Inspired by Atomic Models

Media chatter about sugars got me thinking about their structures, so I used some atomic models I bought a few years ago, and made models of the glucose and fructose molecules. The differences between them and their relations to other sugars were suddenly crystal clear.

Students of chemistry should be issued with such models as a matter of course. Perhaps they are now. I wonder why we weren't.

Economical Word Processor

Editing a document using Libre Office, I noticed that it contained about 20 000 words, and amounted to about 119 000 characters.

Checking the file I noticed it occupied only 64K on the disk, suggesting commendable economy. MS Works, the word processor I used to use, needed about 160K to store an earlier and  slightly shorter version of the same document.

Counting My Books

I have about 1250 books. The number isn't precise, because I wasn't sure what counted as a book. I decided not to count maps, guides to stately homes and museums, back number of magazine, and what I call 'pamphlets', some of which differ from books mainly by being very thin.

I decided to count after hearing a news item estimating the mean number of books per household at around 150. I wonder where that survey drew the line between books and pamphlets

Before moving house I had even more books, but carried out a purge before moving, and another after moving. I guess that I used to have 1500 or more.

Counting to 3.6 billion

It was recently claimed that eight rich men own more than the 3.6 billion poorest people. I wonder how the 3.6 billion was obtained.

In many societies most property is held in the name of the male head of the household. Even in some quite prosperous households wives and children are not recorded as having any property.

The 3.6 billion may thus include many family members of people who are quite prosperous.

Filenames upset my Browser

I put on a web page a set of photographs with names  base_name001T.jpg...to base_name015T.jpg

The browser (Google Chrome) gave a perfect rendering of the page when it was in my computer, but when I put it on my website the files base_name009T.jpg and base_name011T.jpg  were not found, and base_name010T.jpg was converted to base_name001T.jpg. There was no problem with the other files.

I doubt if there was an error in copying the files to the site as I use a batch file to load all the jpg files in the relevant directory. Nevertheless I checked that the errant files were on the site and in the correct place, and reloaded them several times with no effect.

When I entered directorypath/base_name010T.jpg into the navigation bar of my browser, the file name was altered to base_name001T.jpg and that file then displayed.

Eventually I renamed the problem files base_nameZ09T.jpg,
 base_nameZ10T.jpg, base_nameZ11T.jpg, and then all was well. I wonder what happened ? Why just those filenames, and not the others?

Pictures of the Underworld on my web site

I've just added some pictures of the underground chamber revealed when we had some work done on the house earlier this year. this is a link to the relevant page

After idling for months I have at last started to sort out my website. I've just added a few pictures of the house. I hope they will just be the first of many this is a link