Astronomy

New Textile Art

Angela PorterLeave a comment

Nebulous contours 7 June 2012

Nebulous Contours © Angela Porter 7 June 2012

Approx. 17cm x 11.5cm.  Needle felted dyed goat hair on a black felt background.  Patterns picked out with copper ‘Japan’ threads, various beads and metallic threads.

Inspired by the flow of gases in nebulae and of contour lines on maps.

Nebulous Rainbow 7 June 2012

Nebulous Rainbow © Angela Porter 7 June 2012

Approx 11cm x 10.5cm.  Needle felted rainbow dyed synthetic fibres on a black felt background.  Patterns picked out by gold ‘Japan’ Thread, various beads, sequins, polymer clay tiles and metallic threads.

Shapes and patterns inspired by contour lines and also the flow of gases in photographs of nebulae.

Calendar change-over eve…

Angela PorterLeave a comment

The old to the new

Well, the end of the calendar year, and the astronomical year if the Winter Solstice is seen as the end of one cycle and the start of the next, has come with a pile of revelations from a friend and a series of bangs that have released some inner demons and tears and uncovered an emptiness and knotted-ness in my gut area.

I’m pleased for my friend, don’t get me wrong.  At last they are taking the little yet huge step they need to take to release them from a situation that is untenable for them and into a new phase of their life’s journey.  I wish them happiness and joy and love.  I worry that they are chasing a rainbow, a dream that will not live up to reality, they’ll find the grass isn’t greener, but I know that they’ll find themselves progressing forward in a way they couldn’t where the currently are at.

Their excitement, fear, trepidation, hope and all the other things their going through has stirred up some ‘stuff’ within me that needs to be worked on and examined, which are, in no particular order:

  • Job and Career – Teaching is no longer healthy for me and though I find pleasure and satisfaction in some areas of the job, increasingly I’m finding it harder and harder to cope with other aspects of it.  I need to look at myself and what I can offer in terms of being an employee and what I need from a workplace in order to feel appreciated, valued, successful and that I am achieving good and truly helping people.  What kind of career I want, I don’t know.  Maybe training as a hypnotherapist will lead me along the way.  However, I do know I need to identify what I’d like to do, and that starts with what I can do and so on.
  • Relationships – I’ve been single for, gosh, thirteen and a half years now.  Along the way I’ve had many experiences placed along the spectrum of good to absolutely goddam awful.  I’ve felt time and time again the hurt of rejection and the blow it delivers to my self-esteem, self-respect and so on, and of course I realise that I expected nothing else.  Well, it’s about time that changed and it’s time for me to learn about relationships…big step for me.  How I do this, I don’t know, but it will start with me looking at myself honestly at the qualities I have, good and not so good, and come to accept and care about myself.
  • Friendships – I have a small number of very good friends, but learning to ask for help and accepting it when it is given is … a big hurdle for me.  I’ve had to be strong and independent for so long, to prove I can do it, that admitting I can’t is a big thing.
  • Creativity – I do not do enough to develop my writing skills and to weave stories.  I doubt my ability to do this.  I fear plagiarising, being unoriginal, being boring or trite.  I fear failure (damn that ultra-perfectionist part of me that doesn’t recognise when something is good enough).  I feel a sense of being overwhelmed when I think about telling a tale.  The result is I do nothing.  I also am lacking inspiration in art, finding myself doing the same kind of thing over and over and over …

The common threads running through all of this involve me learning to love myself by knowing who I am and to accept myself for this, warts and all.  I need to raise my self-esteem, my confidence, to be brave enough to start something.  Above all else, I need to find the courage to be brave enough to share something of myself with others.

To follow tradition or not?

This year, more than at any other time, I’ve found the traditions and the significance of events more puzzling and confusing.

The rational scientist in me recognises that time is a continuous flow, the only markers on time are the ones we place there so that we can agree on when we are talking about and the meaning we attach to those markers is manufactured to satisfy a need for predictable events in our lives, to bring some kind of order to what appears to be an otherwise random and chaotic existence.

Then the more spiritual aspect of me kicks in and says that it’s OK to do this, to mark the various points on the wheel of the year, the various events that we celebrate, the things we give meaning to.  They connect us together, for we are all connected, not just to all other human beings, not just to all life on Earth, but to the very stuff the Earth and, indeed, the Universe is made out of, the energy that constantly flows round and round.

We are not disconnected from the cycles that we can observe on this planet.  We may rationalise that they are caused by scientific laws, that they have no meaning.

However, I’m coming to realise that they do have meaning.  They bring us together and remind us that we are not separate, that what one of us does impacts on the whole, to a greater or lesser degree.  By honouring the traditions we connect to the patterns that are stored in the universal consciousness for humans have been honouring the same observed patterns and events over many, many generations.  It’s a way of honouring our forebears, of connecting to the present day, and of speaking to the future too.

It’s important, however, to decide if the particular traditions or observances fit in with your own philosophy, why you celebrate in the way you do, and to recognise that it is perfectly acceptable to change them as you grow and develop as a person, and not to just follow them blindly because you have always done them.  It is, of course, perfectly acceptable to create traditions of  your own too.

It may be that because I lead a very solitary existence, traditions celebrated by oneself have not really had any particular meaning, or have changed as my spiritual philosophy has grown and developed over the years.  Perhaps it is important that I find which traditions, which celebrations have meaning to me, and develop ways of observing them that lets me understand where they have come from, the meaning they have for me at this time, and how they will impact on the future.

Of course, I’m not sure if all of that made any sense at all!  Sometimes I need to get it out of me by writing and mithering and wittering on.

The Calendar

Angela PorterLeave a comment

Time to change your calendars and diaries over!  Happy new calendar day for MMXI!

The Sun and the Year

It takes the Earth 365.24219 mean solar days to orbit the Sun once.  This is slightly more than our nominal 365 day long year, so every four days we have a leap year, with 29 days in February instead of the usual 28.  This still isn’t quite right, so the last year of every century is not a leap year unless the year is divisible by 400, which is why 2000 was a leap year but 1900 wasn’t.

There are four key points in the Earth’s yearly journey around the Sun.

The Solstices are where the Sun appears to stand still at solar noon for a few days, this means that it is in the same position in the sky at solar noon.  Solstice comes from the Latin sol for Sun and sistere which means to stand still.  Around the 21st December each year, the Sun is the furthest south from the equator in the sky and we in the northern hemisphere experience the Winter Solstice, the shortest day in the year.  Around the 21st June, the northern hemisphere’s Summer Solstice occurs, with the Sun being at it’s most northerly from the equator.  This is the longest day of the year for us.

The Equinoxes occur in between these points.  The Vernal Equinox occurs around the 21st March and the Autumnal Equinox around the 21st September each year.  On these days, the Sun is directly over the equator.  These are days where the hours of daylight and night are approximately equal, and the word equinox comes from the Latin equi meaning equal and nox meaning night.

To our modern eyes, the cycles of the Sun are important in terms of determining the seasons, the weather, agricultural practices and so on.  But that wasn’t always so.

The Moon and the Year

To early man, it was the Moon, with its cyclical waxing and waning that was the more obvious object to use to measure time and all the earliest known calendars are lunar, based on the phases of the Moon.  Indeed, the word month comes from the use of the phases of the Moon to split the year up into segments.

It takes long and complicated sums to link the cycles of the Moon to those of the Sun.  A lunar month is 29.5306 days long, so a twelve month lunar year would last just over 354 days and so is around 11 days out of step with the Solar year.  If we were to follow a lunar calendar, it would take just about 16 years for the seasons to be completely reversed.

Julius Caesar and the 1st January

Whatever the religious reasons may have been to keep to a lunar calendar, it must have been obvious that it was the cycles of the Sun that had the biggest effect upon human activity.  It was the turning of the seasons that determined when crops were to be sown, when they were due to be harvested, when the weather would be good enough to set sail, and for so many other things too, yet the lunar calendar was still in use, with all the problems of errors and corrections that needed to be made until the Julian calendar was introduced by Julius Caesar in 45BC.

Caesar learned of this calendar from the Egyptians.  Legend has it it was at a party thrown by Cleopatra in his honour.  The Julian calendar was based on a 365 day year, with an extra day thrown in every 4 years.  Each year had twelve months with thirty or thirty-one days, except February, and the 1st January was set as the beginning of the year.

The calendar as we know it today was now more or less in place.  It was regular, secular and based on the real movements of the Sun.

Dark Times

Emperor Constantine (d. AD377) imposed Christianity as the major religion of the Roman Empire and he placed the design of the calendar back in the hands of religious groups who were still wedded to the traditional lunar movements for their major festivals.  After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Christian church was the nearest thing to an international controlling committee and the West entered a long, dark time where scientific enquiry was frowned upon at best and considered heresy at worst.

The Gregorian Calendar

By the C16th, the western world was stable enough to attempt to reform the calendar.  The small errors from the Julian calendar had now become noticeable and annoying.  In 1582 Pope Gregory finally announced changes in the calendar to correct these faults and prevent them from happening again, including the 400 year rule for leap years mentioned previously.

He introduced what became known as the Gregorian Calendar, and ordained that 5th October should become 15th October to bring the calendar back in line with the physical world.  This was a much needed and a sensible solution to the problem of the calendar.

However, the changes were not universally accepted, especially in Protestant countries such as Britain.  The changes were declared to be a ‘Popish plot’ designed to undermine their credibility.  For more than a century following this Papal decree, half of Europe was 10 days ahead of the other half!

It took Britain until 1752 to adopt the changes, by which time it had to correct the calendar by 11 days to bring it back into line with Gregorian calendar.   Philip Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, initiated this move by introducing a Bill to correct the ‘inconvenient and disgraceful errors of our present calendar’.  This Bill was signed into law by George II on 22nd May 1752.  Chesterfield’s Act  decreed that Wednesday 2 September 1752 be followed immediately by 14 September 1752 and also that the New Year was to start officially on 1st January.

Winter Solstice 2010

Angela PorterLeave a comment

All the very best of the Winter Solstice greetings and wishes to all!

The exact point of Solstice is at 23:38 UTC, which is when the Sun enters Capricorn.   In the Northern Hemisphere, this marks the longest night and also the gradual returning of light to the world as the days gradually lengthen once again.

What makes this year’s Winter Solstice extra special is that there is a Lunar Eclipse fall on the same day, for the first time since 1638.  Sadly, it was not possible for me to view the Lunar eclipse as the skies were cloudy here, and no doubt the hills would have obscured my view of the Moon in any case.

In my immediate environment, in the Northern Hemisphere, nature is in it’s annual dormancy and the return of the light from this day on is a reason enough to celebrate the continuation of nature’s seasonal cycle.  With the snow still covering the ground, life having slowed down due to the freeze here in the UK, there’s an even bigger sense of the big sleep of nature.

The Winter Solstice had, no doubt, great significance to prehistoric people, no doubt linked to the uncertainty of seeing life through the harsh winter months.  Evidence for this remains in the apparent alignments of Neolithic and Bronze Age sites such as Stonehenge (Winter Solstice 2010 at Stonehenge) in England and Newgrange (Winter Solstice at Newgrange 2010) in Ireland to astronomical events such as the Winter Solstice.  The lives of these people depended very much upon the seasons and weather and it must have been important for them to mark the cycles of the seasons in some way, just as we do still.

The Feast of Yule was a pre-Christian festival observed in Scandinavia.  At this time of year, fires were lit to symbolise the heat, light and life-giving properties of the returning Sun.  A Yule log was brought in and burned in the hearth in honour of the god Thor.  A piece of the log was kept to act as both a good luck token for the year and to act as kindling from which the next year’s Yule log was lit.  Ashes from the log were also collected to be spread on the fields to ensure a good harvest that year.

There are many festivals coinciding with the Winter Solstice around the world, as can be easily read about on the web – see for instance Wikipedia.

How will I be spending the day?  Well, not as I would in years past.  Normally, I’d replace my bundle of mistletoe at dawn, burning last year’s old bunch.   This will have to wait for a day or two until I can get out and about!   The mistletoe hung in the home acts as a protection against negative thoughts and deeds.  Burning it releases and purifies that which it has absorbed over the year.  Part of the day will be spent in meditation/quiet thought/reflection on the past year and particularly upon the progress I have made in achieving goals in life and giving thanks for all those people and circumstances which have aided me in my progress, whether they realised it or not, and whether I realised it or not at the time! Sometimes, the people and situations that vex us most are responsible for the greatest progress in our personal development.

How will you spend the day?

  1. Guardian – Article about the coincidence of Solstice and the Lunar Eclipse
  2. National Geographic – Article about the coincidence of the Solstice and the Lunar Eclipse
  3. Winter Solstice at Time and Date.com
  4. December Solstice Traditions at Time and Date.com
  5. Winter Solstice on Wikipedia
  6. Yule on the BBC website

Comets

Angela Porter2 Comments

“Comets are long-haired stars with flames, appearing suddenly, and presaging a change in sovereignty, or plague, or war, or winds or floods.”
Northumberland Bede, De Natura Rerum c. 725AD

Ancient Beliefs

The word comet comes from the Greek word kometes which means ‘long hair’.  Our ancestors thought comets were stars with hair trailing behind them.

In ancient times, people thought comets were ‘power rays’ of supernatural beings.  They also thought that comets contained fire because they were so bright in the sky.

Some people believed comets brought curses with them.  They believed that comets caused cattle to give birth to dead calves, princes to die,  natural disasters to occur, and disease and pestilence to spread across the land.  Emperor Nero of Rome had all possible successors to his throne executed in order to save him from the ‘curse of the comet’.

Not all people believed comets were bad omens; some believed they brought good fortune.  Others believed that they carried angels through the heavens.

Not so ancient beliefs …

In 1909 and 1910, the appearance of Halley’s Comet in the skies caused panic in cities around the world. Pedlars did a lot of  business selling ‘anti-comet sickness pills’ and umbrellas to protect people from the effects of the comet.

In March 1997, the members of a cult called ‘Heaven’s Gate’ committed suicide by drinking a cocktail of poisons.  They believed that the coming of comet Hale-Bopp was a sign that it was time for them to shed their Earthly bodies so that their spirits would take flight behind the comet and so be taken to a higher plane of existence.

More about Comet Hysteria can be found here.

Halley’s Comet

The Chinese recorded sightings of Halley’s Comet as far back as 240BC.

The famous Bayeux Tapestry shows Halley’s comet shining brightly in the sky before the Battle of Hastings in 1066.  Some people believed that the comet meant that King Harold of England would lose his throne to Duke William of Normandy in this battle, and he did!

Edmund Halley studied comets and developed a theory that the comets sighted in 1531, 1607 and 1682 were actually the same comet.  He successfully predicted the return of this comet in 1758, but sadly died 16 years before his prediction was proved correct.  Halley’s Comet is next due to return in 2061.

Other Cometary Scientists

In 1577, Tycho Brahe showed that comets travelled far beyond the Moon; prior to this, people believed comets travelled in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) discovered that comets travel in elliptical orbits around the Sun.  He also believed comets were members of the Solar System, like the planets, and that comets could return again and again – he was right!  Comets that are seen quite often, every 100 years or so, come from the Kuiper Belt.  Comets that we only see every few thousand years come from the Oort Cloud.

Meteor Showers

Comets leave a trail of debris behind them as they orbit the Sun.  If this trail crosses the Earth’s orbit, then at that point every year for a long time there will be a meteor shower.

The Perseid meteor shower occurs every year between the 9th and 13th of August as the Earth passes through the debris of the Swift-Tuttle comet.  The Orionid meteor shower occurs in October when the Earth passes through debris left by Halley’s Comet.  The Leonids, around 18th November, result from debris from comet Tempel-Tuttle which visits the inner Solar System every 33 years.

Hale-Bopp

On July 23, 1995, an unusually large and bright comet was seen outside of Jupiter’s orbit by Alan Hale of New Mexico and Thomas Bopp of Arizona. Careful analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images suggested that its intense brightness was due to its exceptionally large size. While the nuclei of most comets are about 1.6 to 3.2 km (1 to 2 miles) across, Hale-Bopp’s was estimated to be 40 km (25 miles) across. It was visible even through bright city skies, and may have been the most viewed comet in recorded history. Comet Hale-Bopp holds the record for the longest period of naked-eye visibility: an astonishing 19 months. It will not appear again for another 2,400 years.

Swift-Tuttle

This comet was first seen in July 1862 by American astronomers Lewis Swift and Horace Tuttle. As Comet Swift-Tuttle moves closer to the Sun every 120 years, it leaves behind a trail of dust debris that provides the ingredients for a spectacular fireworks display seen in July and August. As Earth passes through the remnants of this dust tail, we can see on a clear night the Perseid meteor shower. Comet Swift-Tuttle is noted as the comet some scientists predicted could one day collide with Earth because the two orbits closely intercept each other. The latest calculations show that it will pass a comfortable 24 million km (15 million miles) from Earth on its next trip to the inner Solar System.

Hyakutake

On January 30, 1996, Yuji Hyakutake (pronounced “hyah-koo-tah-kay”), an amateur astronomer from southern Japan, discovered a new comet using a pair of binoculars. In the spring of that year, this small, bright comet with a nucleus of 1.6 to 3.2 km (1 to 2 miles) made a close flyby of Earth — sporting one of the longest tails ever observed. The Hubble Space Telescope studied the nucleus of this comet in great detail. This is not Comet Hyakutake’s first visit to the inner Solar System. Astronomers have calculated its orbit and believe it was here about 8,000 years ago. Its orbit will not bring it near the Sun again for about 14,000 years.

Some interesting websites about comets and myth.

Comet Mythology from Astrononmy-Education.com

Comets, Meteors & Myth: New Evidence for Toppled Civilizations and Biblical Tales – This is an interesting article from space.com.

Harvest Moon

Angela PorterLeave a comment

The Harvest Moon is the Full Moon closest, either before or after, the Autumnal Equinox.  This year, there is a Full Moon on the day of the Equinox, 23rd September 2010.

All full moons rise around the time of sunset. However, although in general the moon rises about 50 minutes later each day, as it moves in orbit around Earth, the Harvest Moon and Hunter’s Moon are special, because around the time of these full moons, the time difference between moonrise on successive evenings is shorter than usual which means that the moon rises approximately 30 minutes later, from one night to the next, as seen from about 40 degrees N. or S. latitude, for several evenings around the full Hunter’s or Harvest Moons. Thus there is no long period of darkness between sunset and moonrise around the time following these full moons. In times past this feature of these autumn moons was said to help farmers working to bring in their crops (or, in the case of the Hunter’s Moon, hunters tracking their prey). They could continue being productive by moonlight even after the sun had set. Hence the name Harvest Moon. The reason for the shorter-than-usual rising time between successive moonrises around the time of the Harvest and Hunter’s Moon is that the ecliptic—the plane of Earth’s orbit around the sun—makes a narrow angle with respect to the horizon in the evening in autumn.

Often, the Harvest Moon seems to be bigger or brighter or more colorful than other full moons. These effects are related to the seasonal tilt of the earth. The warm color of the moon shortly after it rises is caused by light from the moon passing through a greater amount of atmospheric particles than when the moon is overhead. The atmosphere scatters the bluish component of moonlight (which is really reflected white light from the sun), but allows the reddish component of the light to travel a straighter path to one’s eyes. Hence all celestial bodies look reddish when they are low in the sky.

The apparent larger size is because the brain perceives a low-hanging moon to be larger than one that’s high in the sky. This is known as a Moon Illusion and it can be seen with any full moon. It can also be seen with constellations; in other words, a constellation viewed low in the sky will appear bigger than when it is high in the sky. [1]

Of course, I couldn’t leave this little bit of research without Neil Young singing ‘Harvest Moon’, could I?

  1. Wikipedia

Morning musings…morning meanderings

Angela PorterLeave a comment

What is this blog about?

I’ve just been doing a bit of Luddite-style journalling – pen and paper that is! And I was musing about why on Earth I’d want to blog when I keep a journal, and this perhaps seems as a doubling up of work.

However, much of my Luddite-journal is very personal and I’d not share with anyone, no matter how close they are to me, and no-one will have access to them until I “have shuffled off this mortal coil”.

I suppose that this blog is a vehicle for me to share with anyone who wishes to read about my fairly random thoughts, research, insights, questions, perhaps even little stories, poems and some of my arty-crafty stuff. In other words things I’d like to share with others, but don’t really have the opportunities to do in my ‘real life’, and I think the relative anonymity the blog affords me may allow me to do so.

Like so many, there are parts of my life that are kept fairly separate, for instance my ‘day job’ and my spirituality and spiritual practices. My spirituality is with me always, but I can’t talk about it, my practices, or express it openly in my job, with those I work with, although I do get away with meditation during my working day when I begin to feel stressed or upset! The people I interact with spirituality are good souls (mostly), but generally have a fairly narrow spiritual view, and I tend to be a searcher looking for more, trying things from different traditions, working out what sits well with me, what works for me, what helps me find words for what I instinctively feel inside of me, finding ways to express to express this inner knowledge and understanding, changing and adapting things, melding and moulding them into something that is uniquely me. I do not, and would never, profess to be an expert, to have the one right answer, I’m just a seeker looking for what is right for me.

Along my way some of my musings, discoveries, thoughts, practices may help others also seeking their way, whether they agree or disagree with what I may write. Indeed, it is often through a disagreement that you can arrive at a better understanding of what is right for you. I sometimes think you can only find out who you truly are by finding out what it is that you are not (and that may be what others have told you to suit their own conscious or unconscious purposes/needs).

Spirituality is just one thing it’s difficult for me to share with others. I find the same is true of my art (to a much lesser degree), writing (about the same degree), and my interests in so many things, including folklore, folk-medicine (ethnopharmacology or ethnobotany), archaeology, history, etymology, self-help, counselling, forensic psychology, cookery, nature, astrology, astronomy…and that’s just a few things!

I’m very much a ‘random’ and sporadic researcher/reader/student of all the things I’m interested in. The cycles of interest wax and wane randomly, depending on whether something has sparked an interest in me. I tend to dive into that interest wholeheartedly for a while – a few weeks or months – and as my interest is beginning to feel quite sated, some other spark comes along and re-ignites another flame of passion and so off I go.

It must be frustrating for those who know me, who must think I’m quite shallow in my interests and passions as I seemingly flit from one thing to another.  I know I’ve often questioned how serious I am and how deeply I get into things, but I know I dig as deeply as I need to into whatever is my current passion (or passions), and that interest/passion never entirely departs, it just becomes somnolent for a while…until I’m ready to continue digging deeper!

A dear friend of mine always said he was determined to turn me into a polymath (see Dictionary.reference.com or Wikipedia) Much more difficult to do in this day and age of so much information and knowledge. Polymaths were far more common in the past – Isaac Newton for instance. I think it’s quite clear, if my prior ramblings in this entry are clear, that I love to learn! If I didn’t have to work to pay the bills and keep a roof above my head (and keep my pusscat in Purina food!) and could afford it I’d be a perpetual student! As it is, I read, I browse the world weird web (with that sack of salt by my side!), listen to others, and soak it all up, processing it in my own internal way.

A cute tale about me being a sponge for knowledge is of a young person I worked with. They were discussing with another person what they’d like to do for a career and asked if they knew what qualifications they’d need. The person listening said that she didn’t know. The young person then suggested ‘Let’s go and ask …, she is the internet after all!’. Praise, maybe, though I would never, ever claim to be such a thing!

I can be a ‘mistress of the art of the Google’ when others fail to find what they wish while trolling around the weird wide web. So, perhaps another use of this blog will be to keep a record of my wanderings as I come across things of interest, or otherwise, in a way my Luddite-journal doesn’t! No doubt a series of wanderings that are unique to me.

It may turn out interesting to see how this blog evolves and develops.

Morning meanderings

I love alliteration – you have been warned!

Anyway, my morning meanderings through the world weird web included a search for moon-phase information to go into my Luddite-Journal, and that led me to an Astrological Diary that I will almost certainly be purchasing to use next year. My only whinge about diaries is that they rarely have a full year planner for the next year, and as one of my evening activities involves taking bookings at year in advance then I really need it! I guess I’ll just have to go looking for something I can stick in the back of the diary to accommodate my needs.

I did find a moon phase table for 2010 that suited my purpose (without me having to type it all out from my ephemeris!) and it’s a shame I couldn’t find one for 2011 at the same website. However, the search did lead me to the diary I found, and will be ordered very soon!

I do have an interest in astrology – but not your newspaper astrology, the ‘proper’ stuff. I’ve found my natal chart and the analysis of it to be most helpful in understanding myself and helping to heal myself from the wounds of the past, and much more than that. When done properly it can really help to understand what is going on in an individual’s life at any time. It is my experience that it can be incredibly specific, detailed and helpful, but only when done well. It’s not something I rely on and live my life by, but I do find it interesting to study. Perhaps it’s because science pooh-poohs it that I find it so fascinating – I can be terribly rebellious in such cases! I may be a scientist by education, but … it just fascinates me! And it is something I feel I ‘should’ spend more time on, but when I start I get so engrossed that nothing else gets done…