














The madness continues…

DAY 3.













‘It’s the police,’ came the responding shout.



Egbert and Jimmy were silent.




‘Okay. Let’s do it.’


She nodded and followed him numbly.





‘So, where were you all night?’


Cider Sy picked that moment to walk in.



‘Really?’ Cider Sy raised an eyebrow.





‘Like what?’ asked Egbert.





‘Good point,’ said Mistletoe.


‘Bet you’ve been itching to say that!’









DAY 2.


‘Well, are you prepared?’ Cider Sy asked.

‘Of course.’

‘Okay. The station’s closed.’

‘What, King’s Cross?’


‘King’s Cross is closed?’

‘That’s what I said.’




‘I wanted orange juice.’



Oh god, Egbert moaned inside.

















‘Hi,’ said the girl.





‘Yeah, same here,’ he said.


‘You going far?’

‘Not really. Just across to Baker Street.’













But it was not Marcy who answered the phone.













Only Norbert and Albert were in.

‘Where’s everyone else?’ Egbert asked.







‘Well, let’s go home,’ he said.

‘Oh, we’re not leaving,’ said Norbert.














Oh god – he was so hungry. Cold and hungry.


‘Hi,’ said Jimmy.

‘Hi again. What’re you still doing round here?’


‘We had a power cut at work.’








‘Snowpocalypse starts with a bang!’

‘Crisis as multiple tube stations closed!’

‘Stockpile your food – more snow to come.’


‘Record amount of car crashes in severe icy conditions.’

‘Power cuts across London.’

‘Parts of Birmingham collapse after freak blizzard hits.’




‘Can you take me home?’ asked Jimmy.

‘Sure,’ Egbert replied.








‘Go! Go!’


‘Get the key, quick!’













Everybody do the Tangaroan!

It’s new, it’s exciting, and while it kind of sounds like a dance move, the Tangaroan style is in fact the newly classified third type of eruption style. We’ve got eruptive and effusive and now this.


It was classified by a team of researchers from the National Oceanography Centre (Southampton, UK) and Victoria University (Wellington, New Zealand) who studied Macauley volcano in the south west Pacific.


The news appeared in this month’s edition of Nature Geoscience. The paper is called ‘Highly vesicular pumice generated by buoyant detachment of magma in subaqueous volcanism‘.

So what’s the deal?

Well, the Tangaroan style is specifically an underwater eruptive style. If it had happened subaerially it would be intermediate – somewhere between effusive and eruptive. And the main defining feature of this style is its foaminess. See, lots of vesicles form in the magma, and as it bubbles up it turns into a kind of foam, which detaches as packets of pumice and rises. Because of the effects of decreasing water pressure, the bubbles continue expanding so you end up with various sized bubbles by the end of it.

Pumice (which is usually a sign of explosive activity in subaerial volcanoes) is quite common in underwater volcanoes, and this new research means that underwater volcanoes currently marked as having explosive eruptions in the past may be reassessed under this new category. Exciting stuff!

Quite interesting:

The style is called Tangaroan after the Maori god of the sea, but it also acts as a homage to the ship used to collect samples, which shares the name. Fun fact: Tangaroa is also part of the Cook Islands’ mythos and has yellow hair, so when Europeans first visited, they were considered the children of Tangaroa.



DAY 1.





‘Egbert! What’s up, my man?’

No cause for alarm. It was only Norbert.


‘Yeah. It’s going to snow this afternoon.’



It was no use. Norbert’s face had glazed over.





‘Maybe ol’ Eggy’s right,’ joked Albert.

Norbert laughed. ‘Wouldn’t bet on it.’


Evening fell. The snow did not.








She hung up.



He skimmed through the rest of the article.










‘You want yours done?’ Mistletoe asked hopefully.

‘Nope,’ Egbert said firmly.














What Watt is what? An experiment with 27 candles.

27 candles on a coffee table

It’s cold today, and my new house has one of those annoying pay-as-you-go electricity meters with a horribly expensive energy company that I’m pretty much stuck with until I get it all changed to my preferred energy supplier.

It’s all electric heaters here, and loath to guzzle more electricity, I was doing ok in the cold until I realised one of my pet rats had started hibernating. That’s worrying, because rats don’t naturally hibernate. Something had to be done.

Now, I do have enough on the meter to get us through this cold patch, but I also have rather a lot of candles – a whole box full in fact – lying around since the move. And in my realisation that the candles could be placed on the coffee table far closer to my pets’ cage than the electric wall heater, lo and behold, a scientific experiment was born.

It’s a known fact to everyone who has stuck their hands too close to a fire that fires generate heat as well as light. So I wanted to know how much I could heat the room by burning candles. And I want to know the output in terms of Watts, so I can compare it to the power of my electric heater.

To start with, it is helpful to know what a Watt is. It’s a SI unit for power, measured in Joules per second.

Tea lights weight roughly 20 grams and burn for around 5 hours – that’s four grams an hour.
6 inch dinner candles weigh 60 grams and burn for around 6 hours – that’s ten grams an hour.
3 inch high pillar candles weigh roughly 300 grams and burn for around 40 hours – that’s 7.5 grams an hour.

So it seems that the tea lights burns the least grammage per hour and the tapers the most grammage per hour. But how does that convert to heat? Which is better?

I am going to approximate that all my candles are made from paraffin wax. Now, paraffin wax burns at about 43kJ per gram of material, or 43000 J per gram.
For my tealights, at 4 grams an hour, that’s 4 x 4300 = 172,000 J per hour
For my tapers, at 10 grams an hour, that’s 10 x 43000 = 430,000 J per hour
For my pillar candles, at 7.5 grams an hour, that’s 7.5 x 43000 = 322,500 J per hour.

I have 21 tealights, 3 tapers, and 3 pillar candles.
(21 x 172000) + (3 x 430000) + (3 x 322500) = 5 869 500 Joules per hour.

But remember, Watts are Joules per second. So we need to convert this.

There are 3600 seconds in an hour, so we divide our answer by this to get the Joules per second.
5 869 500 / 3600 = 1630.41667
That’s ~ 1630 Watts for my 27 candles.

Now, the average candle emits light at only around 0.05% efficiency. So the most significant part of that wattage output is as heat (infra-red) rather than visible light, and therefore it’s really negligible to try and calculate how much of that total radiative power is emitted under the visible spectrum rather than the infra-red so I’m just going to leave it out.

My electric heater produces 2000W (in other words 2000 Joules per second).
1630W for my 27 candles really isn’t all that bad in comparison. I know that the amount of joules per second will vary as the candles will run out at different times, and I know that this is a very sketchy exercise in a field I’m no expert in, but it’s still a pretty decent amount of energy being emitted.

For now, though, I am going to whack the heater on full blast in addition to burning the candles. And Porkchop, my wee pet that started this entire exercise, is certainly benefiting from this double output of heat.

Fun facts I didn’t know before I started this exercise: The temperature in the centre (blue bit) of a candle can get up to 1000 degrees Celsius! And light is measured in lumens, the SI unit of luminous flux (or the portion of radiative power falling in the spectrum of visible light).

On the Origins of Thundersnow

So today there was a flurry of snow crossing my part of the UK. I say a flurry because it was hardly thick enough to settle, although I hear up north it’s a different story.

Anyway, the snow did not settle but seemed to gather and bunch up in the sky, bits of flake swirling around in the air, whipping up a treat. Before I knew it there was a massive storm forming! A huge banging sound – it was more like an explosion than a traditional rumbling peal of thunder – tore through the house and outside I witnessed massive blue flashes of ball lightning, originating from within the cloud of snow. It highlighted the snowflakes in a way I’ve never seen before, then minutes later the storm had dissipated and I was left stunned. My neighbours had rushed outside too and were staring up at the sky and chattering excitedly.

Thundersnow is very rare, and usually associated with freak storms in Northern parts of the US. It’s not really something that happens here that often.

thundersnow infographic depicting warm air convecting after contact with cold air
[Washington Post thundersnow infographic – click to go to original WashPost article…]

The reason it’s so rare is that for storm clouds to even form at all you need some kind of convection mechanism, and the heat required for this is not usually present in the kinds of temperatures experienced in snowy weather. But sometimes a mass of cold air can slide in atop a mass of warm air, and if the warm air is very humid, close to the dew point but still cold enough to be icy, a weird kind of instability occurs and it will start to convect.

The nimbus head of the storm won’t usually be as high as your average cumulonimbus because these precise unstable conditions won’t last long enough to let it rise so high. And the energy will probably be dissipated relatively quickly, just as I saw today.

A thundersnow-storm will likely be accompanied by a shower of hailstones (which also happened today). This happens when the convective potential is very high, causing strong updrafts and rapid motion. What was interesting was that the hail hit about ten minutes before the thunder began. And when the thunder did start up, I don’t think I’ve ever seen ball lightning so fierce and blue!

The whole thing was so short and violent but it was an epic experience.

Apophalypse Now!

No, that title is not mis-spelled. It’s a reference to the asteroid Apophis, which will be passing overhead… today in fact. You might recognise the name from Egyptian mythology, or from the popular sci-fi series Stargate. It’s a Near Earth Object, or NEO, a class of object in the solar system that has the greatest chance of coming into close proximity with the Earth.

So today Apophis is set to cross over the Earth a mere 14 million km above our heads. For comparison, the Sun is 152 million km away from us, and the moon is roughly 0.385 million km away, so Apophis will be somewhere in that middle ground. We probably won’t be able to see it passing because of the Sun’s light, but early-evening astronomers may catch a glimpse of it speeding away.

Scientists are very interested in this, because it gives us a chance to gather info about the asteroid and prepare for its return in 2029, where it has a 1 in 300 chance of hitting the Earth. Today’s passing can enable more detailed measurements of its mass and spin, which will give a clearer prediction of its orbital path. And there is even talk of Russia planting a landing beacon on Apophis sometime after 2020.

Apophis has a diameter of 300m, but while the power released by an actual impact would be hundreds of times that of an atom bomb, it still does not come remotely close to the size of the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs – that one was 10km in  diameter. Yikes!

With my love of mythology, I have already had to bite my tongue at articles such as the Daily Mail’s ‘Asteroid named after Egyptian Demon.’ Apophis (or Apep if we don’t want to use the Greek translation) is a god, dear Mail journalists. He may take the form of a snake and rule over darkness, and he may have been cast as a demon by certain monotheistic religions, but that doesn’t make him a demon.

Ah well, my love of mythology can run amok here and I can explain things fully. Apophis is the god of darkness who Ra had to defeat every night by sailing through the underworld and spearing him. The god Seth used to be cast as the one doing the killing for Ra, until Seth became mis-cast as a god of evil and darkness, eventually taking Apophis’ place in much later dynasties.

Apophis wasn’t so much a god of evil as a being of necessity – the Egyptians used him to explain why Ra the sun god mysteriously disappeared for twelve hours every day.

One of the funniest things I came across was finding out that the asteroid Apophis is in the Aten class, and while Apophis is the god of darkness, Aten is the god of light. During the Middle Kingdom, the Aten was the disk of the sun, a kind of holy nimbus to Ra. Later on the Aten got a monotheistic religion of its own, Atenism. So we get the picture that the Aten is a pretty big force for supreme goodness. Which makes it funny that such a dark god is hiding in its midst.

It gets even funnier when you realise that in the cult of Atenism, Aten was the one who killed Apophis. And now up in space Apophis is hanging out like a bro in his old enemy’s gang.

This all gave me a major case of the giggles.

But hang on. Atenism is a monotheistic religion, you will recall. So what is Apophis doing there in that old Atenist myth? Well, followers of Atenism engaged in full-scale deicide of the old gods, which largely involved rewriting myths and defacing temples. Because of the monotheism, Apophis had to be relegated to being a demon. So the Daily Mail kind of got it right – but still, Atenism had a brief 20 year stint as a major religion out of all of Egypt’s 3000 year history. For the greater part of time, Apophis was a god. And most people, when they think of Egyptian mythology are thinking of the traditional pantheon, not a wildcard short-term monotheistic religion.

Thinking about it, if Aten were real he’d probably be highly annoyed about lending his name to a group of pagan gods! Hehe.

I looked a little deeper into Nasa’s reasons for naming Apophis. It turns out that Apophis is going to become an Apollo class asteroid after the close pass in 2029, but up until then it will be in the Aten class, and since it’s traditional to name asteroids from within the same mythos as their class name, they needed an Egyptian name with a Greek flavour. They also wanted to choose something that represented darkness or danger. So Apophis, the Greek spelling of Apep the God of Darkness, fitted the bill perfectly.

I must say I appreciate NASA’s commitment to mythological naming very much.

But what will happen after 2029? I’m kind of hoping Apophis gets renamed to fit in with its Greek fellows. Considering its current situation as the polar opposite god to its named class, and the fact that it will be moving into Apollo – who coincidentally is also the Greek god of light – I propose it gets renamed Erebos, the Greek god of darkness; the Apophis of another culture.

It’s around half past two and I’m looking out my window. Apophis is up there somewhere, right now.

This was meant to be a short post.