IBS

So I went to the Doctor who, despite my concerns that he was a locum, was very helpful, as well as very nice. He had me diagnosed inside of five minutes - I definitely have IBS. I've been having problems with this for around ten years and as with a lot of people, I never really went to the Doctor because I put it down to other things.
However, it's really good to finally know what I have as it now means I can manage it and help to alleviate the symptoms. there is no cure as such, but learning what will and won't cause a reaction can help lessen the symptoms.
A while back I suddenly started eating differently. I'm not totally sure what triggered it, but it was in part due to problems I was having at the time. I stopped eating about half the amount of food I would normally eat and would sometimes only eat an apple for lunch, (no breakfast,) and maybe some peanuts and cheese for my evening meal or a can of macaroni cheese or something like that.
I learned to only eat when my stomach actually rumbled, because that way I would know I was definitely hungry. Most people in western societies eat for all the wrong reasons. We eat because we are thirsty - seriously, apparently research shows that around 30% of the time we think we are hungry, we actually are thirsty, so next time you feel peckish, instead of having a bar of chocolate or something, have a drink of fruit juice instead and see how you feel 5-10 minutes later. Often you will find the hunger subsides.
Worse than that is when we eat out of boredom or because we are down. This is totally unnecessary and can be prevented, (at least I found in my case,) by taking your mind off whatever it is you're doing and finding something else to occupy you.
I found that if I listened to my body, it would tell me when I was hungry and when I was thirsty or even when I had had enough to eat and was full. Once I'd learned to listen properly, I found I actually didn't need to eat as much as I was doing and could easily get by on a lot less food with no adverse effects. If you start eating less, your stomach shrinks. Presumably this is an evolutionary effect - if food is scarce, your body reacts by needing less food. I know - go tell that to the starving thousands in Africa and all around the world right? Little comfort for people with no food.
I lost a fair bit of weight during this period, dropping from about 13-14 stones to 11 and a half. I cut out lots of things I had previously eaten and drunk. I drank almost no coffee, (big change for me,) I ate only small portions of bread, (when I was at my heaviest I was 15 stones and would have at least 3 slices of bread with pretty much every meal - one while I was waiting for the food to cook, one with the meal and the last one to mop up with,) and cut out a lot of other stuff. As I said, I'm not sure why I did this - I didn't consciously go on a diet or plan to lose weight. I didn't consciously drop specific things from my diet, it just kind of happened.
Strangely, I'd never felt better. At the time I put this down to feeling happy about being able to fit into any pair of jeans, my now flat stomach, (I never quite got a six-pack, but it was flat for possibly the first time ever,) and the confidence these things brought me. I've pretty much always been a little overweight - nothing chronic, not obese, not really even what you would call 'fat' but overweight. It came as a bit of a shock to notice how much being overweight affected my self image, but in a good way because I felt so much better. As well as my stomach, my face got thinner. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it no longer looked like a potato with a beard, but I had cheekbones and a stong jawline. OK, so I was never so overweight that I couldn't see these things, but now they had that extra gleam of definition!
What I didn't realise however, was that one of the big reasons I was so happy was that my symptoms had gone into remission. I was happy because I felt so much better health wise - not having the stomach cramps, the bloating etc. Sometimes I used to eat only a small meal but my stomach looked like I'd eaten a Viking feast to myself.
That's the problem with IBS, it's very easy to overlook the symptoms, or put them down to something else. In my case, it had been going on for so long, that it just became part of everyday life. Some days were worse than others, that was all. The other problem is that the symptoms vary from person to person. Some are affected in the throat, some in the stomach, some in the bowels or anus. See the link for a list of symptoms. If you have more than one, see a Doctor. My symptoms span the stomach and the small and large bowels, although I do sometimes get a funny reaction in my throat - not like a golf ball like the list says, but it gets irritated, so maybe I span all four categories.
Anyway, I slipped back into somewhere between being my thinnest and my biggest and back into some old bad habits, like eating probably a little too much again, starting to eat bread more often, drinking too much coffee, (maybe up to 10 cups a day,) and so on. I went back up to 13 stone, where I now sit. The symptoms returned and it was only then that I realised that they had dissapeared at all.
I thought back and decided to cut out wheat to see if I had an intolerance. I did that for a week and it's a little tough, because there are more things out there with wheat in them than you realise, even if it's only wheat flour. I felt better, but not totally, so the next week I cut out dairy too. Again, I felt better but not totally. Then I shared a bottle of red wine with my girlfriend and had a large bar of dark chocolate, thinking it would be ok because there was no milk in it. The next day I spent an hour or so curled up on my GF's bed clutching my guts. Apparently, chocolate and alchohol are two common irritants.
So this last week I had no wheat, dairy, coffee, chocolate or alcohol and felt better for the most part. My bloating after meals reduced somewhat but some of the other symptoms were still present, such as excessive burping. Apparently that may be caused by legumes, so I think a week without those may help. The Doctor told me to avoid wheat and dairy, spicy or greasy foods and also try to avoid stress (he recommended listening to classical music, which I do sometimes anyway).
Anyway I urge anyone with symptoms to see a Doctor. even now I'm thinking of things that I've been suffering with for years and finding out that it can be attributed to IBS, just another symptom.
Also check out Wikipedia's page on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irritable_bowel_syndrome
for more info and especially Sophie's IBS tales blog: http://www.ibstales.com/blog/ and website: http://www.irritable-bowel-syndrome.ws/
Lastly, I'm also a vegetarian (that topic is for another post however,) so it means cutting out things from an already reduced diet, which would worry me apart from the fact that I did it before and felt great - not like I was lacking anything at all. At least now when people ask, "You're a vegetarian? What do you eat?" I'll be able to list the entire catalogue of what I eat inside of two minutes!

Dietry requirements

Well, too long has passed since I posted again, but I wonder if that's such a big problem as currently my readership seems to extend to , uh... me.
Oh well. If you are reading this, say Hi in the comments and make my day.

So despite not solving the mystery of dark matter, what else have I been up to? Well spending a lot of time with my wonderful GF for one thing, which is always nice. recently we had a couple of trips out to Winchester and Bath, which reminds me, if you ever happen to find yourself in Bath, go have a meal at a place called De Muth's. My housemate took me there last week, (to thank me for driving out to Bath to give her her purse, which she had left at home, meaning she couldn't pay to get out of the car park. Normally this would just be an oversight, but she went to Bath to do some shopping! Heh.) and it was just amazing. It's a veggie restaurant, but don't let that put the non veggies of you off. They cater for all sorts of dietry requirements and it was the tastiest meal I've had in as long as I can remember.

Speaking of dietry requirements, I've been struggling off and on with stomach problems over the last 10 years or so and after my GF did some research, I think I may have IBS. I've just chalked it up to different things over the years, such as just eating too much, but I've decided to do something about it. For the last couple of weeks I've given up wheat and the last week I've also given up dairy, coffee, alcohol and chocolate. so far I have been a little better and have a doctor's appointment for tomorrow to see about getting tested.
I felt better after giving up wheat, so wondered if it was just an intolerance to that but then drank a few glasses of red wine and ate some dark chocolate, (no dairy,) and the next morning I had to lay curled up on the bed for a while I was in so much discomfort. Apparently chocolate and alcohol are two of the worst things to trigger an attack. Bah.

So now I have to watch my GF buy a bottle of red wine and then go home to a cup of tea with soya milk. Not so much fun.

Dark matter - a solution?

So this week I've been off work - yipee! I figure I should post something because, well, I'd be just too much of a slacker if I didn't. I'm not sure where this post will go just yet, as I started it with no particular topic in mind again.
I had another week off a couple of weeks ago, and although I did get around to doing some writing, it wasn't on here and I felt bad for not getting around to it. The thing is I usually like to write about a particular topic but to be honest, I think if I just realise that if I dive in and start writing, something always comes out.
The writing I did do was for my book, which I've mentioned previously. I'm happy that I'm actually getting some stuff done with it now - I'm about 4 or 5 chapters in so far, so I am *actually* writing it.

OK, so the big news is I *may* have come up with a solution for the missing weight in the universe problem. I'm not kidding.
For those of you not acquainted with the problem or who don't take a passing interest in science, the problem is thus:
'They' (meaning scientists,) weighed the universe. Yup, weighed it. I'm not sure of the specifics of how, but basically they looked at all the stuff we can see - stars, planets, galaxies etc and calculated how much mass is should all contain. Then they calculated how much the universe actually weighs, using how much gravity there is. The assumption being that certain astrophysical phenomena, such as spiral galaxies being bound together instead of the stars and planets flinging off into space, would require a certain amount of gravity. Makes sense. However, knowing how much gravity is exerted by a body of baryonic matter, (i.e. normal, tangeable 'stuff' like planets or stars or you or a chicken salad sandwich,) they totted it all up and fell short. Way short. The stuff we can see does not account for the gravity in the universe. It's about one sixth of the density required, or some people put it at 10% of the weight that it should be in order to match up.
That left people scratching their heads as you might expect. It's like stepping on the scales and finding out you now weigh 100 stones, (1,400 pounds for you American types or 635 kilos for you Europeans out there,) instead of 10 stones, (140 pounds or 63.5 kilos,) and yet physically, you don't look any different.

...

Well, I left writing this blog to come back to it and during my time away I checked into it and it appears my theory is bunk.
Basically I had been walking around the science museum a few weeks back and I saw a quote from Einstein saying that even photons have mass when they approach the speed of light. (I'm starting to womder if I remembered it wrong.) Since photons normally travel at the speed of light, it occurred to me that the universe is filled with light. Even if the average photon had an incredibly small mass, the abundance of these particles would mean their sum could end up weighing a fair bit. Since light is invisible - it's only the things it interacts with that we can see and since the scientists who weighed the universe were weighing what they can see, it seemed to me that light would be an obvious candidate for being overlooked.
According to several websites, photons have no mass under the modern definition - from USA Today's website:
A: No, photons do not have mass according the present definition of mass. The modern definition assigns every object just one mass, an invariant quantity that does not depend on velocity, says Dr. Matt Austern a computer scientist at AT&T Labs Research. Under this definition, mass is proportional to the total energy, Eo, of the object at rest.
"A particle like a photon is never at rest and always moves at the speed of light; thus it is massless," says Dr. Michael S. Turner, chair of the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Chicago. (http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/basics/wonderquest/photonmass.htm)

But hang on, there are two issues there:
One is that as you approach the speed of light, mass increases doesn't it?
Well, apparently not. This is the old terminology of 'relativistic mass', which is no longer used. Obviously under that description, the faster you go, the more mass you have, but light (photons,) would have to be massless, otherwise it's mass would be infinite and the universe would go squish.

Secondly, the good Doctor mentions that photons are never at rest - except now they are. A recent experiment brought a photon to complete rest by firing it through a Bose-Einstein condensate of Rubidium. The previous slowest speed for light was 38mph, which is still unbelievably slow.
Anyway, it might be an idea to weigh the little bugger while it's in there, as we might yet find out that the missing weight of the universe is not due to dark matter, but the sum of the weight of all normal, invisible light.
If so, you can contact me through this blog to give me my Nobel prize.


Further reading on photonic mass can be found here:
http://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/ParticleAndNuclear/photon_mass.html
for those of you who are interested.

The problem with the pace of technology

I needed some support with a router that we are having problems with at work. I looked on the website and found technical notes – FAQ’s troubleshooting etc, but under the model I am looking for, there were only PDF’s available proclaiming the European compliance. Not especially helpful.

I couldn’t seem to find a basic user manual either, so I rang the number listed on the site for UK support.

The first time I rang I was given a premium rate number to call for support, which the line announced itself as (a different model router) support upon connection. The advisor I spoke to could not find any documentation on my model of router but wished me luck in finding help.

I rang the UK number again and explained the situation for a second time. The lady I spoke to was very helpful but was looking on their website for help, which I'd already explained that I'd checked. She was unable to find anything relating to the router on the website that I hadn’t already found myself, which came as no great surprise. She then offered me a number for support for home products that was in America. I explained that for one thing this was a business product, or at least being used by a business and secondly that it seemed ludicrous that there was no European number to call, let alone a UK based number. She offered me a second number, which started with the code for America. I pointed this out only to be told, “I don’t know if it’s an American number or not.” I confirmed that it was definitely an American number from the code. She read it out anyway.

She then Exclaimed that yes, she had found a UK number, but then realised it was the number I was already speaking to her on, which she ironically commented was ‘helpful’ before saying, “I don’t know why they put our number, it’s not really any use to you.” I had to agree.

I take it all back...

Firstly, an update: I haven't smoked a cigarette in over four weeks. Not bad huh? A guy at work commented on it just a few moments ago by saying, "You haven't smoked in, like... ages man!" only to be a bit disappointed when I told him it was four weeks. He thought it was about three months, which at times it has felt like that to me too, but I think a month is doing pretty well, so with all due respect, fuck him.

So, the next part may be extremely old news to some, if not most, but it's new to me so hell with it. You know how sometimes you find something cool out and you're all buzzed about it and you tell someone and they say, "Oh THAT? We've known about that for ages..." and then you get that feeling that confirms that you're just outside the clique, on the fringes of madness, riding a scooter powered by squirrel spit on the teetering edge of the abyss and the munch pebbles are getting bigger... (If you don't know what munch pebbles are, you've either never skated or at least didn't own a skateboard during it's golden age between say, 1980 and 1990,)

Anyway, a little while ago I discovered the 'personalise this page' thing on Google. (If you're thinking, "big whoop", skip this bit. There is a discussion on Geeks vs Nerds further down and some funny quotes and stuff at the end.) First of all I was none too impressed. OK, so it gave you a little clock and I could RSS feed a couple of blogs I like, which was kind of cool but nothing amazing. Then today for some reason I remembered when I saw a demo of Vista, the sidebar to which you could attach gadgets and then I hazily remembered some comparison to Google. So I started tinkering with the add stuff part - how cool is it? There's EVERYTHING on there! I have an IT tab to help with work with feeds from Slashdot and GRC, as well as IP and DNS tools, a fun page with games and comics, and a main homepage with blogs, quotes and the news and weather. I'm all geeked out about it. (I am a self confessed geek and have bought products by thinkgeek.com to prove it - actually I'd love to get a feed from there...) So anything bad I said about Google, (not on here,) I take back - mainly because as well as the gadgets thing being really cool, there is one that rates how evil Google is on that day based on a user poll. I figure any company that doesn't take itself too seriously and allows that kind of thing can't be all bad. Besides, people have a go at Google because they are getting too big and are trying to take over the whole net. Well, being pragmatic, that's what companies in a capitalist society do isn't it? They grow and earn more money and offer more products and services and basically try to take over. It's only the monopolies commission that stops one company trying to buy everyone else and in reality most stuff is owned by about 5 or 6 massive corporations anyway and I doubt most people know the names of any of them.

Whilst I was impressed by Vista when I saw it, it basically does what other versions of Windoze did, which seems to be rip good ideas off other people, (mostly Apple and also Google for this one,) and implement it. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Window$ boy myself - all but 3 of the computers I look after at work are Micro$oft machines, (the others being 2 Macs for the graphics crew and one Free BSD based server with a proprietary OS that acts as firewall and net monitor type of thing,) but the ideas in Vista blatantly aren't new. The Aero flipping screens thing is similar to OSX's interface and the sidebar gadgets are like Google's, as mentioned. I still want to upgrade though, as the benefits will still be worth it and it looks damn sexy.

On another note, I had a drunken pub discussion with someone once on the differences between Nerds and Geeks. Some people will think that it's a different term for the same thing, but this guy described himself as a Nerd and I think of myself as a Geek, so we got talking about why. I asked him if he had any toys on top of his monitor. He said no, which definitely puts him in the Nerd camp, but is a symptom rather than a cause.
After about an hour of discussion, we decided that Nerds have a need to make things neat - whether it's cabling or code or whatever. They like things to be in order. It makes sense to them and they feel more comfortable when things are in their proper place and correctly labelled or referenced or commented or whatever.
Geeks, by contrast, just like things to work. It doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to get the job done. Sometimes this is by necessity, like a lack of time to pretty things up, sometimes it's by design because, hey, that's just who we are. We admire Heath Robinson and are more likely to be impressed by a bodge job that works despite looking unbelievably dangerous and/or unlikely to work, over a job that looks very pretty and orderly.
You don't have to do a particular job to be a geek or a nerd, you can find both schools of thought in programming, network administration - even (gasp,) non IT jobs, (see under [L]users,) it's a lifestyle thing.

Right, finish on some random cack:

Word of the day that doesn’t exist but probably should: Grebulon (noun): A name for those small, unexpected crunchy things you often find inside other things – usually foodstuffs, but not exclusively.

Usage: “I was eating a Kinder Surprise yesterday and there was a grebulon inside, as well as the toy. I may sue the company for psychological damage and whiplash.”

Random me quote: “Don’t let the bastards get you down, shut you up, or fob you off.”

Random me quote 2: “Life is what happens. Everything else is just stuff.”

Clever answers to stupid questions

I have a myspace page - I know, I know... anyway someone posted a list of "things to think about" which were mostly stupid semantic questions, with a few genuinely interesting questions. As I started reading them I was answering them in my head, so I decided to have a go at them. Most of the answers are from my own head, but a few I needed to research further. A coupleI am not 100% sure on, but are ok as far as I know. I ended up answering 68 out of about 85 questions. Most of the ones I missed were either boring or incredibly stupid, but if I can find the original bullitin on myspace, (bulletins are offline at the moment for some reason,) I'll post the rest.

For those I had to research: thanks goes to wikipedia, dictionary.com, howstuffworks.com, google, and several random sites, as well as the book Anatomy for the artist by Sarah Simblet.

Here are my answers:

1. Are people who are allergic to nuts allergic to coconuts too?
No, coconuts are a fruit.

2. Are Zebras white with black stripes or black with white stripes?
It is generally believed that zebras are dark animals, with white stripes where the pigmentation is inhibited. The pigment of the hair is found solely in the hair and not in the skin. The reasons for thinking that they were originally pigmented animals are that (1) white horses would not survive well in the African plains or forests; (2) there used to be a fourth species of zebra, the quagga (which was overeaten to extinction in the eighteen hundreds). The quagga had the zebra striping pattern in the front of the animal, but had a dark rump; (3) when the region between the pigmented bands becomes too wide, secondary stripes emerge, as if suppression was weakening.

3. Aren't all rooms room temperature?
Yes, semantically but 'room temperature' is a measuring point at which the temperature is deemed comfortable

4. Can bald men get lice?
In theory, yes but lice use the hair to climb, cling to and attach their eggs to, so it would be unlikely.

5. Can crop circles be square?
Crop circles is an overall term, due to the original formations seen, but crop patterns have been created in all manner of shapes.

6. Can someone give up lent for lent?
No. This is a logical contradiction. You can’t give up giving up, it’s a double negative.

7. Can you breathe through your nose and mouth at the same time?
Yes due to the human descended larynx.

8. Can you get cornered in a round room?
No, another logical contradiction.

9. Can you make a candle out of earwax?
No, candle wax is flammable when melted - it's actually the gas that burns. Ear wax is a totally different substance and not flammable in that way.

10. Can you write in pencil on an eraser?
Yes. (You've never done that?)

11. Do cows drink milk?
Obviously as calves, all cows suckle from their mother.

12. Do cows have calf muscles?
No, that is a nickname for the gastrocnemius muscle. Cow physiology is different to humans.

13. Do ducks sneeze?
No, sneezing is a product of the human olfactory and respiratory systems, usually in connection with the immune system.

14. Do glow-in-the-dark objects stop glowing when somebody turns the lights on?
No, but their apparent luminosity decreases relative to the luminosity of the brighter object - hence why you can't see the stars during the daytime. They are still there, but the much brighter light of the sun renders them impossible to see.

15. Do octopuses have arms or legs?
Neither, they have tentacles.

16. Do people with big eyes see at a wider range than people with smaller eyes?
Human eyes vary between 20mm and 30mm in diameter on average, but the difference in the angle viewed would be imperceptible between the two extremes.

17. Do stairs go up or down?
Up and down are relative and mostly arbitrary terms until an object in motion can be given a relative vector, seen to be in accordance with one and in opposition to the other.

18. Does anyone actually kill two birds with one stone?
The statistical possibility that someone, somewhere throughout all of history has achieved this act is quite high, however the use of the word 'does', implies an ongoing or at least present tense usage and I would like to hope not.

19. How can someone 'draw a blank'?
The 'drawing' refers to drawing from memory rather than artistry, and probably shares an analogous linguistic form with drawing water from a well.

20. How can you hear yourself think?
The exact processes are unknown but the human mind is capable of replicating and inventing sounds, (and images,) within it's own confines.

21. How can you tell when sour cream goes bad?
The same way you tell when 'normal' cream has gone bad - it smells and tastes different and eventually will develop mould.

22. How do the "Keep off the grass" signs get there?
Someone puts them there. The idea being that if one person walks over the grass to put a sign up it will not cause much damage, but if everyone was to walk over the grass, it would.

23. If 75% of all accidents happen within 5 miles of home, why not move 10 miles away?
Because 'home' is not a fixed location, but a relative one. So if you move 10 miles away, that is now where your home is and all the things that most people statistically have accidents with would still be within 5 miles of the new location.

24. If a cat always lands on its feet and buttered bread always lands butter side down, what would happen if you tied buttered bread on top of a cat?
Firstly, neither of those statements are true. Cats try to ensure they land on their feet but don't always. buttered bread is subjected to the same laws of physics and probability as everything else and does not always fall butter side down, but people percieve this to be the case because they forget about the times it landed butter side up because there was less impact on them.

If you were to tie a piece of buttered bread to a cat and drop them so that they were both 90 degrees to the floor, the cat, being an animate, sentient life form concerned with its own safety, would try to right itself and would most likely land on it's feet. The bread, being an inanimate object, would be subjected to whatever moves the cat made, unless the string broke, in which case it would depend on its distance from the floor at the time, along with its rotational speed, if any, and other physical factors.

25. If a criminal turns himself in shouldn't he get the reward money?
No. Criminality is usually punished by society, not rewarded.

26. If a word is spelled wrong in the dictionary, how would you know?
If you thought this may be the case, you could check other dictionaries, including online ones and then contact the publisher in order to get them to check and rectify their mistake.

27. If an orange is orange, why isn't a lime called a green or a lemon called a yellow?
Presumably the colour was named after the fruit, not the other way around. The orange tree is called Citrus Aurantium in latin, the lemon tree Citrus Limon.

28. If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
No. The words moron and morality share no linguistic roots.

29. If heat rises then shouldn’t hell be cold?
No. As previously stated, up and down are relative terms. That's like saying Australia should be cold because it's down.

30. If it is a 50mph wind and you drive your car at 50mph downwind, if you stick your head outside would you feel the wind?
You would feel the air passing over you as you rushed through it, yes. Wind is usually defined as moving air, so you could argue that if you are moving through it, it is not wind, or else you define it as moving because you take yourself as the fixed point of interest as we are prone to do.

31. If it is zero degrees outside today and tomorrow it is supposed to be twice as cold, how cold will it be tomorrow?
Strictly mathematically speaking, this is a paradox as zero is the absence of anything. Pragmatically speaking, zero in temperature is defined as the point at which water freezes in celcius and colder than that goes into minus figures. It would then depend on how much the temperature dropped over the previous day, (assuming we are measuring in days due to the usage of 'today' and 'tomorrow',) therefore if it was 2C yesterday and zero today, we can effectively expect tomorrow to reach -2C.

32. If money doesn't grow on trees then why do banks have branches?
The word, as with many words in English, has multiple meanings, (the word with the most number of meanings in English is 'set',) but branches in this sense still keeps some of the original meaning of being offshoots from a main body.

33. If one synchronized swimmer drowns, do they all have to drown?
No, the routine would stop and if the person could not be revived, the appropriate authorities would be notified and the show cancelled.

34. If quizzes are quizzical then what are tests?
Testing.

35. If someone can't see, they're blind and if someone can't hear, they're deaf, so what do you call people who can't smell?
Anosmic.

36. If someone told you they were a pathological liar, would you believe them?
It would depend on other, mainly non verbal clues. If their body language gave clues as to their assertation being false, then I would deduce that they were indeed lying, but that the condition was not classed as pathalogical. If their body language suggested they were being truthful I would deduce that yes, they were a pathalogical liar and they were telling me this honestly because their condition does not preclude them from ever telling the truth.

37. If swimming is such exercise, why are whales fat?
Swimming is good excercise for humans, who usually do it in warm and relatively shallow waters. Whales have a subcutenous layer of fat in order to keep warm while swimming at depths that would prove lethal to humans, where the water is extremely cold.

38. If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?
The theory that the universe is expanding is exactly that - a theory, but one that seems to hold weight due to observations in red shifts from distant stars. You might as well ask, what was there before the universe, to which the most logical and obvious answer, applying Occam's razor, is - nothing.

39. If you are driving at near the speed of light and turn on your headlights, what will you see?
It is impossible to drive any craft at such a speed presently and scientists generally agree that ever being able to do so is extemely unlikely, however even if you are travelling at the speed of light, the light being emitted is accelerating away from you at the speed of light, so it would appear normal.

40. If you have x-ray vision, and you can see through anything, wouldn't you see through everything and actually see nothing?
No. Xrays are very good at penetrating things like fabric and soft tissues, but the more dense the object, the less x-rays penetrate, hence why bones show up on x-rays otherwise the sheet would be blank and they would be no use in medical imaging.

41. If you stole a pen from a bank then would it still be considered a bank robbery?
In theory taking any article from a bank could be considered a 'bank robbery', but the term is traditionally used to describe the theft of a large quantity of money or bonds. Crimes are judged on the value of what is taken and pens cost so little that a bank is unlikely to press charges for the theft of one from its premises, although many attatch them to counters with ball bearing chains to avoid them being taken.

42. If you take a shower, where do you put it?
If you are taking it from the shop you bought it in, the usual place to put it is in your bathroom. If you mean the act of having a shower, then it is a common lexicographical term and does not literally mean 'to take' in this case.

43. If you were born exactly on 12:00 midnight on December 31st –January 1st, which year would you say you were born in?
The year begginning Jan 1st, as it was only the previous year until the stroke of 12. If you had been born at 11:59 and 59 seconds, you would have been born in the previous year, ending December 31st, however births are rarely so precise.

44. If you were on a plane going the speed of sound and walked from the back of the plane to the front, would you be walking faster than the speed of sound?
No, due to the laws of motion and momentum, you would still be walking at roughly 4 miles per hour, (the average human walking rate,) relative to the surface you are walking on.

45. Is French kissing in France just called kissing?
No, apparently they call it American kissing. - I'll check this with my half French girlfriend though.

46. On the periodic table, why do some elements have symbols with letters that aren't even in the word?
They come from the latin versions or similar. For example, PB, which stands for lead, comes from the latin plumbum, from which we derive the word plumbing, as the Romans used lead for their water pipes. Other examples include: Sn - Tin - Stannum (Latin) Ag - Silver - Argentum (Latin), Argunas (Sanskrit) Cu - Copper - Cuprum (Latin).

47. Shouldn't there be a shorter word for "monosyllabic"?
No, the word is a conjunction of 'mono', meaning one and syllabic, which is formed from the word syllable, meaning an uninterrupted segment of speech consisting of a center of relatively great sonority with or without one or more accompanying sounds of relatively less sonority. No other word, conjunction or otherwise, has been formed to represent the same meaning. Besides which the length of a word often bears no direct correlation to it's meaning.

48. What are those little things on the end of your shoelaces called?
Ferrules.

49. What colour is a mirror?
A mirror reflects light, so in general has no colour, but often mirrors may have a slightly blue cast. Other mirrors maybe heavily coloured, either the backing or the glass itself, in which case it could be argued that they are not mirrors in the strictest sense, but instead just highly reflective surfaces.

50. What did cured ham actually have?
Again this is a word with more than one meaning. Curing, in relation to meat is a preservative process dating back hundreds of years and does not connote disease in this sense.

51. What does OK actually mean?
It is taken to mean everything is alright. Its exact origins are unknown, but it is believed to have come from a corruption of 'all correct', i.e. 'oll korrect', which was a popular way of speaking in the 1830's.

52. What would happen if everyone was to flush their toilet at the same time?
Chances are that the water companies would struggle to cope with the demand and burst pipes, flooding and sewage strewn streets would ensue.

53. What would happen if you were to feed a pig some bacon?
It would almost certainly eat it, digest it and eventually, defecate the remains out. Pigs are omnivorous but lack the mental capacity to distinguish between meat from one animal to another and so have no concept of cannibalism, which is an exclusively human idea.

54. Where do they get the seeds to grow seedless grapes?
Seedless grapes are seedless because the seed aborts during development, termed stenspermocarpy. You can see the remnant of the aborted seed(s) in the grape. Grape breeders have found a way to remove the developing embryo when it is very small to prevent it from aborting, termed embryo rescue. They can then raise seedless grapes from the rescued embryos to use in breeding new types of seedless grapes. For vineyards, seedless grapes are grafted.

55. Where does the white go when the snow melts?
The white colour is caused by the refraction of light due to the interactions of photons within the crystalline structure of ice. Because snow is a lot of ice crystals on top of each other, eventually all the different wavelengths of light are refracted back out equally, equalling a white colour. When it melts, it becomes water and the crystalline structure is lost.

56. Where would we be without rhetorical questions?
Literally, exactly at the same point in time & space that we are now. Linguistically we would lose a mostly useless and often frustrating device.

57. Which way does a compass point in space?
It would either float freely or point to the nearest magnetic field.

58. Who was the first person to see a cow, and think what would happen if I pulled those dangling bits and drink the liquid that comes out?
It's unlikely that things happened that way. Someone will have seen a calf suckling, associated it with humans breast feeding and possibly tested it.

59. Why do men have nipples?
Because all human fetuses start as female in the womb. After conception the developing embryo follows a female template. It's only after six to eight weeks that the effect of a gene on the Y chromosome kicks in for boy embryos. This gene stimulates the production and influence of hormones such as testosterone, which 'masculinise' the embryo by altering physical development to form male features. Nipples, however, are formed before this masculinisation process takes place, and nothing that goes on later reverses this. So the story that God made Eve from Adam's rib got it the wrong way round. Males are an adaptation of females and the nipples are just one piece of evidence for this.

60. Why does a round pizza come in a square box?
Square boxes are easier to make, given the materials used and are also easier to store and carry.

61. Why doesn't superglue stick to the inside of the tube?
It is the glues interaction with the air that causes a chemical reaction, making it harden and useful as an adhesive. There is little or no air in the tube and the glue is kept in liquid form.

62. Why is a square meal served on round plates?
It is sometimes said that this phrase originated from the Royal Navy practise of serving meals on square wooden plates. Such plates did exist and so that sounds like a plausible story. However, there's no evidence to support it and in fact, the lateness of the first printed record (see below) pretty well rules this out as a reasonable theory. The Royal Navy's records and many thousands of ship's logs are still available and, if the phrase came from that source, it would surely have been recorded before the mid-19th century. The word square has many meanings, including 'proper, honest, straightforward', and that's the meaning here. This isn't a rectilinear meal on right-angled crockery or otherwise, but a good and satisfying meal.

63. Why is ice clear but snow white?
Ice isn’t clear, it’s translucent, which means most of the photons pass through it. They do refract, but few are actually reflected and it is the absorption and reflection of different wavelengths of light that give colour to an object. If all the light is reflected, it is white. If all light is absorbed, it is black and varying degrees in between. If most of the light is neither absorbed nor reflected, the object is translucent or transparent. For snow, see 55.

64. Why is it called pineapple, when's there neither pine nor apple in it?
The word "pineapple", first recorded in 1398, was originally used to describe the reproductive organs of conifer trees (now termed pine cones). When European explorers discovered this tropical fruit, they called them "pineapples" (term first recorded in that sense in 1664) because it resembled what we now know as pine cones. The term "pine cone" was first recorded in 1695 to replace the original meaning of "pineapple"

65. Why is it so hard to remember how to spell 'mnemonic'?
Some people may find it difficult due to the odd arrangement of consonants at the beginning, however others may find it easy to remember for the same reason - the odd arrangement making it stand out.

66. Why is it, that the sun darkens the colour of your skin, but lightens the colour of your hair?
Hair and skin are two different substances and their pigmentation changes in different ways.

67. Why isn't phonetic spelled the way it sounds?
Not all words are onomatopoeic. Just because the word has that meaning does not mean it should be.

68. Would a fly without wings be called a walk?
No, it would still be a fly, short for flying insect, in much the same way that a person with no arms is still a person.

Thoughts on Thirties

No one ever tells you about your thirties. It's the decade of your life you are least prepared for. As a kid you have school, so you know what your life is going to be until you're 16 at which point you become old enough to have sex and you figure that having sex will keep you occupied for at least a year. Chances are it's more likely that trying to have sex as opposed to actually having the sex will form the larger part of your year, at which point you'll be old enough to drive and cruise around looking for girls/boys to attempt to have sex with. Then you look forward to 18. You'll officially be an adult - old enough to vote and most importantly, old enough to drink and there's a good chance that you'll have met someone willing to have sex with you and actually done it by this point. 19 is pretty much just more of the same and then you hit 20. So you're no longer a teenager, but that's no problem; you're still young and cool, it just means that you're no longer a kid and are now a fully sophisticated adult who may have had sex on a number of occasions, possibly with several partners by now. 21 is a milestone birthday for some reason, even though it's more of the same and then the next big one after that is when life begins at 40.

Only it's not. As you hit 25 and 26, something starts to creep in at the back of your mind. 27, 28... and then at 29 it hits you. The next big one isn't 40, it's 30 and no one has told you about it. You start to panic - you don't want to turn 30. What happens? You know at 40 you are out of touch with the kids and have to start wearing cardigans or jumpers or something, but what happens at 30? Do you start buying knitwear but not putting it on yet, stocking up in preparation? Do you wear it indoors but change into something cool to go out in? Do you still go out?

There's no guidance for you anywhere. Music is aimed at either teens or if it's more serious stuff, your parents. T.V. is the same - programs-a-plenty for kids, teens, twenty-somethings and generations older than you, but what for thirty year-olds? Even the programs with 30-something stars are trying to pass them off as 20-somethings. (Friends anyone?)

One of the reasons no one has told you about being 30 is that it's very different for our generation to our parents'. By the time my father was 30, I was 3. By the time my mother was 30, I was 8. They had grown up and been adults for a while by then. They'd got married, had jobs - careers even, and had kids. By the time I was 30, I'd just got a job in the field I now work in - the first steps into my career.

I didn't want to turn 30. I was enjoying my 20's nicely, thank you very much. I was getting to grips with a few things, growing up gradually but not rushing into anything in particular. True, by my mid 20's I had noticed a few grey hairs in my beard and my male pattern baldness was settled in, but I was still young and I had time. When 30 crept up onto the immediate horizon I got the fear pretty badly. I felt I should know what the hell was going on in my life. I should have achieved more by now. Shouldn't I be a fully fledged adult by this point? What do I do for fun now? Am I having a mid life crisis at 29? If so does that mean I'll only live to be 58? Did I leave the iron on?

I'll break it down for you. I'm 32 now, so I can speak with a little experience about being a thirtysomething.
Here's the bad news:

• There is nothing really that caters for your age group. No specific music, T.V., films, or pastime's of any sort.
• As a thirtysomething, you may experience moments of, "why have I not got my life more sorted than this at my age?"
• You may still live in a shared house, or even worse, with your parents - which you definitely didn't think you would be doing by now.
• You may notice the first signs of aging: grey hairs, the appearance of wrinkles, baldness for men, slightly less perkiness in the breasts for women. Ironically you may also find that you still get greasy skin and spots from time to time, which you had previously thought would be long behind you.
• You are already starting to notice you are out of touch with the kids and may even find yourself complaining about them.

Here's the good news:

• Although there's nothing specifically catered towards your age bracket, you are at a nice age where you can do pretty much anything and not look too out of place. You can go to pubs, clubs, bowling alleys, restaurants, parks... wherever and no one will bat an eyelid.
• Your musical and film tastes etc, won't so much change as just develop and branch out, but you'll still like most of the stuff you did when you were 20.
• You're at a good age, where you can hang out and talk to 20 somethings and have plenty to talk about without coming off as 'the creepy older person that hangs around with younger people', but also can hold your own in a room full of 40 or even 50 somethings. In a room full of 20 and 40 somethings, you can act as a bridge to the generation gap and talk to everyone.
  
• You may not think you have your life sorted, but actually it might be more sorted than you think when you look at it. Do you have a job? A career even? A car? A partner or in a serious relationship? A home? The fact is that even if you said 'no' to all of those, chances are you know what you want and where you are going better than ever before. You know your own mind better than ever before and are less afraid to speak your opinion than ever before. You are more yourself than you have ever previously been and if you think back, your probably more comfortable in your own skin now than ever before, so you are more confident too. That's huge.
• You are taken seriously as an adult by the world at large. Every now and again you get called 'young man' or 'young lady' by someone older, but it's usually someone over 60 at least and you actually take it as a compliment now. People of 50 and below talk to you like a person instead of a child and include you in conversations, even asking you your opinion on things, which you actually have to offer now.
• You have some really good friends that have been with you for a long time. You think of them differently to people that you hang out with, either from work or even socially. Your friends are the ones that have stuck by you throughout and you may or may not live close to them any more, but you keep in touch and you would jump in the car if they needed anything and you know they would do the same for you.
  

Basically you are more grounded, sorted and know your own mind more. You don't have to answer to as many people any more - maybe just your boss and your partner (but if your relationship is an adult one, then it's more equal give and take than previous ones.).

So far I've really enjoyed being a 30-something. I never really saw the American series of that name in the late 80's, early 90's, whenever it was, but it looked like it applied to my parents' generation more than mine from what I saw. Most of them were married, some had kids and nearly all of them wore jumpers or Laura Ashley dresses. Me? I wear jeans, t-shirts, trainers and hoodies with skateboarding logos on them, as well as beanies or caps to keep my bald head warm. My girlfriend says I dress like a teenager, but she's 29 and scared of turning 30, so what does she know? I've tried to tell her it will be cool, but she's going to have to find out for herself. Maybe going through the fear and coming out the other side with a feeling of, "Oh. Really? That was it?" is something we have to go through like a right of passage. To paraphrase the mighty Morpheus: "No one can tell you what being 30 is like, you have to experience it for yourself..."