Chicken Fight 1 SOLD!!!!

Well, today I said goodbye to my Chicken Fight 1 painting (shown) that was bought by someone at work. It's sad when a painting goes - you can replace it I guess with a similar version but never exactly the same. Anyway, I hope the buyer enjoys it and uses it as a marketing ploy to encourage his friends, family and colleagues to visit my blog with the viewing of buying up my entire portfolio! If anyone is interested in buying more, I've added guide prices (negotiable a bit) to the gallery at the bottom of this blog.

Changing the subject, I've become a successful alchemist! I've managed to think up a 3 step process for changing lead into silver! See image below! Have a nice evening......

Stu-ey Hew-ey

This is Stu - member of the NMEG group and our coolest and most fashionable member probably. Semi-pro ice hockey player as well, biceps like wedges of beef! Have a good weekend all.

New Group Photo!!!!

Just had a new research group photo outside the department.

Left to right: Stu Brittle (porphyrins), Mark Sugden (gold nanoparticles) , The Old Geezer Himself, Noorh Al-Seny (Nano-scale Structures), Lee Hague (organic transistors), Faridah Supian (calixarenes), Javi Roales Batanero (porphyrins), Benedek Poor (porphyrins).

More later.........

42 !!!!!

Many thanks to Stephen Ashcroft who called in this afternoon to show me a copy of the book: "So long, and thanks for all the fish" by Douglas Adams. The great thing about this was that the book was signed....................... and even better, it was signed by Douglas Adams himself!!!!!!

He can't stay away!!!

You just get rid of him once and before you know it, he comes back!! Today, my friend and colleague David L from Hull Univ came over so we could put the finishing touches to our latest joint grant application. Also, he comes over for a nice glass of red which I always furnish him with. He brought over a giant yellow bog-plunger to fix our department's blocked drain problem!

Above: "John's van", now run

by John's son, Jez.

Also, thanks to Linda S (from our main office) who brought me a giant apple from her garden to add to my "Time Vase" - three apples now, two well on the way to oblivion. I couldn't resist showing you a photo of my eldest lad, dressed up for Sheffield's Fright Night in late October. He usually looks fairly normal but not on this occasion.

Left: arty photo Below: Mein Gott!Time Vase

The Cooler (my method for dealing with wayward undergraduates!)

Extra-solar Planets!

Take a look at this!! This is nicked from the bbc.co.uk website today and shows some real (exo)-planets orbiting a star only 25 light years away!! Now for those non-scientists out there, 25 light years is the distance light would travel in 25 years - light travels at 300 million metres per second, so it goes an awful long way in 25 years.....BUT, this distance is actually very short in astronomical terms. Many galaxies are about 100,000 light years across*, and there are millions of galaxies that fit into our Universe...... you get the picture. We're looking at real planets here that are still there - ie the light from many distant galaxies that we observe from Earth now, actually left those galaxies millions of light years ago and hence by now, they may have completely changed or even collided with neighbouring galaxies. In the case of these planets, the light left them 25 years ago in 1983!! Any intelligent (or it may be more accurate to say non-intelligent) lifeforms may just be watching the very early episodes of The Bill! It's unlikely there is life on these particular planets, however, but you never know! After all, they have found thriving bacteria populations at the centre of volcanoes on Earth and even in nuclear reactor vaults, so life can certainly exist in hostile environments.

*A colleague of mine, Susan C, has just told me that the distance from the Earth to the centre of our Galaxy is about 25,000 light years and we are only about half way in.

Have a great weekend!

Sunrise over Sheffield

Luckily, I had my camera with me today to grab the two shots above. Busy day ahead with my Durham talk to prepare, Mark S at 11-12 and then a UCAS parents' lunch (ie parents of new applicants who would start their degrees next September) and tours after lunch. Nothing planned tonight so I think it's a homemade (not by me) curry and then a nice bottle of Rioja maybe! Have a good day.

Solar Sighting in Sheffield

Hello again - posting number 2 today!!!!!

The last few days have been completely cloud-covered in Sheffield - we haven't seen the Sun in ages. But this morning, we have a bit of blue sky* and there's a large yellow object in it!!!! I thought I'd snap a few views of the trees I can see from my office! Here they are:

*Mentioning blue sky reminds me of a time I was working in a lab in Paris (CNET, Bagneux). Work was going quite well but all the staff I was working with went home at 5pm (a bell actually sounded to mark the end of the day!) so the evenings were lonely affairs, walking the streets of Paris** and building up courage to go into Parisien restaurants on my own. Anyhow, in one such restaurant, I was halfway through my horse-steak (and I'm not joking*** - it was delicious and must have come from good stock, very Shergar-esque) and my relatively fed-up mood was lifted when I saw the words on a sign above an archway in the room, saying "Il y a toujours des choses qui font apparaitre les ciels bleu!" If you speak some French, then don't read the next sentence and work it out for yourselves, but for non-French-speaking people, it means "There are always things to make the skies look blue". I think this is a great expression to help keep our peckers up when we're feeling low. Aww!! Isn't that Richardson bloke a big softie?

**Did you know that the famous song "Streets of London" written by Ralph McTell (released in 1974) was actually written while he was in Paris? Si, es verdad!!!

***I have eaten a rather large range of the animal kingdom in my time, probably more than most. Horse is on the list as mentioned above, so is dog (Beijing, 1996), octopus (Japan several times), various Mongolian creatures (China and Taiwan 1996 and 1997), Atom Bomb Soup (Japan - our host, the boss on Sony in Yokohama, called it that, not us), sea urchin (the worst thing I have ever experienced, Japan) and probably cat although I can't be certain.

Apples

Thought it was about time I showed you how my Apple Art pieces are doing. The original Shrinking Apple is the decayed blob at the bottom of the wine glass, now joined with a fresher apple which can view its own destiny. The Time Vase was set up in October and is going to end up with about 7-8 apples all in progressive states of decay, conveying the sense of time, ageing, gravity and destiny. Hope you like them. Modern art rocks!

End of Uncle Tim's Bit of PHY101!!!

Tonight marked the last of my lectures in PHY101 Motion, Forces & Energy! Thanks to all 140 PHY101 students who made it a really enjoyable course to teach. In an interview afterwards, Uncle Tim was quoted as saying "I must say chaps and chapesses, the deafening applause at the end was the loudest so far in my teaching career! And it was heartening to see that some of you even managed to stay awake!" Seriously, you're a great bunch and Uncle Tim is always in D21 for you if you have any problems.

Other events today - I burnt my toast this morning, but that's cool, I love burnt toast. It reminds me of childhood when times were hard, and my mother didn't wash the potatoes to bulk up the stew with a bit of good ol' Yorkshire mud!

Hasta luego, y espero que todos pasan un buen semana de Reading. Uncle Tim xxx