Climate Change

 On Monday I took my Caterham to Snetterton circuit. It was the hottest day sin... ever yet the car behaved very well. The coolant and oil were running over 100°C, the track was hot, the air was hot, the sun was very strong but nothing leaked out or went wrong. One of the worst bits was the temperature in the drivers compartment. When Caterham switched over to using Ford engines the exhaust moved over to the driver's side. That means that it's you who gets deafened (not you passenger) and it's you who burns your leg getting out of the car (not your passenger). It also means that the hottest part of the engine bay is right in front of the pedal box. By the afternoon putting your feet on the pedals was like putting your feet into an oven, and both my guest and I damaged our shoes. I melted the rubber sole on mine, and my guest melted the glue that held the sole on!

Richard "warm" B

Ouch

 I don’t have a funny or well constructed story from my week off, but I will try to share a very brief incident with you. I just burned the very end of my nose. This was done while trying to light a cigarette. It was a very short cigarette, a very high flame, and a very long nose.

Hobby

 One time during my career I invented a whole new way to store tree structured data in a relational database. Once I'd "invented" it and understood it I knew enough to research it and find out that it was a well understood technique.

I've recently become mildly obsessed with geodesic domes. How do you make all those triangles link together, but not end up with a flat surface? I decided that the best way to understand it was to build one, but I don't have the maths or the materials to build it from straight edges. What I did was to buy a polystyrene sphere and mark out the triangles of a "2-frequency subdivision of an icosahedron" on its surface. It was a fascinating project and I’ll do it again better and with a higher frequency.

The great thing is that since doing it I have a much better understanding of the construction and I've been able to find and understand articles that explain the theory behind these shapes. They're both simpler and cleverer than I knew, and I still don't have enough maths to calculate the lengths of the edges myself.

Richard "Buckminster Fuller" B