Referral Spam

It's a brilliant thing for a new blog, for me to look at the page views and see that there is a number that isn't 0. Alas it is increasingly apparent that while I may have pageviews, I am mainly entertaining spam sites. Seems that some sites are being set up to lure many a new blogger into getting and further spreading viruses. Knowing that people like knowing who is directing traffic at them, they fake referrals, whereupon us curious types may want to click the referral link. Protip: Don't. A quick Google search will reveal that these are malicious sites ready to infect the unfortunate blogger and generally ruin their day.

If you are curious about which sites are malicious, I have found a fairly comprehensive list at lordhtml.blogspot.co.uk, who's post I came across when googling, checking out the validity of my latest referral (www4.best-aruchecker.com).

There are already plenty of blogs warning against these sites, but given that they seem to make up most if not all of my current traffic, they are kind of pissing me off. I like accurate stats, thank you very much, and frankly don't have much patience for anyone who willingly spreads viruses, so I'm going to add my voice to the masses.

Solidarity, friends.

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Nuclear Energy: Power!

Today we talk about nuclear power, it's physics and it's uses. First up to bat, fission.

At it's most simplistic, the difference between fission and fusion is that fission it when the nucleus of an atom splits, and fusion is where two nuclei, funnily enough, fuse, join together. Alas, simplistic isn't what we really want here so let's delve a little deeper.

It is possible for fission to occur without our intervention, however this is pretty rare, and not so helpful in regards to our power. So, we are forced to split our nuclei ourselves, and we go about this in the most obvious way. We bombard them with neutrons.

Ideally you'll remember all the work that was done regarding the discovery of the nucleus. Maybe you'll also have an idea of the work on radiation done by the Curies and Becquerel, and of course Einstein's foray into mass-energy equivalence. Basically, the early 20th Century was a good time to be into physics, as we began to understand more and more about the subatomic world. So much so in fact, that some thought we might try breaking back into that old alchemical pastime of transmutation that the ancients and the people of the middle-ages seemed to have so much trouble with. In 1917 Rutherford managed to transmute Nitrogen into Oxygen. Not quite Lead into Gold, I'll grant you, but still pretty ground breaking, I think you'll agree. He achieved this by directing alpha particles into Nitrogen: ¹⁴N + α → ¹⁷O + p.

Eventually the neutron was discovered and a fellow called Enrico Fermi had the bright idea to fire them at uranium, the heaviest natural element, in order to create a new, heavier element. confident with his work, he named the new element Hesperium. Others however were not so convinced. A German chemist suggested that instead of becoming a bigger atom, it was conceivable that it broke down into smaller chunks. This line of thought however was not pursued.

Not until a group of physicists started performing similar experiments in Berlin. Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann (The textbook doesn't mention Meitner, which I think is kind of unfair given that even though she continued to collaberate by mail, the only reason she wasn't a part of some of the work is because she was fleeing, well, she was an Austrian Jew in 1938. Work it out. Anyway...) found that after bombardment that sure enough the product was not a larger element, but Barium, an element with 40% less mass than Uranium. In the words of Meitner's nephew Otto Robert Frisch:

Was it a mistake? No, said Lise Meitner; Hahn was too good a chemist for that. But how could barium be formed from uranium? No larger fragments than protons or helium nuclei (alpha particles) had ever been chipped away from nuclei, and to chip off a large number not nearly enough energy was available. Nor was it possible that the uranium nucleus could have been cleaved right across. A nucleus was not like a brittle solid that can be cleaved or broken; George Gamow had suggested early on, and Bohr had given good arguments that a nucleus was much more like a liquid drop. Perhaps a drop could divide itself into two smaller drops in a more gradual manner, by first becoming elongated, then constricted, and finally being torn rather than broken in two? We knew that there were strong forces that would resist such a process, just as the surface tension of an ordinary liquid drop tends to resist its division into two smaller ones. But nuclei differed from ordinary drops in one important way: they were electrically charged, and that was known to counteract the surface tension.

The charge of a uranium nucleus, we found, was indeed large enough to overcome the effect of the surface tension almost completely; so the uranium nucleus might indeed resemble a very wobbly unstable drop, ready to divide itself at the slightest provocation, such as the impact of a single neutron. But there was another problem. After separation, the two drops would be driven apart by their mutual electric repulsion and would acquire high speed and hence a very large energy, about 200 MeV in all; where could that energy come from? ...Lise Meitner... worked out that the two nuclei formed by the division of a uranium nucleus together would be lighter than the original uranium nucleus by about one-fifth the mass of a proton. Now whenever mass disappears energy is created, according to Einstein's formula E=mc², and one-fifth of a proton mass was just equivalent to 200MeV. So here was the source for that energy; it all fitted!

To make a long quote short, they concluded that the Uranium has more or less split down the middle. Actually, I really like that liquid drop analogy. That makes things much easier to visualise. To hell with you textbook.

Smug wanker.

Anyway, back to the physics. As well as the two chunks of smaller atom, it was found that 2-3 separate neutrons were also released in the division. So consider this. You have a bunch of ²³⁵U that you fire a neutron at. This bothers one of the ²³⁵Us enough to make it split, producing Barium and Krypton or whatever, a chunk of energy, and 3 shiny new neutrons. Neutrons released into the very same bunch of  ²³⁵U. Yeah. Suddenly you have a whole bunch of other neutrons colliding with yet more  ²³⁵U, and I think you probably get it. There is a whole lot of energy being released. This, friends, is a nuclear chain reaction.

As for how the energy is released, when the  ²³⁵U undergoes fission, the two new chunks, both being positively charged, repel each other, sufficiently so that they overcome the strong interaction holding them together. From this they gain kinetic energy. Being smaller, they are more stable, having more binding energy that the original nucleus. The change of this binding energy is equal to the energy released, which is in the order of 200 MeV.


Alright, so now we know what fission is about, lets get on to fusion. This is the energy source that will solve all global problems, end strife and provide cheap energy for all! Or not, but it'd be pretty damn useful, if only we could get it working properly and reliably. Indeed, the only consistently reliable fusion power source we currently have is the Sun.

Fusion, being the cousin of fission, also involves one particle at one end with two at the other, only this time it is the two particles coming together to make one larger one. Now, you have to remember that the electrostatic repulsion is what gives the two resultant fission particles such a high resultant kinetic energy. It's this same force that needs to be overcome to force the two smaller particles close enough to let the strong interaction take over.


This is all a roundabout way to get you to the maths of it all, which you already know if you think back to part one. Yeah, when you get two particles together the change in binding energy is found as a change in mass. This mass can get you the energy released in the fusion event. Pretty basic stuff as long as you get the maths right.

The more interesting aspect, other than the infinite energy and everlasting peace on earth is the sun. The sun is incomprehensibly hot. Consider that the very centre of our dear Earth , the solid inner core is thought to be roughly 5700 K. This is nearabouts the temperature of the sun's surface. The core, where all the fusion fun happens is closer to 15000000 K¹. At this kind of temperature atoms are kind of like "Bloody hell it's hot", take off their nice electron cloaks, and go for a casual, high energy jog. You might expect hat this would cause them to collide at high speeds, and, well, you'd be right. Such high energies in fact that lo and behold, they overcome electrostatic repulsion and undergo fusion. This is the start of a process known as a proton-proton chain reaction.

The only other thing you really need to know about fusion right now is that we're trying to get it working down here. Really we are, and have been for over 50 years, but it just wasn't sticking until recently. There are however some decent prototypes in the making,  including JET, the Joint European Torus, which has shut down now but paved the way for ITER, International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which in turn has sparked planned to built the DEMOnstration Power Plant which will build on ITERs results. That's a planned project inspired by the projected success of a project that hasn't even properly started yet. That's some comforting confidence, right? Should all this pan out, it may lead to PROTO, the world's first commercial fusion power plant. I am genuinely excited about this, guys. Science fiction future here we come!



¹Incidentally, if you're using the AQA Physics A textbook, it tells you that the temperature is 10⁸. Clearly this is wrong, by an entire factor of 10. Seriously, fuck this book.

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Nuclear Energy: Energy and Mass

Alright people, Physics Unit 5 is a fair ways off but not so far as we can ignore it. This time I come to talk to you about, well, I've already said in the title.

This is the part that really centres around the part of physics everyone knows, and that many I wager look forward to when they start doing physics, E = mc². It feels like the opening gate to the really intense stuff that physics can be about, and the stuff that when you go deeper into it, you will be hard pressed not to bring up at bars, boring everyone else even though you know just how interesting it all is and if only you can explain it the right way they'll understand too.

"No, look, it's not that difficult. Once an object's mass is compressed within a sphere of radius r_s, then it's escape velocity is equal to the speed of light, and it becomes a black hole. Now just let me explain the Chandrasekhar limit..."

If for some reason you haven't grown up in a society where every generic science class in your childhood cartoons had a blackboard plastered with Pythag and E = mc² then what you need to know is that over a century ago a guy called Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity in which he showed, among many other significantly more complicated things, that mass and energy are connected, specifically that Energy E is equal to the mass m of an object, multiplied by the speed of light (in a vacuum) c squared. So, when an object loses gains energy, say, kinetic, by speeding up, it gains more mass. Now, normally this is fairly indistinguishable from normal. For example, imagine an 650 kg object like, say, this flying car.

Let's say it accelerates from rest until it's casually moving along at a breezy 40 m/s. Good old Newtonian physics tells us that gives it a kinetic energy of 520kJ. Now we just need to divide that by c² to find that at such a velocity the car/plane has an measly extra 5.78x10^-12kg.  Now it clearly this is nothing compared to the 650 kg we started with, so doesn't really bear thinking about. Indeed, in order to gain a single kilogram the car would have to be moving at 1.66x10⁸ m/s which you may notice is somewhat faster than we are currently able to get cars moving these days.

This equation follows us right down to the nuclear scale, where it can be used to find the energy released from particles during radioactive decay. So long as we know the difference in mass before and after decay, we can plug this into the equation and find the energy given out.

Moving on, some definitions for you to remember!

Binding energy: This is the work that must be done to separate a nucleus into it's constituent protons and neutrons.

Mass defect: The difference between the mass of the nucleus and that of the separated nucleons. Interestingly enough there is a difference, as well shall go into.

See? It's funny because defect sounds like effect. Only the most original comedy here, folks.

The binding energy of a nucleus can be thought of as a measure of a nucleus' stability, that is, how readily it will break down after a few glasses of gin. Apply enough Long Island Ice Teas, or work, and you can overcome the nuclear strong force, remove a nucleon from a nucleus, thus increasing the potential energy of that nucleon. Do this lots, and the total energy released is equal to the nucleus' binding energy.

The mass defect is more or less as simple as the definition. The accumulated mass of the separate nucleons is greater than that of the nucleus they were once part of. The difference in this mass is the mass defect. What this means is that when a nucleon is worked off a nucleus it somehow gains mass. If you are keeping up, it may not surprise you to learn that this extra mass comes from the potential energy gained by the work done on the nucleon to separate it from it's nucleus. Specifically, the binding energy of a nucleus is equal to the mass defect multiplied by the speed of light squared, or:

E=Δmc²

Looks familiar, huh?

Now, a century on, we still don't really know exactly why mass and energy have this relationship, because this whole mass thing is a bit of a bitch. I'm sure we'll come to that another time. For now just understand that energy and mass are essentially one and the same. If you don't believe me, consider this explanation I nicked from a recent Ask A Physicist.

 "Protons are made of quarks, but if you add up the masses of the individual quarks, they only add up to a per cent or so of the total proton mass. The rest is interaction energy. From the outside, you cannot tell the difference between "real mass" and mass with is really energy. There is no difference." 

So, physics continues to push us over that sketchy line between understanding and Shermer's last law. Bring on the magic.

Join me after the break, when I delve into the world of nuclear power.

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Bailyn's Fables: Einstein and Relativity

This one fits nicely in with my revision posts, as I plan to go into energy and mass equivalence next. for now though, do enjoy the next little story in this series.

One of the things that so many hopeful students know is how Einstein was kind of a moron as a young man. He didn't do well in tests, if he did them at all, he was kind of a rebel, and he generally hacked off his teachers, which as you'd expect means that he didn't do very well in the job market. He gets his job in the patent office, and after years of labouring away in obscurity he publishes 3 of the most important papers in physics, ever.


There are a few morals one can take from this which I shall go through in increasing order of sophistication.

1. Genius in obscurity can revolutionise science

This is the dangerous one, the one that the hopeful students mentioned above are most likely to cling to, because it basically means that no matter how rubbish you are, you might one day be lauded as one of the most important people of all time. Isn't that a nice thought? Such a nice thought, in fact, that many people do indeed cling to it, believing themselves to be the unsung hero of our times, citing Einstein as an example of their obvious genius.

So edgy and badass. Truly the mark of genius.

Every day professors and academics are bombarded by people who in very clear terms (caps lock) explain why Einstein and all of modern physics is wrong and why they are right. Which brings us nicely to the next, more acceptable moral...


     2.  You can revolutionise science only if the new theory encompasses previous theories

We have had centuries of Newtonian mechanics which has held up for that long, so obviously there is something right there. What Einstein did wasn't to overturn Newton's theories but to show that they were only part of a bigger theory. This is something that many don't understand. Just because you've come up with a radical new theory doesn't mean that the planets are going to stop moving in Keplerian orbits

Do explain why relativity is wrong and not, for example, a theory that has passed every observational and experimental test thrown at it for a century. Be sure to quote Galileo as evidence of your unappreciated genius.

Edit: I found this entertaining little number in a brief search for some of the more entertaining examples of the above.


     3. Einstein's work in the patent office was key to his way of thinking

Some of the big inventions that were passing through the patent office at the time it seems were methods of synchronising clocks over large distances. The introduction of rail travel meant that while before clocks could be out by a full 20 minutes and no one would really care, now they had to have a unified system, or else things are going to collide at high speeds and it will all be rather unpleasant.

Einstein therefore had to spend many days going through these inventions thinking about time and electromagnetic signals moving at the speed of light. Thus it is thought that maybe, rather that simply coming out of obscurity in a blazing glory of physics, the work he was doing in the patent office was actually key to his coming up with his theories.

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Bailyn's Fables: Galileo and the Church

I thought I'd start with the big one. This is the one that almost everyone was taught in primary or early secondary school. The story of how one scientist put forward a theory that disagreed with the Catholic church's beliefs, and was subsequently admonished and persecuted for it by them. It was likely one of the first times in our lives that we were made aware of this "war" between religion and science, and carried with it the moral that you should stand up for what you believe in, or against the tyranny of what you think is wrong. Fine lessons, but let's see what we can get from the truth.

A quick side note here, as there is another commonly held untruth at this point. The story sometimes goes that Galileo invented the telescope and thus was the first to gaze upon the heavens. In fact the credit of the invention should really go to one Johann/Hans Lippersheim, a German-Dutch lensmaker, in 1608, though as with so many historically significant inventions, this is up for debate. The key point however is that Galileo was not it's inventor. This is not to say he was not a great man. He contributed massively to the Scientific Revolution and deserves much of the praise thrown his way, but there is a matter of truth that must be considered.

Certainly, he may not have invented the telescope, but he made a damn few discoveries with it. Not, a further point must me made, heliocentricity, as such measurements as would be required simply wouldn't have been possible in his day. Most of his work was involved in observing sun spots, the moon's craters, moons around Jupiter, and the phases of Venus. None of these directly proved that Earth orbits the Sun, however the moons around Jupiter seemed to contradict the idea that everything was centred on the Earth, and Venus' observed phases showed that it orbited the Sun, rather than us.

Here is where the fable pulls away from truth. It is commonly taught that these findings, which were directly opposed to the Aristotle and Ptolemy geocentric models that were strongly supported by the Catholic Church, were dismissed as, well, to summarise:

Subsequently, depending on who is telling the story, Galileo kept shtum for a bit, or stood strong, the little man against the vast church.

The truth is, Galileo published his conclusions, and the Jesuits, while initially skeptical, performed their own observations and ended up confirming his findings, though they would still warn Galileo to abandon Heliocentrism, calling it "false and contrary to scripture". Galileo became popular with many in Catholicism, and indeed became friends with a man who would later become Pope Urban III.

Mind you, it's not like he was totally accepted:

"My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth."

A letter to Johannes Kepler

No, it seemed that some would never accept Galileo's word, even to the point of refusing to look in the bloody telescope to see for themselves. Nonetheless, Galileo's book circulated for several decades, with very little opposition from the church. It did however have plenty of opposition from another area. His fellow scientists.

Many attacked the theory because it opposed the deeply entrenched Aristotelean view and indeed Scripture. Far from being persecuted by the church, he was attacked by his very peers!

The story moves in back into the realm of reality later in his life however, when he published Dialogue Concerning the Chief World Systems that more or less attacked the very people who had supported him, including the now Pope Urban III, and sought to interpret passages of Scripture, something the Church felt outside the jurisdiction of a scientist, as it were. Decidedly old now, he was brought to Rome to defend himself and was placed under house arrest. He was still allowed visitors, and had a servant. He spent a lot of his time composing one of his finest works, Two New Sciences. 


So, far from the little guy against the big power story many of us know, the truth is somewhat contrary. Understand that I am not taking the side of Catholicism against science, but neither do I believe that it is right for anti-religious people to keep citing this story, when in reality it really missed a lot of the truth. I do believe it is important that the truth and only the truth be considered in this ongoing, and probably everlasting debate. It's a moral high ground kinda thing, I suppose. So, in light of the above, I might suggest an alternate moral for this fable, that even science is prone to fanaticism, and we would do well to guard against it. Your own suggestions are welcome.

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Bailyn's Fables

A fable, for those who for some reason never were children, is a short story, generally full of cute anthropomorphic woodland animals who have misadventures and finish the story either dead or having learned a lesson or moral.  It turns out that science is full of these stories, admittedly minus Benjamin the Bunny or whoever. These are stories that, generally speaking, describe the process of some discovery or event, but upon closer scrutiny, turn out to have an element of artistic license, as it were. While this might piss the scientific historians off somewhat, they still serve a purpose. The point is not that the story is an accurate depiction of events so much as it is a lesson, a vivid illustration of how to behave.

It is in these posts therefore that I will discuss some of these scientific fables, and while noting the morals, will perhaps delve somewhat into the truth of things.

I should explain that the name I have chosen for this series is from the Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University, Charles Bailyn, from whom I will have stolen a great number of these fables. He was first brought to my attention mid 2011 when I was pointed in the direction of a number of free online lectures. Never one to pass up either free things or learning, I downloaded a number of these, one series of which was fronted by this Bailyn fellow. I quickly was impressed by his teaching style. So many lecturers I have found to be stiff and awkward in front of a large group of people, but he managed to sound enthusiastic, interested, and at times that rare but oh so important of things, genuinely amusing. But most importantly I found that I was learning, and taking much more out of it than I ever had at college.

This post turned into something of a tribute up there. I think I'll leave it like that, only adding sincere thanks to Professor Bailyn, should he stumble his way here one day after Googling his own name or something. I thoroughly enjoyed your lectures, and greatly look forward to going into even greater depth when I get to university myself.

Ah look, we're back on topic.  From the first lecture, he started talking about these fables of science, and as I am ever one to seek the truth of things, I quickly jumped on the idea to seek the truth behind the stories, to compare and contrast. This will just be one area of this new, mildly more structured blog. I shall be posting the first fable not long after I post this. See you there.

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Radioactivity: the Discovery of the Nucleus

Today's picture heavy topic is Radioactivity: the Discovery of the Nucleus.

See, the thing is, until relatively recently, we didn't really know what we were made of. Some philosophical ideas had been thrown around for millennia that if you keep halving something that you would eventually get to a point where the cheese could no longer be halved. This tiny bit of something was referred to as "Indivisible", or ἄτομος (átomos). This was known as Atomism. The origin of this thought is widely credited to Democritus and Leucippus.

However people still believed that we were made up of the classical elements, and while such a theory is still prevalent in modern popular media, most college textbooks tend to prefer teaching the periodic table. This was due to the foundations laid by 17th century "natural philosopher" Robert Boyle with Corpuscularianism, similar to atomism, except "corpuscles" could in principle be divided. While he didn't create the idea, Robert Boyle argued in 1661 that matter was composed of various combinations of different "corpuscles" or atoms, rather than the classical elements of air, earth, fire, water and dragon.

Things didn't really progress for a while after, Corpuscuthingy being the prevalent thought of the time, until the science of chemistry was developed. In 1789, French nobleman and scientific researcher Antoine Lavoisier discovered the law of conservation of mass and defined an element as a basic substance that could not be further broken down by the methods of chemistry. Later, in 1805, discovered the John Dalton proposed that each element consists of atoms of a single, unique type, and that these atoms can join together to form chemical compounds, prompting him to become thought of as the originator of modern atomic theory. Further lines of reasoning were made by one Johann Josef Loschmid, who in a scientific landmark, worked out the size of molecules in air, and botanist Robert Brown, father of what has come to be known as Brownian motion.

In 1869, building upon earlier discoveries by such scientists as Lavoisier, Dmitri Mendeleev published the first functional periodic table. The table itself is a visual representation of the periodic law, which states that certain chemical properties of elements repeat periodically when arranged by atomic number.

Now bear with me, if you haven't left already, because here is where we finally near the content of the A2 syllabus (assuming you haven't found the last 4 paragraphs as fascinating as I have). In 1897, the electron was discovered by J. J. Thomson while pissing about with cathode rays. In doing so, he discovered that they were a component part of every atom, thus overturning the then prevalent belief that atoms are indivisible. Thomson postulated that atoms were therefore made up of the negatively charged electrons distributed, possibly in rings around a uniform sea of balancing positive charge. Thus was created one of my least liked scientific names, the Plum Pudding Model.

Douse it in brandy and set it alight, then get back to me.

Thus it was that in 1909, under the direction of Ernest Rutherford, Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden bombarded gold foil sheets with α rays, then known to be positively charged helium atoms. Lets take a more detailed look at that. What Geiger and Marsden used was an evacuated metal box, containing an alpha source lined up with a gold foil, and a scintillator (A zinc sulphide screen that emitted light when hit by an alpha particle). What was observed was that most particles travelled straight ahead with little to no deflection. 1 in 2000 were deflected however, and very occasionally, 1 in 10 000 would be deflected at a greater angle that 90°. Some would even bounce right back to the source, an action that would be impossible for a diffuse cloud of positive charges, as Thomson had suggested. It was, in Rutherford's words "as incredible as if you fired a 15 inch naval shell at tissue paper and it came back." to give you an idea of just how surprising this was.

It would have to be at least triple ply

From this, Rutherford interpreted the results as suggesting that the positive charge of a heavy gold atom and most of its mass was concentrated in a nucleus at the centre of the atom. This was the creation of the Rutherford model. He went on to use Coulombs law of force and Newton's laws of motion to explain his results, and through the use of different metals in the same experiment he worked out that the magnitude of the charge of a nucleus was +Ze, where e was the charge of an electron, and Z was the atomic number of the element.



So there we have it. The history of the discovery of the nucleus. I could go on to the size and density, but that's decidedly mathsy, and while I love maths, it doesn't translate very well into the historical documentary format I have going here, and I fear I would end up breaking into degree level stuff, which I just do not need distracting me right now.

At any rate, I hope you enjoyed it. It has probably helped me, if not you, so at least there's that.

It is highly likely that this won't be a daily thing as it is entirely likely that I will be a) busy b) doing other things and more likely c) procrastinating.

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Get Me Some Thermite And A Parachute

Honestly, I think this is the hardest post to write. Every other post in this blog will consist of physics lessons, science stories, and my adventures in GMing, plus whatever madness I feel is appropriate. This one? This is the one that I need to grab you, because it is highly likely that if you're reading this post it is to gain a deeper understanding of what the hell I am about.

"But surely you have an About page for that?"

Yes! Or at least, I will, and maybe even a contact page so you can talk to me in private (You saucy devil, you. we don't even know each other yet)! But still I feel a First Post is kinda important. A blog of only this semi-seriousness needs a kicking off point, to ease both you and me into the swing of things. The trouble sets in when thinking of exactly what to write. If it were a journal type thing that I could just start with a journal type post. However it is not, and anyway, my life at the moment is kinda non-eventful. "Dear Blog, last night I went for a pint down the local with old friends. Everything was pretty cool. Today I did physics. That was also cool, because I am the kind of wonderful nutter who enjoys physics."

Wonderful, in so many ways.

On the other hand what that leaves me with is the "Welcome" post. Aren't those things just so tedious? How many times do you need to read a variation on "Welcome to my blog! Hope you stick around, because I just know we're going to be SUPER friends ;D". I think I'm probably just prejudiced against the word "welcome". It just reeks of insincerity, doesn't it? It's a word primarily used by billboards and tour guides. "Welcome to Scotland!" "Welcome to the University of Anybloodywhere". If you are using the word welcome to start a conversation, chances are you are being paid to do so.

£125,000

So that leaves me with this choice, to ramble for a few short paragraphs until I feel comfortable just explaining what I'm about without feeling like I'm just throwing it at you. Because I care, I really do.

First thing you must know is that I have another blog, Not Fanatically Anything, but as the name suggests it's pretty unfocused. I figured that it would probably be a good idea to have somewhere to write about key interests, so here we are. Primarily the plan is to write articles on physics. I'll mainly stick to the AQA Physics A A-Level curriculum, [Edit: Given that I'm actually in university now, there will be more higher concept stuff. I shall however continue to try and get it across in my relatively non threatening manner] but I'll spin off into other things I find interesting that you, if you're anything like me, should find interesting too.

Secondarily I may be posting any PnPRPG recordings (or Actual Play) that I produce henceforth. I have a nWoD campaign planned so chances are that'll be up soonest in those regards. [Edit: Yeah, uh, that never really happened unfortunately]. For previous work, do check out my old blog where I GM'd a short (incomplete) Pokemon Tabletop Adventures campaign. Indeed, that was my first ever experience in GMing. Bask in the ineptitude of my burgeoning abilities.

I do hope that you like what you've heard so far. However many posts I've made between now and you reading this, if this interests you, I'd love to have you reading more, and drop me comment sometime. I'd like to chat.

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