Tag: Photos

Cow and calf

I was using the footpath and this cow and her calf were close up against the fence. I was able to take the photo without even stepping off the path.

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Image of the day – 156

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

Click to enlarge

Here’s something you may never have seen, unless you’re a farmer or a vet – a calf suckling from its mother. When we lived in St Neots, there was a footpath running past our back gate in Eaton Ford and running very straight to the churchyard of St Mary’s in Eaton Socon. The path led past a large field, Bedfordia Meadows, and sometimes cows were kept in this field.

On one particular day in 2012 I was using the footpath and this cow and her calf were close up against the fence. I was able to take the photo without even stepping off the path. I’ve been working my way through my photos from July 2012 recently, looking for images for articles like this one. And it seemed to me that many of you might like to see this moment from a summer’s day 13 years ago.

For the cow and the calf this is a matter of life and death. Without the mother’s milk a new-born calf would not survive long. Milk contains the water and all the nutrients needed for the calf to grow and become capable of drinking water and eating grass for itself. In the wild, like all mammals, the cow would stop producing milk once the calf stopped needing it. But domesticated cattle have been bred to produce milk for much longer and a cow would quickly be in pain and in danger of serious infection if not regularly milked twice a day.

Mammals provide milk, birds lay eggs

Both dinosaurs and mammals developed from early reptiles. At the time of the Cretaceous extinctions caused by the impact of the famous asteroid, when all the large dinosaurs died out, there had long been early mammals and some of the smaller kinds survived. One branch of the dinosaurs survived as well and we are all familiar with them, they are called birds! A number of small reptiles and amphibia survived too so today we have toads and frogs as well as crocodiles, alligators, lizards and the snakes. But most air-breathing vertebrates in the world today are either mammals providing milk to their young, or the egg-laying birds.

That asteroid changed everything!

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If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

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Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
Dinosaurs and the Bible
A bird called Jenny

Enigmatic computer

Once it was realised that a letter could be coded as any other letter except itself, even this tiny clue could help point the cryptographers in the right direction.

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Image of the day – 155

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

Click to enlarge

Why is this old computer enigmatic? Some of you will know, some might guess correctly, others may have no idea. I took the photo in July 2012 at the Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park where highly secret work was done during the Second World War to break the German Enigma code as well as other enemy codes and ciphers.

This is a working replica of the famous Colossus computers used to crack those very difficult codes. And computer power alone couldn’t do it, it required clever minds to look for little hints that could make the ‘unbreakable’ code breakable. As an example, once it was realised that a letter could be coded as any letter other than itself, even this tiny clue could help point the cryptographers in the right direction. And there were always cribs that could help, the knowlege that a particular operator always began with the same phrase was an enormous help.

No original Colossus machines exist, after the war ended, Churchill gave strict orders that they should all be dismantled and the parts broken into small pieces.

The idea behind Colossus was the brainwave of Alan Turing, a mathematical genius who worked at Bletchly Park during the war. The Bombe that preceded it was originally designed and built by Polish engineers. Turing and his team designed and built a British version, physically different but doing the same job.

CSO (then based at Bletchly, now at GCHQ) intercepted the coded messages, while teams produced the German plain text, translated it into English and passed it to the British government and military planners.

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If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

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War, survival, victory
A conversation with ChatGPT

Rotated parking

Consider the poor removals staff when it comes to picking up or delivering a whole houseful of furniture.

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Image of the day – 154

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

Click to enlarge

Today’s photo is slightly giddying. This is Paradise Square in Sheffield; I took it in July 2012 when we were visiting family there. Here’s an amusing thought, but perfectly true – more car parking spaces are available in Paradise Square than had it been on level ground! But that doesn’t mean it’s a car parking paradise. Make sure your handbrake is firmly on and if your car has a manual gearbox, perhaps leave it in gear for added safety. Be careful when opening the door, too. I wonder if car insurance is more expensive if your address is on Paradise Square?

And consider the poor removals staff when it comes to picking up or delivering a whole houseful of furniture. Those hydraulic lifts at the back of the vehicle, usually so helpful, would be almost worse than useless! Would it be best to park across the slope? Or would facing uphill or downhill be better?

This must be one of the steepest car parks in the world. If you’re aware of one with an even steeper slope than Paradise Square, leave a comment. Thanks! (I found one, linked below, but I bet there are more.)

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Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

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Image of the day – 59

An early photo

The dog in the photo was Chloe, a wire-haired fox terrier. Although it’s a fine day, the waves look fairly energetic suggesting strong winds across the Irish Sea.

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Image of the day – 153

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

Click to enlarge

This is a photo of my younger sister, Ruth. Bear in mind that I’ll be 77 this summer, and you can deduce right away that the photo is quite old! I took it on a beach in mid-Wales, I believe in 1963 so it’s worn well. Ruth was building a lovely sand castle; Mum and Dad were on the beach nearby, as were my other two sisters, the weather was sunny and warm, and all was well with the world. It usually is when you’re on holiday!

But what else can we learn from this image?

Well, you might notice it’s a bit blurry, that’s because it was taken with a cheap Kodak Starmite camera with no focus control and a cheap lens. But what you can’t see is that the original was poorly framed and had a sloping horizon so I had to crop it for a better composition. The original is a Kodachrome transparency on 127 roll film. It’s dusty and I had use GIMP to clean it up.

But there are other things we can see. The bucket is red plastic, but the spade has a wooden handle and a painted steel blade. That alone would give an approximate date, given that plastic buckets were a recent innovation while wood and steel spades would have been similarly replaced with plastic only a little later. The flags were paper with wooden sticks.

Just think of this from a waste point of view. Only the bucket in this image would have produced waste that could not recycle itself. The spade, the flags, the clothes Ruth is wearing, even her footwear, when discarded would gradually rust or be digested by soil bacteria. Most of it would be gone within a few decades, though the rubber soles might take a tad longer. But the plastic bucket will still exist in some form unless it was incinerated. Most likely it’s still in landfill somewhere near Cirencester as that’s where we lived at the time.

The dog in the photo was Chloe, a wire-haired fox terrier. Although it’s a fine day, the waves look fairly energetic suggesting strong winds across the Irish Sea.

I have other early photos, mostly on black and white emulsions of the Ilford FP series, but a few others in colour.

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Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

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Photos the old way
Managing old family photos

Hoarfrost on Cotoneaster berries

During a summer night, molecules of water in the air condense as droplets of water on leaves, we call it dew. But on a cold winter’s night the water condenses as ice and we call it frost.

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Image of the day – 152

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

Click to enlarge

It’s a pretty picture, isn’t it? Red berries in wintertime, covered with glistening ice crystals. I used this photo once for a Christmas card. The ice is very decorative, and it’s easy to understand why we talk about icing on a cake (frosting in the USA).

The ice crystals form as the air cools at night. Air can hold significant amounts of water in gaseous form, but the precise amount depends on the temperature of the air; warm air can hold much more water than cold air. That’s why water condenses on cold surfaces. Take something out of the fridge and leave it in a warm room, and five minutes later it will be covered in droplets of water. That water was in the air but you couldn’t see it or feel it because water vapour is a gas.

During a summer night, molecules of water in the air condense as droplets of water on leaves, we call it dew. But on a cold winter’s night the water condenses as ice and we call it frost. Hoar frost, or rime, forms slowly over a number of hours and the kind of ice crystals that form is dependent on humidity, pressure and rate of temperature change. It can be quite subtle (view ‘The snowflake designer’ below for the details).

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Useful? Interesting?

If you enjoyed this or found it useful, please like, comment, and share below. (If you don’t see those links, click the article’s title above the main photo and they will appear.) Send a link to friends who might enjoy the article or benefit from it – Thanks! My material is free to reuse (see conditions), but a coffee is always welcome and encourages me to write more often!

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Nearly a year ago now…

Frosty cobweb
The snowflake designer