Iotd – Page 3 – Journeys of Heart and Mind

Cloud reflection

Just from this image the brain understands there are ripples on the surface of the water and from past experience will also know that these ripples will be moving.

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Image of the day – 176

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Sometimes we see things indirectly, and our brains are capable of retrieving far more information than you might at first think. It’s true of all our senses – hearing, touch, taste, smell and all the rest. The senses provide information but the brain makes much more of it all.

What do we see in this image? It’s just a pattern of coloured patches reflected from a water surface. That’s what the eye sees. But the brain tells us there are clouds in the sky above and there are ripples on the water. Then the brain compares this basic information with what it recalls from past experience and it can construct two narratives, one for the clouds and another for the water.

The clouds

There is a dark cloud and it’s the closest one to us, it threatens a shower of rain. A second image taken a few seconds later would be enough for the brain to decide the direction of movement of the cloud and predict whether the rain might fall here or somewhere else. Paler clouds, white clouds and blue sky suggest there’s some sunshine around as well so although there might be a brief shower, it won’t turn into ongoing steady rain. All of that from from a few colour patches.

The water

Because of the way the cloud reflections are distorted, the brain can infer the water is neither heavily disturbed not completely calm. Just from this image the brain understands there are ripples on the surface of the water and from past experience will also know that these ripples will be moving. The same brain will realise that there are two likely causes; either there is a light breeze blowing or perhaps a boat has passed recently. Once again, past knowledge in memory is necessary to arrive at these conclusions. There are some large ripples and, near the top of the image, some much smaller ones too. There was a small disturbance in the water further away as these small ripples seem to form an expanding circle of which we see only a small part.

Here and there things are floating on the water, small leaves, perhaps? If so, there must be trees nearby, perhaps with branches overhead. What a lot the brain can reconstruct on the basis of prior knowledge! And all of these conclusions come from some patches of colour in a still image. And what about the little sticks emerging from the water on the left-hand side? It’s the remains of vegetation of some kind. Was there a plant growing in the water? Did a strong wind break twigs off an overhead tree branch?

And one last point – it was not raining at the moment the photo was taken. The water would have been covered with dozens of circular disturbances if rain was falling. That’s a lot of information that your eyes and brain can glean from a single fragment of time trapped by my camera!

We are, as the Bible expresses it, fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14).

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Image of the day – 72

Churn flooding

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Latest news on the Lion

I was able to put the puzzle together during a recent holiday in the Lake District. A jigsaw is a family tradition for us every year, we usually do a 1000-piece, commercial cardboard puzzle but I’d say the lion was rather more difficult.

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Image of the day – 175

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

My Sister, Rachael decided she wanted to learn to make traditional wooden jigsaws and bought a power scroll saw to learn the skills and processes involved. Having mastered the process she asked me for a clear photo of the lion picture I made in 1969. I had to take the picture out of the frame to avoid reflections in the image. I also had to adjust the image shape in GIMP to correct the geometry, and I increased the contrast to bring the black and white parts of the image closer to the way they originally appeared. Rachael used my image file to get the lion picture printed on plywood ready for cutting. She didn’t tell me she was making the jigsaw as a gift for me, so it was a lovely surprise when she handed the pieces over in a decorative container. I’m so impressed that Rachael has learned to design and cut jigsaws. She is also restoring old jigsaws, cutting replacement pieces if they are missing and lost. She even paints the new pieces to match the rest of the puzzle when necessary. So clever!

With the help of my wife, daughters and grandchildren, I was able to put the puzzle together during a recent holiday in the Lake District. A jigsaw is a family tradition for us every year, we usually do a 1000-piece, commercial cardboard puzzle but I’d say the lion was rather more difficult. Today’s image shows the completed jigsaw.

The jigsaw of life

Life is sometimes a bit like doing a jigsaw. Nothing seems to fit at first, but once you have some pieces in place it begins to get easier as you recognise more pieces with just that shade of colour or a similar texture. It takes a long time, but you get there in the end. Perseverance is necessary to complete a jigsaw, that’s another thing that’s true in life, you have to persevere; giving up is not an option. Attention to detail is crucial for a successful outcome.

Can you think of other parallels between jigsaw building and life? If so, drop me a line in the comments section below.

Two short videos about cutting the jigsaw

The two videos below show my very clever sister, Rachael, working on the jigsaw. In the first one she talks briefly about the cutouts and little lion shapes (or ‘whimsies’ to use the proper jigsaw terminology). You can see these clearly if you look at the photo at the top of the article. The second video shows a small extract of the cutting process.

Techie video

A techie maths video all about jigsaws and the number of pieces in each, picture shape ratios, piece shape ratios, probably far more than you want to know. None of it applies to the Lion jigsaw as that’s hand cut, each piece is unique and there are no rows or columns.

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The lion roars

Smallest Police station?

However, a quick Google search turned up an even smaller one in Trafalgar Square, London. So Watchet has already lost its brief claim to fame!

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Image of the day – 174

At Watchet Harbour on the north coast of Somerset stands possibly the smallest Police Station in the world. Certainly I’ve never seen one this tiny before. It’s just a door and a small window wide and has the grand title ‘Watchet Harbour Police Post’. If you know of a smaller police building anywhere in the world, please let me know in the comments section below.

However, a quick Google search turned up an even smaller one in Trafalgar Square, London. So Watchet has already lost its brief claim to fame! Read more about the Trafalgar Square example. However, the London claimant is no longer used by the Police, so Watchet might still claim to have the smallest working police station in the UK.

International claimants

Florida also has a claim to the smallest working police station and it’s certainly much smaller than the police post in Watchet. Like the London version, Florida’s is sheltered by a tree.

I suppose it’s possible there’s a smaller one somewhere else in the world, but if so it must be so tiny that you’d need a smaller than average police officer to occupy it.

Toy versions

For something even tinier, try one of these.

The smallest church?

This is a bit different. You can’t measure a church in terms of how wide or long it is. Churches are measured in terms of how many people are meeting. Jesus once said, ‘Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I’ll be there with them’. So the smallest church must be a meeting of two people (three if you include Jesus). That’s because church is not a building at all (although we often call a place where followers of Jesus meet ‘a church’. Is it still a church if the people have all gone home? No. Why? Because church is a community, not a building. Two people is the smallest possible community. We don’t always think of church as a community, but we should. If it’s not a community can it really be church at all?

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The Lake District

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Image of the day – 173

This is one of the waterfalls along Stock Ghyll just north-east of Ambleside, Cumbria in the English Lake District. It’s beautiful countryside, and the nearby Force Cafe and Terrace served us a wonderful ‘Full Force’ breakfast. In the local dialect, a waterfall is known as a ‘force’, and there’s a whole string of them along this stretch of Stock Ghyll. A ghyll or gill is a narrow, deep, wooded ravine with a stream running though it. The term can also be used for the stream itself. Donna and I made our way carefully along this muddy, stony footpath, and it was well worth the effort.

Stock Ghyll runs right down into the town of Ambleside where it once powered a series of watermills, and finally flows into the nearby lake of Windermere.

Bobbin mills

Bobbin mills were common in Ambleside in the 19th century. Coppiced timber was cut to length and shaped on a lathe, then wooden discs were attached to both ends and the completed bobbins sold to the textile spinning and weaving businesses in the industrial cities south of the Lake District where they were used to store thread after spinning and before weaving. They contributed to the rapid growth of spinning and weaving factories in northern England. Wooden bobbin manufacturing died out with the 20th century introduction of plastics.

Formation of the Lake District

The granite structures of the fells and mountains of the Lake District erupted from volcanoes during the Ordovician period some 460 million years ago.

Much more recently, repeated glaciations ground out U-shaped valleys arranged more or less radially and when the glaciers melted during warmer periods, lakes remained in the valley bottoms. Rivers flowing into the lakes or sometimes from one lake to another, have silted up some of the lakes at one end, and these flat, silted zones are now rich areas of pasture and crop land as well as places where urban construction has become possible. The photo above shows the mountain of Skiddaw in the distance and farmland in the foreground. The town of Keswick, out of the frame to the right, is also built on this flatter land laid down as sediment in the northern part of Derwent Water.

What else can we learn

One thing is very clear, what happens in one time period may be changed drastically at another, later time.

We cannot know exactly what this area would have been like when it was full of active volcanoes, but we can get a rough idea from modern subduction regions on Earth today. Under the Mediterranean, for example, the African plate is being subducted underneath the plate carrying Europe. The Alps and the Pyrenees have risen as a result, and volocanoes like Etna and Vesuvius are still actively pumping out magma or ash. The Mediterranean region is also prone to earthquakes. Now imagine (if you can) a mile or more depth of ice resting on top of the Alps grinding down the rocks to form U-shaped valleys as they slide due to gravity across the rock surface far below.

In Roman times, the areas of river sediment like that in the photo above would have been smaller than they are today and the lakes would have been correspondingly longer.

It’s very much a dynamic process. It’s a bit like the life of a person, we start as a new born infant and learn to talk and walk, then run. We learn to eat, and we learn to reason. at school we learn a lot more about the world we live in, politics, science, other languages, geography, history; we fall in love, we marry and raise a family; we have a career and learn how to manage the work environment, run a business, serve customers, manage bank accounts and so forth. The world is our playground, we travel on business or just for fun, we become grandparents as we grow older and retire from work. There are many beginnings and endings along the rich tapestry that is a human life. And lives intertwine in so many ways – friends, family, work colleagues, neighbours. Just like the Lake District, at any point it’s impossible to know what the future might hold.

Life is the same. What happened in my life when I was young is very different from what is happening in my life today. Change and unpredictabilty are the only things that are consistent throughout. If the ice hadn’t melted when it did, the Lake District would be far different from the place we know and love.

How do we deal with this built-in uncertainty? One way that many have found is faith, following a guide that we trust in ways that stretch us and help to shape our characters. Faith can be like an anchor in a choppy sea or even a full-blown storm, holding us safely in the right place until calmer conditions return. I recommend having an anchor in this experience we call life. But if you choose an anchor, choose carefully, there are some pointers elsewhere on this website. Hunt around and see if there’s anything here that you find attractive or compelling.

I’m always fascinated by links and similarities between one thing and another, life is full of them and sometimes they help to broaden our vision and understanding in ways that are quite unexpected.

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Living fossils

Living fossils can be found and recognised over long periods of geological time, and appear very similar throughout. And they may have little diversity, in other words the species in the group all tend to be similar to one another.

Leaves of Ginkgo biloba, the Maidenhair tree

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Image of the day – 172

Every now and again biologists discover a plant or animal that looks uncannily like a known fossil. It’s happened a number of times.

Living fossils have two main characteristics, although some have a third:

Living organisms that are members of a taxon that has remained recognizable in the fossil record over an unusually long time span.

They show little morphological divergence, whether from early members of the lineage, or among extant species.

They tend to have little taxonomic diversity.^[5]

The first two are required for recognition as a living fossil; some authors also require the third, others merely note it as a frequent trait.

To put this more simply, Living fossils can be found and recognised over long periods of geological time, and appear very similar throughout. And they may have little diversity, in other words the species in the group all tend to be similar to one another.

Here are some examples, listed in order of their discovery. In some cases the fossil organism was already known before a living form was discovered, in other cases the living form was known first:

Dinoflagellates (1753, worldwide in salt and fresh water)
Ginkgo or ‘Maidenhair tree’ (1800s or before, southwestern China)
Echinothurioida or ‘Soft sea urchins’ (1870s, southern England)
Eomeropidae or ‘Scorpion flies’ (1909, southern Chile)
Coelacanth there are two living species (discovered in 1938 in the Indian Ocean) and (late 1990s off Indonesia).
Metasequioa ( discovered in 1941 in Hunan, China)
Glypheoid lobsters (1970s, Philippines)
Jurodidae or ‘Jurodid beetles’ (1996, Siberia)
Mymarommatidae or ‘false fairy wasps’ (2007ish, North America)
Syntexis libocedrii or ‘cedar wood wasp’ (2011, California to British Columbia)

What else can we learn from this

Two things really. The first thing is that species can sometimes exist for very much longer than normal. And the second thing we learn is that species with astonishingly similar appearance may rise independently more than once. So-called fossil species may be no more than independently arising lines that happen to look very similar.We see the same thing between different living groups, so there’s a marsupial mouse that looks quite like its European namesake. This is known as parallel or convergent evolution.

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Evolution and behaviour

Crystalline inclusions in Cotswold stone

It seems that quartz geodes are not unusual in Oolitic limestone deposits.

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Image of the day – 171

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

There’s a long stretch of dry stone Cotswold wall along the western edge of the Gloucester Road between Cirencester and Stratton. Walking along the footpath one day I was surprised to see the crystalline inclusions featured in this photo. The crystals look to me like a form of quartz (six-sided columns with six-faced prisms at both ends).

This might be part of a geode fractured open while quarrying the stone. There’s a small chance that the other side of the geode exists elsewhere in the same wall or in some other structure built around the same time. It seems that quartz geodes are not unusual in Oolitic limestone deposits. When they are stained purple purple the crystals are known as amethyst. The formation in the photo shows no hint of colour at all. The deposit must have formed from a particularly pure solution of quartz.

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A canal walk through Chalford

Lichens

A Cotswold scene

A grand old house in Cirencester

Mullings engaged the architect William Jay to design the house, and Watermoor House was accordingly built around 1827 in the Greek Revival style

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Image of the day – 170

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

The land now occupied by Watermoor House and St Michael’s Park may once have been common land. But early large scale Ordnance Survey maps mark a much larger area, including that now occupied by the house and park, as a large nursery. It might have been owned at one time by Richard Gregory who was a Cirencester nurseryman in the 1790s.

The business (and probably the land) passed into the hands of John Jefferies at least by the early 1800s, and it seems that Randolph Mullings, a local solicitor, bought a substantial piece of it in order to build a large house in its own grounds. The details remain unknown, but Gregory, Jefferies and Mullings were known to one another, and Jefferies worked as a manager for Gregory on the nurseries. Gregory lost much of his money by providing surety for a friend’s loan, and Mullings advised Jefferies to continue managing the business and wait to see how things would work out.

Having acquired part of the land, Mullings engaged the architect William Jay to design the building; Watermoor House was constructed to Jay’s plan around 1827 in the Greek Revival style; and the garden and park were added to complete the property. The house is now grade II listed.

At some point Watermoor House became a private school until it closed in the 1950s or 60s. It may have had some other function following this, but today it is a residential care home.

I’ve cobbled this tale together from limited sources that may or may not be reliable. There are also many gaps. It would be good if the story could be properly researched by someone with the time and skills to undertake it.

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Resources for Cirencester history

What do we see here?

The water flows in the town are complex, this section is often known as Gumstool Brook, but it might also be regarded as a diverted part of the Churn.

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Image of the day – 169

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

At the top of the image you can see the rears of buildings on Cecily Hill in Cirencester. Their gardens contain the trunks and foliage of mature trees just beyond the wall. The wall separates those gardens from the water channel and may have been built specifically for that purpose. Some of the tree branches have grown across the top of the wall.

Near the base of the wall is a distinct line, brown below and much paler above. I think the brown part of the wall is often underwater. The water flow is strongly seasonal, high in wintertime and much, much lower in the summer. The River Churn divides at the Gloucester Road bridge, only a kilometre from this point. The major branch follows the outside of the Roman city wall and usually continues to flow all year round. But the branch in the photo is fed from the outflow of the long, narrow, supply pound for Barton Mill and this in turn is fed from the main flow of the River Churn. The water flows in the town are complex, this section is often known as Gumstool Brook, but it might also be regarded as a diverted part of the Churn.

The pipework at the bottom of this wall was there in the 1950s and 60s when I was a child. Most of it was hidden then by a low wall topped with flagstones, but today much of the structure has fallen away exposing the glazed pipes. Out of the photo a little further to the left, the water disappears underground, running south of Coxwell Street and reappearing at the surface further west in the Abbey Grounds.

It’s good to know that the Town Council and the Friends of Gumstool Brook are looking into ways of improving the flow of this watercourse by adjusting the sluice management rules. We might see the water flowing properly all summer in 2026.

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Image of the day – 72

Churn flood plain

Churn flooding

Caring on the water

It might be as simple as a kind word at the right moment, or a helping hand to steady someone losing their balance, or even just a smile.

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Image of the day – 168

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

This boat, seen here on the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal, is based at Saul Junction in Frampton on Severn. It might look like a tourist boat available for hire by the public, but it serves a different and entirely charitable purpose. Two similar (but not identical) special boats were built to provide opportunities for disabled or seriously ill people to experience a day on the canal for free. And for those that want to, they are also given the chance to explore the boat, see how it all works, hold the steering gear and so forth. The boats are designed for wheelchair access too. Check the See also link below for details and photos from the Willow Trust website.

I love to see examples of effort and resources being expended by enthusastic teams to greatly benefit those who need and deserve help. Every one of us can see the need for support of this sort, though not all are able or willing to provide it. But every single person in the world can do something positive to help others one way or another. It might be as simple as a kind word at the right moment, or a helping hand to steady someone losing their balance, or even just a smile. All it takes is an open eye, an attentive ear, and a willing mind.

If you are a wealthy person you might give thousands of pounds towards maintenance and fuel costs for these boats; if you have some spare time but no money, you might give time and energy to help with tidying and cleaning a boat between trips or helping in other practical ways. No matter what we do or do not possess, there’s always something we can offer.

It’s about contributing something, anything, in a world that’s not always fair or kind. And there are so many considerate, helpful organisations out there – everyone can find worthy opportunities in every town and most villages around the globe; even where there’s no local group or organisation, there will be many local opportunities to find and fill a need of some kind.

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A glorious orchid

Orchids grow wild here in the UK, they’re not as showy as many of the tropical ones, and the flowers are far smaller, but they are still beautiful plants.

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Image of the day – 167

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye. I’m posting an image every few days.

Orchids produce such beautiful flowers, often in great abundance, and they last for months if protected from too much heat and strong sun. This lovely, white Phalaenopsis flowers every year for us, but this year it had a bad plague of scale insect on the backs of the petals and on the leaves.

Scale insects are not hard to deal with as they can be wiped off with a soft tissue moistened with methylated spirit. Or even just wiped away gently with your finger. But you have to be persistent because you need to remove all the adults and then keep on removing the smaller insects until you have broken their reproductive cycle.

Orchids grow wild here in the UK, they’re not as showy as many of the tropical ones, and the flowers are far smaller, but they are still beautiful plants. Some orchids have flowers that mimic insects such as bees, butterflies, and flies. The insects are attracted to the flowers, and sometimes even attempt to mate with them; they act as pollinators, spreading the orchid pollen from one flower to another and so helping the orchid produce viable seed.

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Pasqueflower

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Fallen Rhododendron flowers

Image of the day – 176

The clouds

The water

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Image of the day – 175

The jigsaw of life

Two short videos about cutting the jigsaw

Techie video

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Image of the day – 174

International claimants

Toy versions

The smallest church?

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Image of the day – 173

Bobbin mills

Formation of the Lake District

What else can we learn

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Image of the day – 172

What else can we learn from this

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Image of the day – 171

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Image of the day – 170

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Image of the day – 169

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Image of the day – 168

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Image of the day – 167

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