depth and fallibility within just a few lines, as much from the well though-out script as from animation so fluid that you can almost forget that it's not real.

I have to tell you that bears feature. This is shown in the trailer, so I don't consider it a major spoiler, but it needs to be said anyway because of the quality of the animation. It is extraordinary.

Forget Sulley's fur in Monsters, Inc. and the sea anemones in Finding Nemo (based on Sulley's fur) - they were ingenious and groundbreaking, yes, but they have nothing on this. The animators for Sulley, for those of you who don't know, went to extraordinary lengths to make the lovable monster's long hair look realistic - an onorous task which entailed animating thousands of individual hairs to respond to position and environment. In Brave, the animators have produced hair which is long enough to respond to environmental influences such as the wind, water etc, but short enough that it also shows the movement of flesh underneath this. And it is incredibly realistic.

Overall, it is the incredibly attentive animation that forces the viewer to take the plot seriously, and unlike many animations, make it easy for even older viewers to forget that the danger is imaginary. 

Any further ado will inevitably lead to spoilers, which I don't consider a good thing, so let's get straight to the scores:


Visuals: 10/10, although - as it moves the bar upwards - probably 11/10 when compared to any previous animation.
Writing: 8/10 - most of it was beautifully original, and it certainly flowed like a 10, but some details of the plot were annoyingly predictable.
Voice Acting: 10/10, easily. Accents were either real or pulled off beautifully, some complex vocal work was done and every emotion written was expressed precisely in the voice.
Score: 10/10. A touch of celtic goodness kept it out of the land of cliches for a Disney score, but still managed to create the mood and set the scene just as required.

so, Overall: 9.5 (brilliant)

I should, however, draw your attention to the fact that if you watch films just for the plot, you're looking at an 8/10 - very good, but not brilliant.

Volunteering... animal shelter.

Wildlife shelters are wierd.

I say this not because I consider it odd to want to save animals that have become injured by modern society and thereafter retard the species evolution by returning these injured animals to the wild. As a general rule, I do not believe that animal shelters do retard evolution for two major reasons:

1) In the UK, most species handled are either city-thriving species that have already adapted to modern life or at such low numbers that as many animals as possible have to be kept going, regardless of genetic quality just to prevent Allee* effects.

2) The bulk of animals treated in these animal shelters are birds and mammals, which are indisputably able to learn from their own mistakes and - in many cases - have also been proven capable of learning from the mistakes of others. Thus Action A, if followed by pain and stress, will be avoided in the future even if the animal survives.

Be that as it may, Wildlife shelters are awash with paradoxes:

1) Human hospitals smell of two things (in my experience) - Disinfectant and bodily fluids, even on non-surgical . With all the herring-gulls, ducks, pigeons and hedgehogs distributing their business as far and wide as possible, you'd expect that the predominant smells in the shelter would be similar. But instead, it smells of disinfectant and food (as far as you can call the cat-food that hedgehogs seem to love above all else "food").

2) When you open a cage, there is no way of saying how you'll feel after you've cleaned it, weighed the resident and closed the door. A mangy little hedgehog with no fur can be happy and hyper and quite definitely planning on living, and you'll leave (and scrub your hands) with a huge smile on your face from the adorable little zombie... while a larger hedgehog with a very positive history can have suddenly decided not to drink and losing weight at a rate of knots, and you feel like you're going to throw up just seeing it fade.

3) When someone walks through the door with a box, you're heart goes up and down at the same time. You can't wait to see this new and exciting animal, but then, of course, this new and exciting animal has to have been injured in some way (most probably by idiots with guns and/or dogs).

4) You can be the shallowest, least philosophical git on the surface of the planet (me) and you'll still feel obliged to find flowery euphemisms for death afterwards.


It's made me feel really good and really awful at the same time.


I conclude - it's wierd.

I plan to go again. 





*To put it simply, Allee effects come in when organisms cross a critical threshold and, although they are present throughout a large environment, their chances of finding a mate before they get eaten/expire are effectively nil, so the population rapidly dwindles and disappears

Volunteering in Conversation Rant

This one is a bit personal. 

So I suppose we need to actually talk about me.


I'm not just unemployed. I have aspirations. I have plans. I even have dreams (see my rather unrealistic to do list...). And - as much as I may joke about the impossibility of it - the core of it is that I sat through genetics lectures in order to get enough credits to keep learning a bit more about conservation. Because I love wildlife, and I love nature, and would really like to conserve it.


Then we get to the part with my s***ty dissertation. It was poor topic, more than regulation hours of lab work, and far too small a sample for there to be more than a fractional chance that anything of interest would be found. This didn't put me off, until my statistics showed me that actually I'd found something quite useful, but that unhelpful voice reassured me that nothing would ever come of an undergraduate dissertation. So I had a low patch and effectively self-sabotaged, turned in an atrociously under-written dissertation and as a result missed a good grade by 1.2%.


The result of this is that - in order to progress any further in academia, I really have to have some practical experience (not to mention money). Apparently self-directed practical experience from 22 years analysing the differences between the degraded UK environment and the rapidly degrading central african environment doesn't count. The best thing to do, or so I'm told, is volunteer.

And here lies the point which I want to discuss.

The UK's version of conservation sucks. Yes, their protective laws are groundbreaking, and their capacity for enforcement of laws is brilliant, but they seem to have forgotten that nature exists. It doesn't help that a lot of conservation organisations - home and away - are actually run by hunters who want to conserve nature in such a way that makes it easier to shoot (bluntly), but environments are overmanaged.

It is a garden state and many "pro-conservation" people firmly believe that maintaining the patchwork of farmland is important because the countryside has to be in use. They also can't seem to grasp that a healthy ecosystem is self regulating and, by controlling any native organism, you are reducing the food of its natural predator and thereby causing yourself to need to keep controlling.

Heathlands - which are a species rich but transitional habitat - are over-maintained. Naturally it would appear when woodland burns, and disappear once soil recovered and a bad season limited grazer numbers enough for trees to recover. But grouse are easier to shoot on open ground, so charities maintain vast areas of open moorland and heathland because the landowners have had centuries to instill in us that trees will destory the habitat.

Broadleaf forest - which naturally covers more-or-less all of the dry land in the country and thus regulates rainfall - is all but gone. Where it's not gone, the forestry commision has "dangerous" trees removed - that is to say, old trees which are becoming hollow and thus perfect for woodpeckers, bats and countless beetles. Dead wood is gathered up, and all our decomposers are disappearing as a result - or moving on to live plants (slugs being a notable example of an animal that, in the absence of its primary food source, become a major pest).

Waterways have been straightened and cleared, and I have actually seen parks noting their good work in clearing trees along banks where they were outshading other vegetation. Because, you know, that won't reduce soil stability and increase runoff and stifle the life within the pond/lake at all. Straighter waterways are maintained because it "reduces flooding risk" - my arse. It creates a flood/drought cycle instead: water runs fast down hills, creating flash-floods on the flats which, not dampened by bends, can become dangerous. On a small island, it gets to the sea quite quickly, and heads off into the channel leaving us parched for the rest of the year.

Britain is also the only country I know of where the vast majority of nature reserves are actually in use as grazing land.

Because "that's what the ecosystem needs".

Many of our ecosystems, such as heathland and some areas of downland, do benefit from low-intensity grazing. You can tell low intensity grazing because the grass isn't clipped right down to the earth in such a way that one good day of rainfall washes everything away. High intensity grazing creates a disturbed habitat which is about as species-rich as astroturf, and only slightly more natural.

And everyone says "you should get involved".

As an entry level volunteer, you don't really have any opportunities to innovate, change and sent things in a less ridiculously counter-productive direction. As an entry level volunteer in UK conservation, the best you can hope for is that your contribution doesn't do much extra damage.


Okay, rant over. Point is, I'm going to volunteer at a charity shop instead until I can get paid work at a zoo because frankly, they encourage wildlife a shedload better than british nature reserves do.

In Love and Zombies...

Bit of a random (surprise?) and quite a short (hooray!) one today... 


Let me start by saying that I find liberated intellectuals highly attractive.


To break that down, for me to be attracted, someone typically has to check these two boxes:


             1) They defy gender stereotypes.

             2) They eat knowledge for breakfast.



Being bat-shit crazy helps, but I'm not sure I actually know anyone who isn't, on some level, bat-shit crazy, so I don't think it's necessary to put it up there.



There are a lot more women/girls out there fitting these rigorous expectations than you might expect. And probably about sixty percent of the ones I've been lucky enough to meet don't treat me like an idiot for having a sense of humour, so the question remains as to why I have not yet seduced and married one of them before moving to Australia and having lots of sex and babies...


Yesterday, I finally worked it out. 


In a typical romance, there are a number of ways of expressing affection:

                 1) Asking on dates.

                 2) Paying for dinner.

                 3) EPS (Excess public slobbering).

                 4) Purchasing of flowers.

                 5) Purchasing of jewellery.

                 6) Going on holiday together.

                 7) Watching romantic DVDs together.

                 8) A nice bottle of wine.

                 9) A slow dance.

...and so forth until proposal. 

For me, expressing affection is much simpler. On the way to finding myself attracted to someone,  there is a point where my I decide that they are awesome, and as soon as that happens, one of two sentences is going to be randomly chosen and blurted out of my mouth without any input from me:

             1) "I want to eat your brain."

         2) "I want your brain on a stick."


What's most worrying - infinitely more than anyone that I am ever interested in thinking that I was raised in a Papua New Guinean tribe - is that on some very basic level I actually think like that.

Awesomeness = Yummy brains.

I really do need to find some way around this.

Now go forth and smivel without getting Cruetzfeldt-Jakob's Disease...

Rejection, Failure... My life continues.

So, lately a few good things have happened to me:

1) I passed my driving theory (thank you, Pearson Vue and your distinctly odorous Portsmouth offices)

2) I learned that I would not incur charges on my overdraft unless I was still in it in November (Thank you, Halifax and your double-sent letters).

3) I got out of my overdraft (Thank you, Dole... I think).

4) My father sent me details of this awesome volunteering post that has become available in the centre of the universe (= thank you, immediate paternal ancestor).

5) I got a nice macro of a Conopid fly (Physocephala rufipes) in the garden, having never even seen a live conopid before (Conopids: bizarre nectar-feeding flies which seem to be related to hoverflies, with elongated antennae and larvae which are endoparasites of various bees, wasps etc): here is a quick and half-hearted edit of it especially for you:

and

5) The evil monstrous hearless nice bitch cow devil-woman lady at the pit of despair job centre was not horrible the second time I saw her.


Unfortunately, the bad things keep happening:

1) I remain utterly unemployed.

2) I am only out of my overdraft because I am on the dole, which is increasinly making me want to die.

3) For some obscure reason, the government thinks I would make a good juror. I thought this was a good (or at least interesting)  thing until I realised that a) it means that I cannot apply for anything overseas because I would then have to return halfway through and irk my employer right out of their socks and b) if any of the stuff I have applied for overseas says yes (unlikely, I admit) I'll have to explain that I now can't, unless they feel like postponing my start date.

4) Two jobs that I had applied for which were local and unambitious (so I thought I had a good chance) have turned me down.

5) I have to see the dragon lady on 9.11 (American style date to make the point that although I am in the UK, I have an appointment with a monster lady on the eleventh anniversary of an event that makes me feel petty for being miserable).

6) I do not handle rejection well and as a direct result of having two rejections in one "send and receive", I am having to drink copious amounts of tea to remain even remotely functional.

7) My best friend has buggered of to Bath to do some singing for a week. Which means that my life is in dire need of comic relief.



I want to have some sudden inspiration as to how to see these things in a positive light... but currently I lack any inspiration and require more tea. 


I'm going to watch Kiwi! on youtube in order to feel more tragic... is this logical?


And then I'm going to daydream about being Australian.

Smivel

Aeroplanes... and more...

CnH(2n+2) + (2n+1/2)O2 >>>>> nCO2 + (n+1)H20

Alright, so it's a bit vague, and the format's all wrong, but hopefully the chemically minded get the gist...

It's the (organic) chemistry of combustion of basic hydrocarbon (alkane) chains. The CnH(2n+1) is the hydrocarbon chain, or - more tangibly (names are simplest isomers from Butane up. Longer chains = more isomers, but end result of combustion remains the same)

C1H(2x1 + 2)        =  CH4        =  Methane
C2H(2x2 + 2)        =  C2H6      =  Ethane
C3H(2x3 + 2)        =  C3H8      =  Propane
C4H(2x4 + 2)        =  C4H10    =  Butane
C5H(2x5 + 2)        =  C5H12    =  Pentane
C6H(2x6 + 2)        =  C6H14    =  Hexane
C7H(2x7 + 2)        =  C7H16    =  Heptane
C8H(2x8 + 2)        =  C8H18    =  Octane
C9H(2x9 + 2)        =  C9H20    =  Nonane
C10H(2x10 + 2)     =  C10H22  =  Decane
C11H(2x11 + 2)      =  C11H24  =  Undecane

And so on and so forth into infinity (well...)

These are also known as paraffins, and are found in most of our oil-based fuels. As a general rule, the thicker the fuel, the longer the chains.

What is the reason for someone who walked out of sixth-form chemistry three weeks before the finals to start talking organic chemistry, you ask?

Jet fuel. 


Jet fuel is a petroleum based fuel, and (although for some reason a lot of people think it's benzene, the wonderful ring hydrocarbon of awesomeness and ourobouros that brightens up every AS-level organic chemistry paper...) it is composed almost entirely of a variety of these simple hydrocarbons (again, keyword Alkane, because sooner or later I'm going to forget that not everyone knows that word).

In burning any alkane, we have the formula I opened with:

CnH(2n+2) + (2n+1/2)O2 >>>>> nCO2 + (n+1)H20

 To give this context, lets talk about methane. With just one carbon, it's the simplest, 

To burn methane, we need one molecule of methane and two and a half of oxygen gas (this is a theoretical burning, so we can have half of a molecule), and we'll produce one molecule of carbon dioxide and two of water. 

So in burning methane (getting swiftly to the crux of this matter) you produce half as many carbon dioxide molecules as you produce water.


At this stage you may well wonder where I'm going with this. 

It ends up at jet trails. And it's less convoluted than you might expect. 


If you burn ethane, with two carbons, you end up producing two carbon dioxides for every water molecule.

Propane produces 3 carbon dioxide, four water. (75%)

Butane produces 4 carbon dioxide, five waters. (


And so it follows. For every Carbon chain you burn, you produce one more water molecule than you produce carbon dioxide.


Now, it may interest you to know that, at fixed temperature and pressure, one mole of any gas occupies the exact same amount of space as another.

This is useful because a mole is a numerically-derived unit, which we can divide by about 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to get to the statement:

"one molecule of any gas at a fixed temperature and pressure takes up exactly the same amount of space".

Now comes the jet fuel/jet trails bit.

The jet trail is formed by water molecules in fuel emissions being spewed out into the pretty-cold atmosphere, where the sudden temperature drop causes them to condense and form clouds. 

While there is a fair amount of Diana Rossing (chain reactions in me-speak) leading to the formation of what eventually becomes a cirrus cloud, while the trail is still a clear line leading from the tail end of the jet, it's still composed mostly of the water from the jet's own burning fuel. 

This is all very exciting, of course.

Along with this water, comes fractionally less of carbon dioxide, taking up fractionally less space. In the best case scenario, with the burning of methane, there is half as much carbon dioxide you can't see being spewed into the sky as there is water that you can see (because it condenses). 

Methane is the best case scenario, and a very unrealistic one at that. In widely used jet fuels, ratios vary but chain lengths hover between 5 and 16 - so CO2 to water ratios at the plane-end hover between 5/6 (83.3%) and 16/17 (94.1%).



So for every jet-trail of rapidly-condensed water vapour across the sky, there's more than three-quarters that volume of carbon dioxide being spewed out, too.


Which, regardless of your stance on global warming, is really quite alarming. 




Go forth and smivel wisely. And cut back on air travel if you'd like coasts to stay roughly where they are...





P.S - This all came about while I was on the train, on the way to my driving theory test (which I aced, by the way), and trying to count the jet-trails etched across Hampshire's blue sky (which I failed to do. And I'm not mathematically impaired). Hampshire's airports combined wouldn't be expected to handle the volume of a recognised international airport such as Heathrow, Gatwick or the likes. Just so y'all know.

Olympic Closing Ceremony review... from BBC HD coverage.

It sucked.

The sound technician should be beaten with sticks for completely failing to do anything remotely resembling his job. 

In no particular order, these bits were the bits that, on their own, would have got marks slightly more than 3/10.

1) Boris Johnson waving a large piece of flammable material close to an open flame and potentially sparking an international conflict: 8/10 (Boris just gets voted in as mayor so that we can rely on free standup at the end of any major event). 

2) Eric Idle and his completely random dancers: 6/10 - it made no sense, but it was colourful and I may have laughed a little.

3) The Spice Girls (I'm so ashamed) - 8/10. Much as I hate to put crappy celebrities up there with the Boris, they were - unusually - making less about themselves and just playing their (awful) music as though they had a good sense of humour. Infinitely more enjoyable than expected, but that might have been because all the stars that people wanted to see were... not there.

4) Jessie J and "Queen" with... I can't even remember. Because it was less of a let-down than realising that neither David Bowie nor Kate Bush would actually be present, but instead some wierd people would do something symbolic yet completely irrelevant while their music played. 5/10 
[(also entertaining because it ran at the same time as my discovery that: a) My sister did not know who John Lennon was; b) She thought he died recently; and c) she didn't know that Freddie Mercury was dead (and yet has every Queen song ever on her computer)]

5) The bit at the beginning where there was an interesting set which was on screen for what, three minutes? Meanwhile a reliant robin was exploded by an amusing but tired Italian Job quote and Stomp was being entertaining (but seemed as though they were lid-synching). 6/10



And now, because the thing that we Brits do best (apart from the rest of the olympics) is moan, these were the very worst bits of the ceremony...

1) Beady Eye being so awful that for a moment I thought they were actually a cheesy cover band of Oasis. 1/10 (mark for showing up at all)


2) The sound technician being so bad at his job that you couldn't even hear half the acts. (Annie Lennox, Emili Sandé and the Who all seemed to be singing without a real microphone. Kaiser Chiefs were also difficult to hear, not sure if that's a bad thing, though). 0/10 for mucking up so many other things that could have been at least half decent otherwise.

3) The moment when you realised that the tap-dancing sound wasn't actually coming from Renato Sorriso's feet, but canned on the speakers. 2/10 for having such great choreography but faking it (the rest of the Brazil stuff gets a 5 or a 6, I'm not sure)

4) Fatboy Slim DJing when the octopus was infinitely more interesting and, frankly, a bit of Mighty Boosh, David Bowie or perhaps Yoko Ono's severed head would have been a more appropriate centrepiece to it. 3/10 because at least the sound was working and the octopus had so very much potential. 

5) George Michael being on stage at the beginning and by his turning up assuring us that it could only get better when it didn't, really. 0/10 because he seemed to think that it was all about him and it never seemed to end...

6) The exploding tightrope dummy. Just.... made no sense... why??? 2 points for randomness, -1 for lack of closure = 1/10.


One good thing about the awful ceremony was that the dull Belgian man (Jacques Rogge) who seems to turn up at all these ceremonies and talk into amusingly shaped microphones for too long seemed interesting by comparison. 

And the final thing that I am very pleased with is that I said during the ceremony that it seemed an appropriate transition from the public-spirity goodness of the Olympics, focusing on all those people acheiving greatness through hard work, to the typical UK grimy, cheesy, unimpressive celebrity culture, underwhelming events and mind-numbing dullness. Today, quite a few reviewers seem to agree. Not least the awesome Lynne Truss.

I have considered the possibility that the off-the-mark feel of the closing ceremony was an intentional but tongue in cheek reference to public expectations for the olympics, but I doubt it. 




It isn't really worth lynching Kim Gavin over, and Yoko Ono's hugely irrelevant Lennonface (ungraded) is not worth decapitating her for (and the piece could have been hilarious if it was a massive Lennonface-palm instead). But after the sheer awesomeness of the rest of the Olympics, it felt like it had been rushed together with no real thought, and as though Mr Bean had been asked to handle the artistic direction and forgotten to hire a choreographer.

Personal Statement Part ii... the elimination round.

So, having got past the "I hate me, how do I say that nicely in a personal statement?" part (here, in case you're interested),  I now have to find some way to whittle down the nauseating string of positive adjectives into a personal statement.



Based on the adjectives that I managed to twist out of my self loathing, I could say that I am an organised, committed, creative, engaging, positive, outgoing, flexible, contemplative, observant, unbiased, tolerant, reflective individual who is independent and happy to instigate, but good at taking a back seat, confident but constantly striving for self improvement and open to criticism, passionate and enthusiastic but having perspective, taking a balanced view, knowledgeable and with a thirst for knowledge, assertive with good prioritising skills and attention to detail, looking for work in the environmental sector with a long-term view of furthering my higher education.

But that is long, boring and wordy. Not that I'm in a position to, but I wouldn't hire someone so... immodest. In fairness, if I was a recruiter (which I am not), I would prefer to hire someone who put no personal statement because they feel that singing one's own praises is trite and - more importantly - vain.

I feel slightly unwell. And the point of the exercise is to feel better about myself, not to want to vomit on myself.

Because of the way that I  came up with these adjectives (which is far too long to go into within brackets) some of these words are redundant. The next task, then, is to group associated and/or interchangeable words:





positive
knowledgeable / engaging

contemplative / reflective
observant / attention to detail / organised


flexible/ independent / happy to instigate / creative / good prioritising skills
confident / assertive / outgoing

flexible / tolerant / good at taking a back seat


tolerant / open to criticism / striving for self improvement
committed / passionate / enthusiastic / thirst for knowledge

having perspective / taking a balanced view / unbiased

You may notice that flexible and tolerant are both included twice: flexible because it says that I can lead or follow (independent or taking a back seat), tolerant because it says that I can take leadership and advice (taking a back seat and open to criticism.

So the next step is to try and make sure it doesn't sound cliche. 

Let's get rid of:

Positive - in the current economic climate, it says a lot about you that you can spend 8 months unemployed and stay positive, but it's a little bit... peripheral.

Attention to detail - I was on a "how to get employed" course a while ago (can you tell it didn't work?) and one of the words that everyone used and it annoyed me that the lovely instructor didn't pick up on was "Attention to detail." I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that out of the five other people there, all of them included "Attention to detail" on their draft personal statements.

Of the two remaining, observant and organised... organised is not something to boast about. It's either required or not required, and you're not expected to apply for administrative posts if you're not organised. Stating the obvious in such an application might make them question whether you are actually organised. Well, if they were me.

So that's out.

(Do bear in mind that recruitment agencies use the most twattish thing ever to sift through CVs - automated keyword searches. And guess what? Automated keyword searches ignore the people that have used more original language and go for the drones. However, quite where in your CV the word is doesn't matter to the bot, so it could be an idea to put spare/commonly used words... between the lines*)

Between contemplative and reflective, I would tend towards contemplative. Reflective conjures images of someone daydreaming philosophies in the back of biology class. It's out.

Because they are a little less wound, the "independent" words are difficult to get rid of. Independent itself is again, a bit of a cliche and (I think I recall hearing) has gained a sort of stigma as it may mean that someone is impossible to get on with. It's out. Good prioritising skills feels like organised - if you're applying for a position where you have to prioritise, and you're saying you can lead, it's pretty much assumed that you know where you stand on getting the cake out of the oven or the baby out of the burning building. And less cut-and-dry cases. It's gone. 

Flexible is generally a useful one to keep in, and creative I'm going to hold onto as it's a little bit outside of the "independent" box. Happy to Instigate, then, is going to stand for independent here (although it is liable to tweaking later in the game...)

Outgoing sounds too much "I'm going to climb a mountain and then jump out of a plane" for most jobs (although I would imagine it's a useful hidden keyword for sales positions). Confident sounds a little bit overblown ("I know I'm wonderful, just hire me!" sort of thing). That may be the point, but Assertive is a good word because it tells them that you're not going to be in their face, but that you aren't going to just sit back and take abuse, either. It is possibly a bit cliche, but it's cliche because it's a very good thing to be that is not a prerequisite, and, if you have an assertive bone in your body (even if, like mine, it's in one of your toes), it may be worth keeping it (the adjective, not the bone) in for the semi-final.

I'm in two minds about Tolerant. It sounds a little bit like Nick Griffin (British Nationalist Party racist bigot leader, just in case you didn't know) saying "Some of my best friends are black!" (Although I doubt he'd say something like that and lose his single voter). Regardless that it's not actually about seperating yourself from ethnic/religious intolerance, but rather about tolerating bosses who are assholes (with me being British, that means "donkeyholes", which is infinitely less insulting than the alternative and need not be censored), it sounds like you're trying to cover up that you're actually an intolerant jerk. It can be different in context, of course, and may be another useful hidden word.

Open to criticism versus striving for self improvement is dealt with as such: which one takes a more active role? Striving for self improvement. It says you're not just open to criticism, you actively seek out criticism and advice to make yourself better. It wins. 

Now we come to committed, passionate, enthusiastic and thirsty for knowledge. 

These ones are difficult. The first three sound a little bit cliche, and thirsty for knowledge sounds wierd without one of them. It's going away (for now). Eager to learn may be a better one to say that you eat knowledge for breakfast, but if we use striving for self improvement, we cover that ground anyway.

Passionate is a little too informal, unless you're going for good cause work. It's disappearing from generic personal statementland in the meantime. Committed and enthusiastic work reasonably well together, so they both stay, for now. 

Taking a balanced view is clearly a messy way of saying unbiased. It's going, although unbalanced is another one for the invisible keywords if I suspect auto-filters are in use. As for having perspective... it sounds like it would be appropriate if you're applying to work in, for example, a funeral home, and are no stranger to grief, but it sounds a little out of place otherwise. Unbiased is great if you want to be a judge, but Objective might be better here.

So far, then, we're down to:
Knowledgeable, Engaging, Striving for self improvement, Contemplative, Observant, Flexible, Happy to Instigate, Creative, Assertive, Good at taking a back seat,  committed, enthusiastic and Objective.

This still seems a bit much - if I was to say:

"I am a knowledgeable and engaging  zoology graduate from the University of Nottingham, looking for work in the [e.g. customer service industry]. I am assertive but observant and flexible, happy to instigate or to take a back seat, and would enthusiastically commit to a role that makes the most of my objectiveness while challenging my creativity and allowing opportunities for self improvement."

it would seem a little bit... crowded. In particular Objectiveness doesn't seem to fit in, and the "but" between assertive and observant makes it seem as though we're using assertive as a euphemism for aggressive (when we just want to say we're capable of aggression when required). 

One option is to thrown in a third sentence (radical, I know):

"I am a knowledgeable and engaging  zoology graduate from the University of Nottingham, looking for work in the [e.g. catering industry]. I am observant, flexible and assertive, capable of instigation and objectively taking direction.  I would enthusiastically commit to a role that challenges my creativity and provides opportunities for self-improvement."

It's pretty keyword rich, and can't be read more than a couple of times, but as a basic structure, it works (more or less...).

However, I don't want something to work more or less - I want something that works. 

And that brings us to the next major hurdle in trouble. 

The first thing I do when proofreading anything (usually longer things, to be fair) is read them aloud. And reading it aloud, I'm getting rid of objective. It just doesn't fit. Other than that, it seems to be ready for someone else to tell me whether it's alright, and to go in pulp CVs in between... 



"I am a knowledgeable and engaging zoology graduate from the University of Nottingham, looking for work in the retail industry. I am observant, flexible and assertive, capable of instigation and taking direction, and would enthusiastically commit to a role that challenges my creativity and provides opportunities for self-improvement."





In other news, I have a rejection from Cardiff on their otters job.

Not unexpected, and at least they got back to me. And it wasn't right after the closing date, either, which means they must have thought about it. I would make this relevent by saying that they would have given me the job if I'd had a personal statement, but as it turns out, most of the jobs I apply for don't even want to see your CV, but rather require you to fill out an application form.









*By between the lines I mean throw invisible keywords into your CV. By colouring them white and putting them either in headers or footers or after fullstops, you keep them invisible but make sure the bots don't pass you by because you can think for yourself and/or use a thesaurus.