The Bear Minimum

From the mouth of the volcano responsible for that horribly ash cloud an amazing lightning show formed last week.

I visit the National Geographic news site quite often. It’s far more entertaining than regular news, and has the added bonus of increasing my wonder at the natural world.

Recently a series of photos went up of a volcanic lightening storm caused by the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano in Iceland which has been disrupting everyone’s travel plans. A volcanic lightning storm is very similar to a regular one, with the same elements present to cause the charges. Scientists aren’t 100% sure how the long sparks, as lighting from volcano are known, form, though there is speculation that it involves the silica found in magma.

Not only was there an incredible light show, there would have been sound, too. “For instance, small sparks of about 30 feet (9 meters) to about 300 yards (91 meters) make sounds like rifle shots, while the miles-long bolts produce the deep, familiar rumbling we associate with thunderstorms.”

The lighting bolts when coming from volcanoes can travel in any direction, up, down, or out to the sides, and will continue streaking out in that direction until they meet an area of oppositional charge. Apparently scientists are installing lightning detection equipment on Eyjafjallajökull to try to gather more about this relatively newly known - only discovered last year - form of lightning.

Of course, the lightning forming in the ash cloud causes there to be glassy sand particles which are quite irritating to breathe in, especially for asthmatics or emphysema sufferers.

I’ll leave you now, dear reader, with some of my favourite images from the series posted on National Geographic’s story on the phenomena.

Ahh, is the world truly not amazing?

I certainly do! Here’s how I like my mornings to go…

First off, I like to ensure I’ve gotten enough sleep to be fully functional. If you’re sleep deprived, you’re actually as uncoordinated and generally effected by said state that you’re in a similar state to that of being over the legal drinking and driving limit. That shows how important it is to be well rested; especially when your job is to help people with their problems. You have to listen very attentively and help them find solutions. Rewarding, yet exhausting work!

So, after a good sleep, the first thing I do when I’m out of bed is have a very long, very hot shower. This is an enormous part of my morning. It wakes me up, and I’ve time to think about the day or alternatively not think about the day ahead and perhaps think about something my wife and I have planned for the coming weekend.

Next up, eating a healthy breakfast in my bathrobe with a very lovely cup of freshly brewed coffee whist chatting to my wife. At the moment I’m enjoying fruit and toast for breakfast, though it changes quite regularly. The coffee is a non-changing aspect to my mornings, however, though I do change which blends and so on. But there is always, always, a large hot cup of coffee. My wife knows the exact way I like it and always makes me a cup each morning for breakfast.

After that I dress and gather up any paperwork I’ve brought home, and drive to work. Whilst this may not appeal to everyone - which I do understand - having a set routine to follow in the mornings is highly beneficial for me. It takes me a while to fully wake up, so my shower and coffee really help with that. I wonder if you gained something from that insight into my life…

It’s a horrid transition, one that I really am not in favour of making!

I didn’t realise it’d been such a hefty download month. Rent a few movies off of iTunes and you’d be surprised how fast you’ll go through those downloads. Especially if you also decided you’re in the mood to watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nearly 9G just for those three films. That’s what I get for being lazy and not going and buying the Blu-Ray version in town. It’s interesting, though, seeing how much you’ve downloaded. I think when you’re on the highest speed connection short of fibre optics, which broadband is, that you’re unaware how much you’ll be downloading because it goes so fast. I’ve also been enjoying listening to Loreena McKinnett on YouTube lately, but no broadband means no YouTube, nor purchasing it off iTunes. I have one of her albums on there, but there are songs I like from other albums on YouTube and I just hadn’t gotten around to getting those yet.

I do have mobile broadband, also, but I don’t really use it. I’ve got an iPhone, and I fear that I’m letting everyone down with how few apps I have on it. I thought about a Blackberry, but decided I liked the sleekness of the iPhone, plus I didn’t really need business and office telephone systems, just one good reliable phone which I can be contacted on at all times in case of emergencies. My office, however has the Panasonic digital cordless phones system with a fax machine and so on, but I believe those were supplied to us by BT at some point.

At least with the billing cycle I’m on I only have to wait until the 15th to get regular service back… Only until the 15th

I’m honestly still uncertain as to whether I’d be an organ donor or not.

It’s an issue that most of us will become aware of at some point in our lives, perhaps as we’re renewing our licenses one year or a friend tells us they need a kidney or something less dramatic. The point is, we’re all aware that there is a great need for organ donors, and that the greater portion of Brits don’t want to donate.

I can fully understand why, too. When I think of my heart going into the body of another human being, after I’m dead, I feel as if it would be wrong. Wrong to be cut up after death, wrong to allow pieces of me to be scattered into other people, and… in some ineffable way, just plain wrong. I also feel that at the thought of my precious wife donating. The thought of her heart going into another person makes me feel that same level of wrongness.

And yet as a rational person I can see the great need for organ donation. I can see that there are so many people suffering or dying because they’re heart or lungs or kidneys don’t work anymore, and that if more Brits put themselves down on the registry then this would be a much diminished issue.

I think I’m not alone in feeling this way, either. Why else would the greater portion of the population refuse to donate? But are we being overly emotional about this? Are we denying other people’s health unnecessarily? I know we have every right not to donate, that our bodies are our own even past death, but I just wonder if perhaps we should be taught to be less sentimental about this issue. In any event, I’m still not ready to join the donor registry, and it is what it is.

I meant to say a few extra things in some of my previous posts, so I’ll add them here to make it a nice little mixed bag of a post.

With regards to health insurance. For those of you who don’t have any yet, which is a fairly valid option here in the UK, as compared to the US for instance, but if you are looking for insurance, make sure you get many, many quotes for affordable health insurance first! Don’t just go with the most well known, or the one offering the lowest premium. Make sure that you’re signing up for the right kind of insurance for you!

With regards to the investment opportunity of buying to let housing, there are a few more things I wanted to point out. Firstly, if you are considering it, try obtaining an Independent Financial Advisor (IFA), first, as they can assess how realistic it is for you to be buying a second house. If you do think you’re in the right position, but will have to obtain a mortgage, do make very sure you’re aware of all the latest news and trends in lending and borrowing, you can save yourself a lot of money this way!

And finally, still in that vein of thought: I contacted my old landlord who owned all those unit around town, and spoke to him about his thoughts on buying to let properties. He said that he’d had issues for the first few years when some of his tenants paid their rent to him by bank transfers. He said it was difficult to tell where exactly money came from, so he said that he switched all the renting related money handling to a different bank account and found it was much easier to manage that way. He also said that you should go and meet every set of tenants you ever get, because if they know you, know your face and name, they’re more likely to take care of the place for you. If you’re an unknown landlord, he thinks people won’t respect that the property doesn’t belong to them. Interesting, and I have to say it makes sense.

So, there’s a few thoughts I had rattling around my head after writing some of my earlier posts.

I happened to turn on the television last night, in spite of not watching a heck of a lot of it usually, and found that the same old same old is still on television.

It seems that there are a few set television tropes that get trotted out time after time. A few of them frustrate me, quite frankly, and I’d like to see something different for a change, something fresh and unique.

For instance, you can’t go past a new television program without certain characters being omnipresent. By that I mean there are certain types of characters always present, though gender, race, and name will be different in each case. Take, for instance, the Butt Monkey. This is a character who, in spite of being a nice character, has almost everything go wrong for them that possibly can. We’re supposed to like and identify with this character, and yet the writers are punishing him with the worst luck the world has ever known. Eventually it becomes intolerable.

One trope I find particularly dislikeable is one seen so very, very often in television shows. You have two characters who are obviously in love with one another seem to have every single obstacle thrown their way, until one or both of them says they’re giving up on the whole thing, but they’re both pining for the other to come and make it all better. This is particularly irksome to me because it’s usually unlike the characters to do this, yet the writers are ignoring the qualities of the characters they wrote in favour of having certain plot devices present. It’s so very Diabolus Ex Machina, if you ask me, and seems a hallmark of poor writing.

Whilst I’m having a grumble, which can be good for you if done in a moderately mature fashion, is internal monologuing of self-indulgent characters in books. I’m reading a book at the moment and I’m having a rough time of it due to the internal monologuing of one side character. I’ll keep reading and get past this character and all will be fine, though.

So, which TV tropes have you noticed? Do you like or dislike the ones you’re familiar with and why?

A house that we’d let out, of course.

I ask because it is something my wife and I are considering for our future. We both have good jobs, earning rather well, and we’ve often thought about semi-retirement earlier than is typically the norm. Something else we’ve thought about is buying small houses to let, as a means of perpetuating income without having to do much.

When my wife and I first moved in together, some twelve years ago now, we moved into a very snug little unit. It was one of six little snug units, and one of a handful of unit blocks our landlord owned throughout the town. You see, the man owned a business, and during his life he’d bought up unit after unit in order to have a very, very substantial income after retirement.

Now that my wife and I are in a position to think about such things, it’s an interesting idea. We’re in a position where mortgage lending issues wouldn’t exist, as we’d be able to buy a small house or unit outright with money we’d put away, so no remortgages from Nationwide or some such, either. There’s also still a fair bit of people doing the “selling your property or home quickly for cash”, thing, which is dreadful, but if one knows someone going down that path they can offer to take the house off their hands for more than those horrid companies would have given them which works out better for all involved, in my opinion.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I didn’t peruse a mortgage forum or two, as they’re invaluable for getting first-hand perspectives from people who’ve done just what we’re considering doing. I suppose I’m leery of being stuck with bad tenants who’ll damage the house, and that it will become a source of irritation, expense, and drama when it’s supposed to be a nice, neat little nest egg.

You’ll take better care of it that way.

I also like to protect my family. My wife and I are around middle-age now, and that’s about the time when you come to realise some really important things. The most startling discovery is that, every morning when I wake up next to my wife, I’m reminded by her peacefully sleeping countenance, with that little smile she gets when she’s asleep, of just how much I love her. Ten years we’ve been married now - those gifts went down a treat! - and for longer than that I’ve loved her.

Now, I’m aware that sounds corny, and I quite frankly, dear readers, don’t care. When you get a bit older, you stop caring what people think of you and you just want to live life and be happy and love the people you love with all of your heart. That’s how I am with my wife. I don’t mind looking over-protective, because I know that this world, whilst beautiful and amazing, is also chaotic, and anything could happen.

I recently had my yearly physical, which gets faxed off to my family health insurance people, and they offered me a new premium - they do this every year depending on my health, sometimes it’s slightly better, sometimes slightly more expensive, but it’s a good company and I’ve never had any issue getting them to pay for any health related costs. Anyway, this year they offered me a slightly better premium because I’m healthier than expected for 90% of my age bracket. Now that’s a good feeling! They also offered me another life insurance protection plan, but I’m happier with the one I currently have.

The reason I bring these two things up in the same post is to say that your health is not just important for you, it’s important for your loved ones. I have patients who come to me for help with eating disorders because they want to be better spouses and parents, as well as people suffering with alcohol and gambling addictions, and I’ve always respected the effort these people are putting in.

I know these economic times are tough, but your health is so important for your own happiness as well as those who love you, so you owe it to yourself to keep up your health insurance, whether you’re with Zurich health insurance or BUPA healthcare so that you are ready for whatever life has to throw at you!

It’s a sad time for Poland, there’s no doubting that, but it also must be such a terrible shock for them too.

I personally feel that each and every person is special. That we all have an intangible effect on those who’re in our lives, or affected by our lives, and often we’re not aware of how great that effect is. When a public figure dies, there’s a large ripple that brushes across many, many people. If you imagine your country just lost their President as well as his wife, and chiefs of the army and navy… It would be a huge shock to the Polish people.

It’s also so sad to me that they were all on their way over to Russia for a memorial service dedicated to a Russian perpetrated war atrocity in which 20,000 Polish POWs were killed. Call me paranoid, but one does have to wonder about all this… The world knows that Putin is an untrustworthy and unscrupulous man who is not above having any opponents killed. This is fact. So I’m betting that Polish officials are going to be in the thick of the investigation as much as possible.

Mr Kaczynski, who was a contentious figure in Poland, was brought back to Warsaw yesterday, and now rests in the Presidential Palace. When his coffin arrived at the Palace the gathered crowd softly began to sing the Polish national anthem. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but that to me is heart achingly sad. I know that Kaczynski wasn’t a saint, that he had is own set of issues, but he was still respected and obviously trying to better his nation.

We’ve seen throughout history the effect of having a leader taken early in life. It scares the nation to an extent, and I think this will be no different. I sincerely send my condolences to the Polish people and the families of those who lost their lives in the crash.

In the Cradle of Life, to be specific.

Let me set the scene for you. A palaeoanthropologist and his son have set out on the very first day of their trip to the South African region known as The Cradle of Life: A place known for being a repository for many, many ancient human fossils. A few minutes into an area that they’d designated as a likely ‘hot-spot’ using the Virtual Globe software in Google Earth, the son turns over a rock to see what he thinks might be a length of white antelope bone. He calls over his father, and within a few minutes the father is swearing. The son asks “What is it? What did I do?” The father replies, “Nothing! Nothing, you found a Hominid!”

The boy had found the clavicle of the newly named Australopithecus sediba, a formerly unknown ancestor in humanity’s family tree. Before the finding of A. sediba there was almost no known fossil examples from around 1.8 to 2 million years ago in our evolutionary history, which is why these two skeletons, of a mature female and a juvenile male, are so important.

What’s also very interesting about this case is that the scientists who discovered the fossils have grouped them in with the Australopithecus rather than the Homo group of ancestors. What this means is that they think these Hominids are further away from us in terms of evolution, yet there are Homo species in other parts of Africa which have been dated as living longer ago than this new A. sediba.

Another fascinating aspect of the A. sediba is that the skeleton shows us a different version of evolution than scientists had previously speculated. The legs are long like ours, and the pelvis is highly developed, which means that A. sediba walked on their hind legs like us, however their arms are comparitively very long, like that of an orangutan, which means they would have been very able in trees, also. The brain cavity is small, too, like that of the Australopithecus, but it seems that that trait alone is what is holding it up from being considered closer kin, and therefore of the Homo species. In my personal opinion it won’t be too long before the Australopithecus sediba is re-named as the Homo sediba, but is just my take on the situation.