Electric socks anyone?

ScienceDaily has a piece on electrically heated textiles.

In a new paper in Applied Materials & Interfaces, the scientists describe how they use a vapor deposition method for nano-coating fabric to create sewable, weavable, electrically heated material. The demonstration glove they made can keep fingers toasty for up to eight hours. The three-layered glove, with one layer coated by the conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxytiophene), also known as PEDOT, are powered by a button battery weighing 1.8 grams. A dime weighs just under 2.27 grams.

The authors point out, "Lightweight, breathable and body-conformable electrical heaters have the potential to change traditional approaches to personal thermal management, medical heat therapy, joint pain relief and athletic rehabilitation."

Autumn weed control

During yesterday’s school run we passed a marijuana raid. Only a semi-detached house so it wasn’t large scale. Police officers were humping large plastic bags of marijuana plants into various vehicles.

Not an unusual occurrence these days, but Mrs H and I had much the same thought as we drove by. How odd it is that somebody grows something and somebody else comes along and forcibly pulls it up. There are reasons of course - there are always reasons. Many of us live on reasons. Must be some kind of drug which dulls the critical faculties.

Göran Adamson on multiculturalism

Heat omitted from the bottom

Crikey I certainly have a simple sense of humour. Not sure why it amused me either. A problem with circulation? Not really funny at my age.

His breed is dying now

His breed is dying now, it has nearly gone. But as I remember him with that great quiet forehead, with his tenderness, and his glance which travelled to the heart of what it rested on, I despair of seeing his like again. For, with him there seems to me to have passed away a principle, a golden rule of life, nay, more, a spirit — the soul of Balance. It has stolen away, as in the early morning the stars steal out of the sky. He knew its tranquil secret, and where he is, there must it still be hovering.

John Galsworthy – A Portrait (1910)

Galsworthy’s portrait is fictional, but probably not entirely so. I wonder how many of us remember someone in a similar way? Someone who seemed to represent the best of a dying breed. A type of person our society no longer values as it we think it should because times change and new generations cannot value what they never knew.

The impression is easy enough to explain because times do change and different people do suit different times. Yet it isn’t easy to pick out people today who suit modern times to such a degree that their loss will be felt just as keenly. Probably it was always so and the sense of loss stems from an illusion . A remarkably powerful illusion though.

I didn't want to know that

Dame Vivienne Westwood says the secret to staying young is only having a bath once a week.

The 76-year-old fashion designer advised that people shouldn't 'wash too much' - before her husband Andreas Kronthaler, 51, revealed that she 'only takes a bath every week'.

Kronthaler, who is also a fashion designer, then went on to joke that he only washes 'once a month'.

Westwood, who is well known for being an eco-warrior, has previously admitted that she rarely showers - and reuses her husband's dirty bath water.

Bring on the clowns

A casual thought for the day. 

Lord Sugar has described Jeremy Corbyn as a clown and although it is easy enough to see why, the insult could be more interesting than insults usually are. Interesting enough for a Sunday morning that is.

As a political leader Corbyn has nothing to offer. He is a poor public speaker and hopelessly inexperienced with the additional burden of extreme political views. In that sense he is a clown, but clowns are not easy to hate and the modern political trend leans strongly towards hatred, particularly from Corbyn's end of the spectrum.

By way of contrast, Boris Johnson seems to have made a consistent and long-term effort to adopt the public persona of a clown. An intelligent clown rather than Corbyn’s dimmer version, but Johnson is unmistakably a clown and it seems to be deliberate. Does he foster this image because clowns are difficult to hate and because he thinks political life is mostly about hatred?