Since EVERYONE seems to either have a cold or be talking about having a cold…

The Land of Counterpane – Robert Louis Stevenson

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay,
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.

For those in love with murmuration…

Colossal says: “Filmmaker Neels Castillon was on a commercial shoot a few days ago, waiting to catch a helicopter flying into a sunset, when suddenly tens of thousands of starlings unexpectedly swarmed the sky in an enormous dance known as a murmuration. With his director of photography, Mathias Touzeris, the two filmed for several minutes capturing some pretty magnificent footage. You might recall a similar murmuration video from last year shot extremely up close and personal using a camera phone that went viral. How do thousands of birds simultaneously make such dramatic changes in their flight patterns? After tons of research, scientists still aren’t sure. The music is Hand-Made by Alt-J.”
 

 
Until recently, it was hard to say what made the murmurations possible. Scientists had to wait for the tools of high-powered video analysis and computational modeling. And when these were finally applied to starlings, they revealed patterns known less from biology than cutting-edge physics. As Brandon Keim puts it on Wired.com:
 

Starling flocks, it turns out, are best described with equations of “critical transitions” — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition.

At the individual level, the rules guiding this are relatively simple. When a neighbor moves, so do you. Depending on the flock’s size and speed and its members’ flight physiologies, the large-scale pattern changes. What’s complicated, or at least unknown, is how criticality is created and maintained.

It’s easy for a starling to turn when its neighbor turns — but what physiological mechanisms allow it to happen almost simultaneously in two birds separated by hundreds of feet and hundreds of other birds? That remains to be discovered, and the implications extend beyond birds. Starlings may simply be the most visible and beautiful example of a biological criticality that also seems to operate in proteins and neurons, hinting at universal principles yet to be understood.

The Old Man’s Back Again…

I seen a hand, I seen a vision
It was reaching through the clouds, To risk a dream

A shadow cross the sky
And it crushed into the ground, Just like a beast

The old man’s back again
The old man’s back again

I seen a woman, standing in the snow
She was silent as she watched them take her man

Teardrops burned her cheeks
for she thought she’d heard, The shadow had left this land

The old man’s back again
The old man’s back again

The crowds just gathered, their faces turned away
And they queue all day like dragons of disgust

All the women whispering
Wondering just what these young hot-heads want of us
And entres vie he cries

with eyes that ring like chimes
His anti-worlds go spinning through his head
He burns them in his dreams
for half awake they may as well be dead

The old man’s back again
I see he’s back again

I see a soldier, He’s standing in the rain
For him there’s no old man to walk behind

Devoured by his pain
bewildered by the faces who pass him by

He’d like another name the one he’s got’s a curse
These people cried
Why can’t they understand
His mother called him Ivan then she died

The old man’s back again
The old man’s back again
I can see him back again

Things

Things

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

This is by Fleur Adcock. She wrote it in December 1973 – right in the middle of the Winter of Discontent. As she says in “Poem for the Day 2” (where I spotted it): “There were power cuts, a rail strike, shortages of every kind (a note in my diary on the 15th says that I managed to buy the last oil lamo in East Finchley). I had a cold, an elderly friend had just died, and all was bleak. The occasion for the poem was probably some minor cause for embarrassment that was keeping me awake, bet then all the more serious matters came crowding in. I thought other people would recognise the sentiments.”

But then, you read something like this and look out of the window on a nice sunny day, and think about the walk you’re going to have by the river or the lovely family you’re about to see, and it seems a little silly to let those things come stalking in. I love this poem. You can read it in a funny way too. It makes me feel better.

For the first of December

“Lines for Winter”

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself —
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

by Mark Strand.

Strand wrote this for his friend Rosalind Krauss when she got the blues. I like it.

(photo copyright me though – it’s on the river Thames near Hammersmith bridge on a cold day)

It was foggy last night. What’s fog?

Fog and mist are both made of tiny water droplets suspended in air. The difference between them is the density of the droplets. Fog is denser so contains more water droplets than mist.

Our atmosphere is made up of many gases, one of which is water vapour. It can hold a certain amount of water as invisible water vapour at any given temperature. If air is cooled it can hold less water and becomes super saturated. At saturation point, some of the water has to condense to form water droplets, which forms cloud.

Radiation fog
Radiation fog is formed on clear, still nights when the ground loses heat by radiation, and cools. The ground in turn cools the nearby air to saturation point, thus forming fog. Often the fog remains patchy and is confined to low ground, but sometimes it becomes more dense and widespread through the night.

Ideal conditions for the formation of this type of fog are light winds, clear skies and long nights. Consequently, in the UK, the months of November, December and January are most prone to foggy conditions, particularly the inland areas of England and lowlands of Scotland in high pressure conditions.

After dawn, fog tends to disperse because it is ‘burnt off’ by the incoming solar radiation, some of which penetrates the fog and reaches the ground. The ground heats up, as does the layer of air near it. Eventually the air reaches a temperature where the minute fog droplets evaporate and the visibility improves. However, in winter fogs can be very persistent.

Advection fog
Advection fog is formed when very mild moist air moves over a cold ground. This can often happen in early spring in the UK when mild southwesterly winds moving across the country over snowy or icy ground. The lower layers of the air get cooled down rapidly to below the temperature at which fog forms.

Hill fog
Hill fog or upslope fog, as its name implies, is formed as mild moist air is forced to ascend a hill or mountain range. As the air moves up the windward side of the mountain it cools down, and again if the air becomes saturated then cloud is formed which, if below the top of the hills, gives fog.

Coastal fog
Some coastal regions of the British Isles suffer from ‘sea fog’ which forms when moist air is cooled to saturation point by travelling over a cooler sea. The wind may then take the fog into coastal regions. This type of fog tends to occur in spring and Summer, and particularly affects south western and North Sea coasts.

Steam fog
‘Steam fog’ is sometimes seen rising from the ground after a shower. If the ground is warm, the water from the shower may evaporate. If the air above it is saturated and cannot hold any more water, the excess moisture condenses and looks like steam. This ‘steaming’ can also be seen at the Poles, when cold air sweeps over a slightly warmer sea. The sea warms the air a little and some water evaporates. The warmer damper air then rises, cools again and the moisture condenses.

Freezing fog
Freezing fog is made of supercooled water droplets (i.e. ones which remain liquid even though the temperature is below freezing-point). One of the characteristics of freezing fog is that rime – feathery ice crystals – is deposited on the windward side of vertical surfaces such as lamp-posts, fence-posts, overhead wires, pylons and transmitting masts.

ps – if it’s foggy and you’re driving in the countryside, don’t put your headlamps on full beam because it reflects in the water droplets and dazzles you. Which is scary. And sort of looks like aliens are coming to get you.