Law and Morality

I was in Lyon last weekend, and wandering around the Croix-Rousse district, we noticed this piece of graffiti:

Anasua:	I think they mean "what".
Me:	Ah. "Was" must be a misprint.
Philipp:	...because they don't know what is right.

Me Time

Like most UK universities, LSE has a system of 'office hours' – weekly slots when students can book one-to-one meetings with academics. This term I'm teaching undergraduate classes, but I'm also a PhD student. This puts me in the interesting position of being able to book an appointment with myself.

Tomatoes

Happy equinox, everyone! Here are some tomatoes from our balcony garden.

Patterns in Coffee

What do you think this is?

Unless you scrutinised the photo very carefully, you probably answered "Cream". But despite the "Double" in large type and the strawberry graphic, there is tiny type at the bottom which says "alternative to cream". In fact, Elmlea is a "blend of buttermilk and vegetable oils" whose only advantage, as far as I can see, is that it "keeps up to 5 days opened in the fridge, compared to 3 days for double cream."

I've never knowingly bought Elmlea – my dislike for dairy substitutes is well-documented – but this week I thought I'd try it out because the shop didn't have real cream. As an experiment I put some into my morning coffee. The coffee was inedible (I discovered that Elmlea, unlike cream, does not mix with coffee), but at least it made a cool pattern.

London vs Cambridgeshire

This week the Widescreen Centre, the last surviving telescope shop in Central London, announced that they are relocating to Cambridgeshire. The reasons they cited for the move are "[t]he current economic climate, changing retail patterns, and critically a major rent review due imminently".

I only visited their shop once, to buy a solar filter to observe the transit of Mercury. The Widescreen Centre folk graciously answered some questions I had about telescopes, although I'd made it clear that I wasn't looking to buy one. They are also among the core members of my astronomy club (their announcement says they will continue to come for our monthly meets in London).

Rent is not the only thing that makes Cambridgeshire more conducive to astronomy than London. I took this photo last month when my friend Rohini and I went stargazing in Hampstead Heath in London. If you hover over the image, you can see the names of major constellations as well as two Messier objects: the Pleiades Star Cluster and the Andromeda Galaxy.

Try as we might, we could not see the Andromeda galaxy with the naked eye (the photo above was a 15-second exposure, so the camera captured about twice as many stars as our eyes could see).

For me, the most striking thing about the photo is the light pollution. Long after sunset on a clear night, the light from thousands of buildings and streetlamps gives the London sky an unsightly orange cast. Compare this with a photo I posted earlier this year of the International Space Station over Cambridgeshire (hover to see constellation labels):

Relatedly, the photographer Nicholas Buer has a wonderful video simulation of what London would look like if there were no light pollution.

Mission Statement

From a Guardian article about six scientists who have just completed a year-long simulation of a Mars mission:

They managed limited resources while conducting research and working to avoid personal conflicts.

This strikes me as a worthy goal for humanity in general.

The Third Sex

Sign at an upmarket store in Copenhagen:

The Little Mermaid

One of my happiest memories of my time in Copenhagen is of going to see the mermaid at dawn.

The first time I saw her was on a sunny afternoon. The waterfront was teeming with tourists, some of whom were clambering up to pose and take selfies with the statue. I kept my distance and resolved to come back at a quieter time.

Towards the end of my stay, I woke up one morning at 4 am. Unable to go back to sleep and having nothing better to do, I cycled across the city to the waterfront. On the way, I stopped on Dronning Louise's Bro (which some Copenhageners call hipsterbroen or 'the hipster bridge') to watch the dawn breaking over Sortedam Lake.

Some tourists were passing by. 'It looks like my asshole!' one of them shouted at me, for no apparent reason. 'Yours is redder,' I shouted back, and his friends went 'Ooooo.' I'm usually not good at spur-of-the-moment comebacks, so I was pleased with myself.

I reached the statue just before sunrise. There were only two other people there, and they – like me – quietly sat on a bench overlooking the statue and the sea.

Many visitors find the Little Mermaid underwhelming or kitschy, but I've grown quite fond of the statue (in any case, I have a soft spot for disappointing monuments). Even with crowds of tourists swarming around her, she seems dignified and aloof, her gazed fixed on some distant point on the shore; of course in the original fairy-tale, unlike in the Disney movie, the Little Mermaid suffers unbearable torments but does not get her man.

The two other people on the scene were 18-year-old guys from Belgium, returning home after a walking holiday in Sweden. Their ferry arrived the night before and their train was in the morning, so they spent the night on the beach. At one point, they said, it got really cold.

It struck me – not as a cause for regret, just as a fact – that this is the kind of thing I once used to do, but these days I'd be more likely to book a cheap hotel (except perhaps in the company of Bunty, with whom all bets are off).

I turned 30 last year, and it feels like a more significant threshold than turning 18. Lather was 30 years old when they took away all of his toys; his mother sent newspaper clippings to him about his old friends who'd stopped being boys. And the poet Brian Howard said, 'Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.' I cheerfully take buses and, like Lather, draw pictures of mountains that look like bumps, but I may be less likely to sleep under the stars in northern latitudes.