Divided Britain and Kingdom

The year 2018 is coming to an end and my island of Great Britain is very divided with odd pairings. From the summer of 2016 the British people divided themselves into three groups. Brexiteers, Remainers and Abstainers. Brexiteers wanted the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Remainers wanted to stay in the European Union and Abstainers weren't sure or refused to vote.

The divide spanned across the British Island and spilled out to the edge of the Kingdom in northern Ireland and Gibraltar.

There was odd pairings and aliances  throughout the UK. London and Scotland wanted to remain. The rest of England and Wales wanted to leave. Northern Ireland wanted to remain and so did Gibraltar. Ultimately, leaving EU was the final verdict.

I have seen business leaders and politicians that were far from friends working together to achieve their goals. Rival politicians came together and was working as a team. Tony Blair and John Major were working together for the Remain Campaign, they were political rivals in the previous decades. It is a bit like Superman, Batman and Skeletor forming a group. I saw Tim Martin and Robert Dyson on the leave group. A pub chain owner and a vacuum cleaner manufacturer. People I would never see working together were drawn together by this strange situation.

Now the divide is about how we leave and the whether the Kingdom will be intact or if Great Britain will remain Great or be split in half across Hadrian's wall. My Island is filled with uncertainty. I can only hope that we work together and make the final decision work for us. Even a paralyzed man needs both his arms to push the wheels in the same direction, otherwise his wheelchair would just spin around and he would have no hope of getting anywhere.

When the Queen did her speech on Christmas, it made a lot of sense to me. We need to be united in the United Kingdom and the sons of Britain need to respect their brothers and sisters.

I can only hope for the best outcome.

Jesus

Earlier in the week it was Christmas. Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ. It is unlikely that he was born on that day but the week of Christmas brings the shortest days of the year. Here on the British Islands, the sun sets close to 4pm. It is very dark this time of year.

I wish everyone a happy Christmas and a good 2019.

Indonesian Tsunami

Earlier in the week there was a very large Tsunami in Indonesia. A volcano on the Island caused a land slide under the sea, the pressure wave caused by the land slide produced a shock wave that went through the water.

I feel sad because many people lost their homes and there was many deaths and injuries.

I could see a pattern because a strong Tsunamis occour at Christmas quite often in that area. That time of the year is like summer for those countries and I feel like rain or water plays a role in triggering earthquakes and landslides. Perhaps the water acts like a lubricant.

People in this world are very divided but they should be united with common goals like finding ways to reduce disasters.

What 2018 means to me

The year 2018 has come to an end and 2019 has just begun. The 2020s decade is very near perhaps it will be a decade I don't recognise if it changes a lot. 

I spent the start of this year in winter waiting to be reunited with my wife. I was reunited with my wife in spring 2018 in May, just before my father's 70th birthday. We made the weekend of my father's birthday special and celebrated in a hotel in Reading city.
I spent the second half of the year from July as an expectant father and in the winter of 2018 I learned that my first child will be a boy. In the spring of 2019 he will be born.

I worked harder in this year then I did any other time in my existence. I often worked through the night and carried on working during the morning and only came home to sleep. I try to have one day off every week.

2018 is very much like 2016, the British people are divided into three groups, Brexiteers, Remainers and Abstainers. People that want to leave the EU, people that want to remain and people that are not sure. The exit deal has not been agreed and it is not certain if an agreement can be reached. I often wonder why David Cameron conducted the 2016 refferendom when he was not prepared for both outcomes. He underestimated the size of the Eurosceptic community so I guess he thought we would just choose to remain and it would all be over. Brexit was a very big part of British life in 2018, the UK government changed staff many times and many cabinet ministers were fired or resigned over Brexit. There were many fiery exchanges on TV and radio debates about the topic. The British currency seemed to devalue every time there was a setback with negotiations.

The forces of nature were very strong this year. There were many very powerful storms throughout the world and there was a Tsunami in Indonesia. As an islander myself I feel sad for the Indonesian people. Us people that live on islands are vulnerable from the coastal areas.

Governments throughout the world set out to kill citizens that openly criticized them, With powerful poisons or violent ambushes in embassy buildings. It has nothing to do with me and I don't get involved.

The best thing about 2018 is that we came closer to finding an all encompassing cure to cancer, there may be a time when all cancers are just a slight nuisance, much like the flu or common cold. Our knowledge increased much more and we gained a great deal of insight from space probes about the other world's that share our Sun.

I wish everyone a happy 2019 and hope for a brilliant start to the 2020s decade. And I hope that my son will be born safely with no health issues.

Peace love and gratitude to all.

Tension remedy

Many people living on my island are afraid of the near future. We are all asking the same questions in our heads, what will it mean to be British in the 2020s decade when we separate from the European Community and European trading block and become an independent country.

If my son is successfully born in this coming spring, he will live most of his childhood in the 2020s decade. What will the 2020s mean to him? Will it a time of joy? Will life treat him well? Will I be a good father? Will he grow up in a country that is Rich? Will his country be driven into poverty? What is in store?

My life is about to change and I sometimes feel stress. To overcome this feeling of stress I create problems inside my head and try to solve them. The solutions manifest as creations. There are over 50 creations inside my head and they displace stress.

One problem I have is how to create a vacuum blimp when I know there is no material in this world that can harbour a vacuum and be lighter than air at the same time. For example, if you created a vacuum in a jar, the glass would need to be as thin as paper before it would be lighter than air. This thin jar would be crushed by the air pressure outside and disintegrate.

Some solutions I thought of is to make the container inside a vacuum and add layers outside the container that only have a partial vacuum. Another solution is to use a revolutionary new material called Graphine that is as strong as Diamond. There are many more solutions I thought of but I won't bore you.

My gift to you is the concept of saturating your mind with puzzles to displace fear and stressful thoughts. Thanks for reading.

Euro-sceptic map

If I were to draw a Map showing the places where Eurosceptic communities are concentrated, it would show that the outer edges of the continent were more Eurosceptic than inner areas.

Italy in the south, Hungry and Romainia in the East and the British Island in the west.

I think this is because communities that are on the edges of the continent are different from the other Europeans. Perhaps those communities have a window to the world outside.

I won't say anything else...

Walking in the air

When I was a young boy, there was a short animation that appeared every Christmas called "The Snow Man". It was about a snow man that had the ability to fly and make anyone fly with him just by holding his hands. It was beautiful because the animation combined beautiful music, singing and sounds with outstanding hand animation.

After the leadership challenge yesterday over the handling of brexit, I could do with a showman friend to fly me away. I am sick of hearing about brexit on the news and the cabinet changing staff over brexit and related issues. I have never in life seen a government go though so much staff. It must be like a WW1 trench in the front bench in the UK parliament.

I seriously thought about it.... (Silly man I can be)

There are many ways to fly in this world without using much energy. One way is to reduce your net weight by trapping gases that are lighter than air such as Helium or Hydrogen.

There is one way that I thought of myself. Making crystals from carbon allotropes that are hollow and contain no air at all. At the moment this is impossible because the material that houses the vacuum needs to be thick to resist the forces of air pressure and this makes them heavier than air. But if you could use the strength of Graphene molecules in a clever way then you could make a light weight material that can harbour a vacuum. This material would float in air and take me away from this crazy world for a short while, perhaps drag a small village up there, above the clouds. Compressed air would be used as ballast to bring the village down when needed.

Dream dream dream.

Irish back stock

The UK prime minister, Theresa May has made a British exit (Brexit) deal with the EU but the house of commons don't like the deal. The main reason they don't like the deal is because Northern island would be treated like a separate country from the UK. They would have checks made on their products before they enter the British Island.

Let me explain the problem the EU faces. Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are two separate countries. When the UK splits away from the EU, the Republic of Ireland will remain in the EU and Northern Ireland will remain part of the UK. If goods are free to move from UK to the republic of Ireland without paying a tariff then the UK could do a trade deal with a country outside the EU and send goods that are not taxed into the rest of the EU through the republic of Ireland. For example, we could remove the tariff on Oranges from Dominica and then send them to the republic of Ireland and then the Republic of Ireland could send the oranges to Germany. This would mean that Oranges are entering the EU without being taxed.

The Irish in the North and South wanted to keep a soft border because people own assets and trade on both sides of the border. I think the best way out of this is to leave without a deal and pay the tariffs, I recall that the deal involved a £39 billion exit fee. Use the exit fee to reimburse businesses that are taxed for their exports. Isn't that a more straight forward way to solve the problem.

My son is due to be born and like his father is spending his time as a fetus in a country that is consumed by chaos and uncertainty. For me it was the Falklands war, for him it is Brexit.

Greenhouse nonsense

Many governments around the world think there is a big problem with global warming, I don't. I will tell you why.

I think that global warming is real and is a hazard but I don't think there is enough fossil fuels on Earth to cause a lasting greenhouse chain reaction.

In my opinion, global warming is a problem that is fixing itself. The inconvenient truth is that is is more and more inconvenient to harvest crude oil. It costs more and more money to get oil and coal out of the ground so people are motivated to get more fuel efficient cars and electric cars are getting cheaper and cheaper to make. Solar panels are also getting be cheaper to make.

Oil and coal near the surface is running out so bigger drills and diggers are needed that cost more money to get to the oil that is deeper and more out of reach. Eventually there will be no fossil fuels left.

Why should leaders like President Macron steal money from people to fix a problem that is fixing itself?

Oven design

There is one technological implementation that I really like. I like fan assistance in ovens. When air is heated up, it organises itself into layers. Each layer is in ascending  order according to it's temperature. The air at the top is the hottest, the air at the bottom is the coldest. If you add a fan to a closed space then the air gets moved around, so every part of that space is the same temperature. This means you can have an oven that is the same temperature at the top shelf as it is at the bottom shelf.

You can cook 3 large pies in a fan assisted oven with each pie on a different shelf and they would all cook the same.

I was wondering, is it possible that putting a fan pointing at the ceiling in a house would cause warmer air above people's heads to mix with the colder air below and bring down the heating bill? I guess that the difference in a house would be too small to notice.

To most people this is boring but to me it is very cool. But I am pleased that someone had the good idea to combine a fan with an oven because a large family can have a large meal cooked for them with full consistency.