Be warned; the tune will be stuck in your head for hours.  And you may feel the need to hum it aloud at inconvenient times, such as when an important cricket interview is occurring…

By Edward Monkton and via The Serendipity Factory.

My favourite picture for the day is this one:

< happy_serendipity’s flikr page here >

I hope you’re all enjoying this rainy Sunday afternoon!

The second is that my very excited post two weeks ago about my new iPhone no longer stands. Unfortunately, it now only works when connected to an external power source and even that’s only so-so.  Hooray for advanced technology!  Stupid phone.

The third is this awesome clip.  We watched a DVD of a West Coast Swing routine to this song today and it’s been stuck in my head for the last eight hours.  So I thought I’d share the love.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

I’m my own worst nightmare…

I hope you all have a lovely day!

But I thought, seeing as how I’ve busted my toe and will have a bit of spare time on my hands sans dancing, I’d start blogging again.  Mainly just to share all the random adventures I go on and random websites I find myself on.

This website I’m sharing is really called Post-it notes left to their fates in public places.  Which, quite frankly, is an awesome name for a blog.  The author draws on post-it notes an idea or saying that sometimes we need to be reminded of.  They then stick the note someplace random for somebody to find, and takes a photo of it sitting there all on it’s lonesome.

This is my favourite so far:

I hope you go with all your heart on your own adventures this week!

I hope you enjoy, let me know your thoughts…

It’s not just the achievements, not just the highlights of these lives that are important.  It’s the life that is being led.  To truly understand something, anything, you have to know where you’ve been and where you want to go.  Only then do you know where you are.

So many of the people in the latest book I worked on,  Amazing Scientists, are names that we know of, names that sit in the periphery of our lives as important.  Joseph Banks, Aristotle, Alessandro Volta, Louis Pasteur.  Knowing of these amazing people and their achievements is very different to knowing their stories.  Understanding what obstacles they overcame to be able to influence and educate so widely is what makes their stories so interesting, so much more than just text-book knowledge.

However, sometimes the stories raise more questions for me than they answer.  We can never truly know what happened, why people reacted the way they did or why one simple event set off a chain reaction and took a person into a new direction.  Sometimes, I do think as intellectually as that.

Some other times, I just think that there’s a good bit of gossip hiding behind the story that would make everything far more interesting…

Take for instance the story of Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday.  Both men were standouts in their field of chemistry, and in particular, electro-chemistry.  Davy is notorious for being a human guinea-pig to test out the effects of newly discovered chemicals and compounds on humans.  He suffered from many bouts of illnesses as a result, none that appeared to have a true cause other than his history of inhaling dangerous quantities of chemicals.

The man inhaled 16 quarts, or 17 litres, of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) within seven minutes, for crying out loud.

At the time however, Davy’s knowledge and lectures inspired the young Faraday to pursue his burgeoning interest in science.  This led to Faraday striking up a correspondence with Davy after having attended some of Davy’s lectures in London.  Impressed by the young man’s intelligence, carefully presented notes and obvious admiration for him, Davy invited Faraday to accompany him and his wife on a lecture-tour of Europe. 

There are only hazy details about what happened, but all seem to agree that Faraday had a miserable time of it, and the relationship between Faraday and Davy soured quite quickly upon their return to England.  So much so that Davy, as President of the Royal Society at the time, rejected two of Faraday’s later applications to be accepted as a Fellow into the Society, before finally succumbing to peer pressure in 1924 and allowing him in.

My theory?

Based purely on conjecture, circumstantial evidence and a desire to liven up this story with what could potentially be an exciting side-note to two amazing careers, I think that Mrs. Davy made a pass at the younger, more virile, far less chemically altered Faraday.  And Faraday, being a gentleman by most accounts, turned her down.  Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and so Mrs. Davy made certain that Faraday’s experience in Europe was an awful one.

And this is how rumours get started.

Why Mr. Davy subscribed to such treatment of Faraday is unclear, but the most likely scenario (that other, more reliable sources than I, believe too!) is that Davy was becoming jealous of Faraday, both academically and socially.  And so began several years of animosity from the Davy camp, with Faraday apparently taking it all with good grace and producing amazing work after Davy passed away from a stroke (no doubt caused by inhaling all of that nitrous oxide 20 years before).

Obviously, I have no evidence other than second-hand information to support the above scenario and a great deal of time and imagination, but it certainly made writing about the two men more interesting!  For the socially-accepted facts that make up this story though, you’ll just have to check out Amazing Scientists when it’s released…

They made it so sneakily, and not one of them gave the game away!  I was very impressed with them.  Unfortunately, some of the “stems” didn’t quite survive the journey home from school.  Got to love school issued stationery…

I then picked up this gorgeous bouquet of roses when I was doing my grocery shopping, and it makes me happy to walk out into the living room of a morning to see them there, being all pink and gorgeous.

Tonight equals takeaway Thai food and movies with my housemate and a friend.  I hope you all had a lovely weekend!

Kirri is wondering: why does the sun come out during the day, when it would be so much more useful if it came out at night when it was dark?

Or…

Kirri is all that.

As the website states, it’s for the “imaginatively challenged”.  Let’s hope your imagination holds up against all those witticisms.

Children.   Everywhere.  All of the time.

So obviously, I chose a teaching degree when I came back to Australia (well, after awhile, but we all knew I wanted to). Because I am good at it.  I am.  And I care about kids.  They’re hilarious and they always force me to take myself less seriously.

 The difference now?

Now, I would rather be the student than the teacher.  As I’m preparing my lessons, all I can think of is the questions that I want to know the answer to.  Questions that the 11 year olds I’m teaching wouldn’t even know how to ask.  It’s not that I find it boring to teach them how to square a number.  It’s just that I’d rather they learned it as quickly as possible so that we can move on to something exciting.  Something that is more complex and builds on that simple skill that they haven’t even learned yet.

Case in point – a math assignment I did for uni when I was supposed to be discussing 3 dimensional shapes.  What did I find myself doing?  Writing a mini essay on the fourth dimension and researching string theory.

To teach primary school kids.

So, again my indecision, always the indecision.  What do I really want with my life?  Do I finish a degree that frustrates me on number of levels, just to get a degree?  To begin a career that I’m already drawing away from before I’ve even started?  I love to teach, truly.  It’s not like I will never teach.  I intend to – here, around the world, in volunteer positions, even my own kids in the future.

 I just don’t think I’m ready to yet.