Winter Lights

I went to Canary Wharf yesterday to see the winter lights. They call it a warf but it is no longer used as a dock and the whole river peninsula is developed but I guess the name stuck. Canary wharf is a river peninsula filled with tall office buildings. 

Canary Wharf is a bit like the Vatican in a way, it is like a city within a city. All the buildings on the peninsula are tower blocks filled with modern glass windows and offices. London is a city with little island cities embedded within it. The lights were nice and it was very crowded, I guess that helped break up the cold winter breeze.  Perhaps the whole country to put winter lights out for the last third of January. 

In the back of my mind is the sadness of knowing people in Iran were being murdered for protesting. They were doing nothing wrong, they were just tired of their dictator leader using all their oil wealth for their own agenda and being suppressed by the regime. Some of them were just children. When will it end? Will I still be writing out this struggle next month? Who knows? Imagine if a nation like Japan had the same oil reserves as Iran, they would have build some beautiful cities and all sorts of wonders. Perhaps they would have a moon base by now. 

See it Different

I think it is ok to look at the world differently to the way society presents it as long as you accept that society as chosen their verdict. When I was younger I always thought the world was upside down, they showed me a globe where the arctic ocean is the top of the world and the continent of Antarctica is at the bottom. The Earth's magnetic field spurts out of south pole and dives back down at the north pole so a compass is attracted to the south poll but the arrow head faces the north. If it was my choice the globe would be flipped over so the continent of Antarctica is the top of the Earth and the frozen arctic ocean is the bottom. It doesn't matter, society has made their verdict, I go with the flow. 

When I shave in the morning, I think of Cashew nuts because my skin is what I describe as cashew-biege in colour, but society says my skin is white like plain paper or toothpaste. That's fine. Society has made a verdict. I stick with it. 

Everything  would work differently if I was in control but I'm not so that is just fine. Life is too short to care. 

Noah Days

If I would label this time period I would call it the noah Days because the attitude of the people fits like a glove. There is widespread hate and wickedness throughout mankind and people are doing nasty things to others as a routine duty. 

I hear reports of ordinary people being shot in Iran for protesting and then being shot again in the head while they're in hospital. I see people here accusing a small nation of genocide then being silent when these atrocities are reported, why?  Because their hatred causes selective outrage. 

I can't do anything about it accept to report the truth as far as I know it. 

All the routines happen  as a normal despite evil deeds happening around the world.

I can only tell the truth and distract myself, play computer games, read science blogs and look at things on online shops without buying them, watches and things like that. 

Sometimes I just think about things that are beautiful to me like one day being able to dry out sewage burn it up and use the insoluble portion of the ashes to build defensive islands to stop  coastal erosion in Britain. Some of the particles in the sewage would be useful in other ways,  there could be metal fragments left behind in the burnt sewage ashes and they could be recycled.

Elizabeth Line Trip

Yesterday I rode on an Elizabeth line train for the first time. The line opened in 2022 but I never got around to trying it. That's partly because I don't live in London and partly because I didn't need to go to the destinations it stops at. 

It's nice to see a metro train in London that uses overhead AC power lines; most of the London mass transit lines were running before the Yugoslavian-American inventor called Nicola Tesla invented AC power transmission so they stuck with direct current. (Yugoslavia fragmented into several smaller countries in the '90s, Kosovo Serbia and places like that). In those days it was probably easy to be a news broacaster because there was always something happening. These days they have to talk about tap water privatisation for 2 hours or things like that. They can lul a professor to sleep sometimes. 

The train is very cool, it is open plan and spacious with lots of low hanging handles for those that can't find a seat. I was surprised the station platforms didn't have much benches, I thought it would be a good idea to put seating benches up against every stretch of wall in the station so people can sit down while they wait for a train. I also found it difficult to see the map of the line inside the train but that's no big deal. It was a bit too crowded for me, I never imagined it would be so popular. It certainly helps relieve crowding on the other lines. 

I learnt that the tfl charging cap goes up if you go from Heathrow airport on an Elizabeth line train because they have to use some of a private railway's tracks. 

Small and Useful

Yesterday I learnt that on the 11th of January they didn't just send the small Pandora Satellite into space, NASA also sent up two smaller cube satellites that are just 30cm across; they would literally fit into a shopping bag. 

Not only did they get the size of the space probes down, they got the transport costs down. They approached spaceX to build a reusable space rocket. SpaceX built the falcon space rockets, they go up to space, then the rocket parts land safely on docking stations to be reused again. NASA wisely approached private companies to make space vehicles so they can get the cost down. 

The pandora space probe is smaller than a person but it is capable of looking at stars when their planets transit between us and them and working out what light rays are from the planet's atmosphere and what parts are from the star. The point of pandora is to help make decisions for the James Webb space telescope because it is so busy, it is hard to decide what places to look into and what areas to neglect. If the chemicals in the planets atmosphere are interesting, they will get the very busy James Webb telescope to take a closer look. 

The two smaller cube satellites are Blackcat and sparks, they will look at black holes and also study solar flares of low mass stars. 

Pandora Box Iran

There is a lot of chaos going on in Iran right now, when a catastrophe like that happens in the world, some of the good news gets fogged out of sight. This is certainly true of the new NASA mission that just started called Pandora. 

The pandora space probe was launched last week on the falcon 9 spaceX rocket. That is the way they're heading these days, they like to contract private companies to make the space vehicles for them, they don't want to develop it themselves; I call it space privatisation. 

The pandora space probe has been fine tuned to look at the atmospheres of planets outside of our solar system to see if there are volatile gases present. Chemicals that don't persist without being renewed by an ongoing reaction. Here on earth we have oxygen in our atmosphere, life forms need to top it up all the time because it reacts with other chemicals so it won't persist in its form.  The same is true of ammonia and things like that. They don't persist, they need to be topped up by processes or life forms. It will be interesting to see what they find. 

I like the fact that a lot of the discoveries they make are open to the public. Ordinary people like myself can look at their findings for free and learn something new every day. 

Potatoes and Heat

Jacket potatoes taste better when they're roasted in the oven than in the microwave because the heat slowly roasts them from the outside. The microwave causes the potatoes to heat up from inside out. In winter I don't care too much about the oven being used because the heat is used twice, it cooks the food and helps to heat up the home. The thing I was wondering was. 

How long does the heat stay there? The heat energy is transmitted from molecule to molecule but it doesn't move in a straight line, some of the heat energy would zig zag and even travel back into the oven from the edge of the room. The way I look at it is energy released in the core of the sun slowly moves from the core to the sun's surface, the journey can take millions of years because the photons don't go in the straight line, they bounce from molecule to molecule in a tangled random route, when the photon finally gets to the sun's surface, it takes just 8 Minutes to move across space to our planet. I thought similar things would happen with an oven, some of the heat released travels around the room for 2 or 3 years before finally leaving the room; most of the heat would escape in less than 2 hours but a tiny.portion of the heat energy would remain there, perhaps 0.00001 % would still be there a year later. 

Why Protest?

One thing that puzzles me is why people would continue to protest about the Nick Maduro detainment when so many Venezuelan people are celebrating his capture. The people they're calling victims of trump are throwing parties and celebrating the removal of a dictator. A guy that frames his political opponents and gets them sent to prison so he guarantees his victory, and a guy that tanked the venezualan economy so hard that half of them had to leave the country to stay alive. Well, a lot of things don't make sense to me, even in my little world. 

When cold air touches my skin, my taste pallet changes and I like the taste of sour and salty food, I also like spicy food. Even slightly bitter tasting fruits like cranberries and pickled gherkins taste better to me when it is cold. 

I also like to cook my jacket potatoes in the oven instead of microwave, when you cook jacket potatoes in the oven the heat goes through the potatoes from the outside and makes oils and butter you put on them turn crispy and tasty, you don't get that with a microwave because most of the heat appears inside the potato. When it is cold, I don't worry about heat being applied twice as long because it gets used twice, I can cook all my root vegetables in the oven knowing the heat used by the oven would be used twice because it would seep out of the oven and heat up the air in the kitchen and some of that heat would spread around the home. 

Pride in England

One of the things that makes feel proud of my country is we abolished global slavery. The forced slavery of people is illegal in most of the world because of Britain. 

People like William Wilberforce campaigned in parliament to make it illegal to buy and sell people as slaves and force them to work for free. We opened our mind and decided it is wrong to use people as slaves, all people should have the same rights. When we abolished the slave trade, all nations that were part of the empire inherited the law and automatically declared the trade of slaves as piracy. Then we used our huge navy to intercept slave boats from nations that weren't a part of the British Empire so we blocked slave ships from entering the ports of Brazil. 

In the 17th century, every nation on Earth had a significant slave population, it wasn't just the Portuguese dominated Atlantic slave trade, it was the middle east, Asia and many African nations had their own slave trade. Britain abolished all of that using democracy and our powerful navy. 

The most common payer in Britain is to ask God that his will be done. It looks like the prayer was answered because although there is still a lot of illegal slavery, the world at large condemns it. 

What December 2025 Means To Me

Throughout December there was very little frost in the mornings, the weather was strange for that time of the year in Britain. Some trees were confused and started to open their flowers as if it were spring because roughly in the middle of the month the temperature increased to 10°C during the day time. 

I saw some Iranian men protesting in London a few times. They were holding up the old Iranian flag with the golden lion holding a sword and partially eclipsing the sun on the horizon; it was the flag that identified the nation before the Iamist ayatollah regime took control of the country at the end of the '70s.  They were making their intentions very clear to everyone, they want the regime to end and the king to return. Later I saw the protests were widespread in that country. They were sick of the leader spending all the countries wealth arming militant groups and spreading hate about Israel, the infrastructure of the country has not improved since 1980 and they were now facing very high inflation and supply issues. 

There was also a lot of tension between USA and Venezuela, the USA were demanding suspicious boats identify themselves and then firing missiles at the boats when they didn't respond. They were trying to shut off the drugs entering the country I think. 

Just the other Day I learned that the Americans captured Nick Maduro himself and the venesualan people seemed happy about that. I was given the impression that he sends his opposition candidates to jail so he could fix his terms in power.  He also seized the large service companies like the internet and oil producers and ran them into the ground like a typical communist would. 

Let's keep our chins up for 2026. Happy times for a while? Who knows? Whatever will be, will be.