Plastic boxes, containers and takeaway shops

Here in Cambridgeshire, some areas collect plastic waste of all kinds at the doorstep and recycle it. Not in Burwell! All we can do is recycle plastic bottles in the village (not from home) and take hard plastics and plastic boxes, such as those supermarket food packages, 20+ miles there and back to our main recycling centre near Cambridge. I actually WANT to do my bit and help the environment but I am not helped by being excluded from a doorstep plastics recycling service - this stopped about 2 years ago, can you believe it?

Another issue: why do supermarkets like Waitrose and Tesco insist in packaging vegetables and fruit in plastic boxes at all? Why not always loose pack or pack in biodegradable packs? Also, why do there have to be so many shapes and sizes? Why not standard size containers that can be stacked in a bin to save space?

Recycling is STILL a total mess in the UK and needs seriously sorting by our governments. All seem to be as incompetent as eachother.

Finally in my rant today, most rubbish at roadsides is from takeaway food places: food containers, plastic drinking cups and metal drinks cans. Just take a look. Why not get fast food outlets like MacDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken to pay to pick up their ignorant customers' messes? They'd soon get the message that too much packaging costs them profits.

Encyclopaedia Britannica ends printed version

After 244 years, Encyclopaedia Britannica is stopping publication of its paper versions. See http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/ . This is not surprising in the age of Wikipedia and so many online resources, but it was a wonderful resource in its day.....as long as you had strong shelves!

Blackcaps here

This morning we had a blackcap on our bird table. This is a largely migratory bird and I suspect this one had just arrived in from further south in Europe or Africa and was hungry.  It's the first time I recall one actually eating from the bird table. Summer bird visitors are starting to arrive now with the first barn swallows likely to be seen in southern England in the next few weeks. It is around mid April before they appear in any numbers in East Anglia. When the swifts arrive and scream through the evening sky you know summer is really here but that is a couple of months away.

Gay Marriage and the RC church

As a heterosexual male, happily married for over 40 years, I may not be best placed to give a view on gay marriage laws. However, I am absolutely incensed when I hear the Roman Catholic church pontificating about how wrong it is for two people in love to make a public commitment of their love by marriage. What right have they to be so "high and mighty" when their record on sexual morality (child sex abuse, priests who are celibate and know little of sex and its value in a loving relationship, etc)  is, frankly appalling!

Web robot words

As a typical grumpy old man I get fed up with being asked to prove I'm not a robot by entring two words that I can hardly read on the screen. This way of checking for humans seems to have become a lot more common in the last 12 months. Isn't there a better way?

The scale of time

A few days back I mentioned this link which demonstrated the physical scale of things in the universe from the very very tiny to the huge on a cosmological scale. Se http://images.4channel.org/f/src /589217_scale_of_universe_enhanced.swf .

Now this got me wondering about the real nature of time. We think of time as running at a constant rate, although relativity suggests this is not true. We happen to be human beings on a certain physical size scale and to us time goes, more or less, at the speed we are used to. What if time itself was somehow as strange as the physical scale of the universe and ran at rates so divergent that a second of our time was almost an infinity for some things in the multiverses? That our concept of time could be akin to the flat-earther's incomplete view of a multi-dimensional world?

What I'm saying is our concept of physical size and time flow is just how it is for us. One can imagine other universes where time runs incredibly fast or incredibly slowly. Is it really so odd to think that we are just a sub-atomic particle in another universe, or that other entire universes both in all space and time are contained within each sub-atomic particle that makes us and every other bit of star dust?

I'm finding it hard to put into words the sort of concepts going through my head, but in summary I think the whole nature of space and time is far more of a wonder and a mystery than we think or can ever imagine.

Spring has arrived

Feb 26th 2012 and it now feels as if spring has arrived already. After a week or so of very cold snowy days we have the garden springing back to life with bulbs pushing through, the birds singing and looking at nest sites and the grass growing. This morning I even cut my front lawn for the first time this year - just a trim to even out the growth.  March 1st marks the first official day of spring according to the Met Office, so not long now.