Discovery

I wanted to break tradition and document my day. I can feel your raised eyebrows reverberating back into what is to you the past and to me the present. I will dispel such quizzical looks with some hairy liberations of my own, albeit proverbial ones.

A trifling fancy gripped me this morning. I have so much gotten bored of being housebound each day that earlier this week I wandered to Newcastle with no purpose but to kill time and left the Grainger Market that day with two packets of biscuits, then proceeded to have a walk along the promenade at Whitley Bay. It was peaceful, enjoyable somewhat, but not nearly as brilliant as today.

Today, I prised my little brother from the clutches of my PS3. We were bound for the Discovery Museum, and discover we did.

Where to start? Let's start at the very beginning: a very good place to start. The wondrous propellers shown above are the work of Charles Algernon Parsons of Ryton, which lies some 7 miles upstream of the Tyne Bridge. Parsons invented the steam turbine, and later developed turbine-driven ships, the first of which was the Turbinia, shown below as she currently sits in the Discovery Museum.

Turbinia, who was completed in 1894, demonstrated Parsons' ingenuity and was by far and away the fastest ship in the world at the time, both due to its knife-like bow and novel use of turbines. Setting a new standard for steamships, the Blue Riband prize for crossing the Atlantic quickly fell into ownership of ships using Parsons' technology. At around the same time, the International Mercantile Marine Co. was setting up a monopoly that was to cruise liners as NewsCorp is to media, which included the White Star Line, of which you will have no doubt heard. To claim a victory over this conglomerate, Cunard commissioned a new range of liners, larger and faster than ever before, using Parsons' brilliant engineering.

The Mauretania. Isn't she beautiful? Cunard needed the greatest shipyards in the world, and two of them at that. A merger between Tyneside shipyards Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson was necessary in order to construct a ship larger than the world had ever seen before. Mauretania held the Blue Riband between 1909 and 1929, though not without a well-documented, ill-fated attempt by White Star to beat Cunard by taking a shortcut with a slightly slower class of ships, their Olympic line. Just as Mauretania dwarfed its sister Lusitania and later comrade Aquitania, the Titanic has fame far beyond that of the Olympic and the Britannic. This would still be the case were she successful in her challenge. To return to a less tragic and commercially exploited topic, Newcastle innovated and implemented one of the greatest developments to fluvial transport to date.

What's this? A locomotive? In fact, it's Locomotion No 1. With this engine, George and Robert Stephenson sped up the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. The duo improved the existing railways for horse-drawn wagons for the heavier mechanical machines, first in the North East, then in Liverpool and Manchester — which opened the floodgates for passenger rail services — and then continuing to supervise the construction of railways all around the UK. The British Empire then carried these innovations across the world.

That's not even everything yet. Not nearly. Have you ever used a light bulb? Thomas Edison may well have displayed his version at the Chicago World Fair, but neither he nor Joseph Wilson Swan of Tyneside ever knew who achieved success first. As ingenious as the pair were, they merged their companies rather than compete or burn their fortune in court under the name EdiSwan. The photograph above shows a replica of Swan's 1878 bulb, with the nearest to perfect vacuum ever, a carbon filament and a rather lovely shape, as well as a reflection of the flash from my camera.

Speaking of cameras, this is an early home camera. It uses bromide paper: yet another brainchild of Joseph Swan. Though lenses were much altered across the years, and different methods for the development of photographs introduced, the majority of film never strayed far from the original bromide paper. Only the recent surge in digital photography has superseded cameras of a similar class to those that used Swan's paper.

Seriously, Newcastle. I am in awe.

Imprisonment

I used to think my bedroom back home in Whitley Bay was cell-like, and I wanted to live elsewhere from the moment I realised that was a possibility, which, given my perceptiveness during early childhood, was probably at a very young age.

"Be careful what you wish for" is the phrase usually associated to such matters, and despite its disgusting syntax, its sentiment appeals currently. I may have a bigger room than I did – it even has an en-suite bathroom – and I have the run of the kitchen, but I still feel less free at times, living on this inaccessible campus, in the middle of nowhere, by which I mean too far from the sea.

Back home, the public transport system works. The buses may be slow, occasionally expensive, and inevitably each service is either infrequent or unreliable, but never both. The Metro surpasses every public transport system in Britain excepting those run by TfL, and though there's always a slight possibility of a stabbing, it is at least close to reliable, and more than enough healthy competition for buses, which most areas of the UK lack.

As such, in Newcastle, it's fairly easy to go anywhere you want to go – and a bunch of places you wouldn't – pretty quickly, and, besides, neither the sea nor the city centre is beyond cycling distance, no matter where you live in Tyne and Wear. There's always something to do and somewhere to go. That's not the case living on this campus. Perhaps Leamington Spa is better for it, though it still resides at least sixty miles from the coast, and certainly less architecturally interesting.

I'll hope that this craving for sea air and an end to the tedium of this landscape or lack thereof is a passing one, after all, if I can go 32 days without meat, I can surely make it to the end of the term without watching waves crash down on the shore. Oh, waves. Hmm, sand.

Cambridge et la neige.

C'est jeudi français!

Depuis deux semaines, il neige. À Newcastle, toutes choses sont blanches.

De toute façon, je suis allé à Cambridge cette semaine. C'est une belle ville. Je serait heureux si j'y vais pour mes études.

Maintenant, j'écoute de France 80 en ligne. C'est très amusant : la musique pop français est comme… fromageux qu'il est en Angleterre.

À bientôt!

Les offres

Mardi, j'ai reçu une lettre de Newcastle University qui a dit qu'il me donne une offre! De plus, hier, j'ai reçu un émail de Cambridge University qui a dit que j'ai besoin de visiter pour une interview. C'est le 7 décembre, et je suis nerveux.

De toute façon, j'ai eu une réunion pour discuter l'aviron Mercredi. Nous avons parle au sujet du programme hivernal d'entrainement. C'était vraiment agréable ; j'aime la responsabilité d'être « Junior Vice-Captain. »

Bien, c'est tout! Bonne nuit, fais de beaux rêves, si c'est logique en français.

The Social Network

I saw The Social Network at the cinema today. It was a fantastic film, and probably still is. Go and see it sometime. Don't pirate it. Pirate music, that's fine. Don't pirate films. The crux of the matter is that, for music artists, the majority of their income – if they're any kind of decent – comes primarily from concerts. The film industry has no such live performances for generating revenue, hence, in not paying to watch a film, one jeopardizes the entire film industry. Don't pirate films.

Back to my original point, which was, oh yeah, The Social Network is brilliant. It has inspired me to increase my geek abilities. For instance, I'd rarely used the wget command on my fantastic, invincible, Ubuntu-running laptop. Currently, I'm testing it out, trying to download scores of photos from MIT's website. I did try wget on Facebook, but, their brilliant tech guys have blocked non-authorized bots, as have wikipedia. On my first attempt at wget, I downloaded around 400MB of data from Newcastle University's website. I'd guess it'd still be going, approaching one gigabyte, had I not killed it.

Anyway, enough chat. I have Unix commands to learn. Laters interpeeps!

The eyes have it...

Today, I attended a lecture at Northumbria University, given by Rt Hon John Bercow MP: the Speaker of the House of Commons. It was thoroughly enjoyable for my politically interested self, and greatly restored my faith in the British constitution. Alas, I didn't ask him any questions, but I neither had a question to ask nor any reason to come up with an awkward question – he didn't annoy me in the slightest, not like that time I confused David Cameron.

In other news, disease is all but disappeared, including what I will describe only as a "facial anomaly" to avoid saying either "cold sore" or "herpes". Damned genetics. I'm not tall, I'm fair-skinned, almost fair-haired. At least my eyes are blue and not some form of green. I apologise for the offence taken by green-eyed people, but you're a noun away from being the personification of jealousy, and I'm much more inclined to brown and blue eyes, though not one of each, nor a mixture. All right, I've had enough of this. Basically, my genetics are pretty bad, bar the intelligence and the well-defined eye colour.

Right, not sure I've any more grumbles or musings, except possibly mentioning that Newcastle City Library is becoming increasingly popular, which I'm not all that pleased about. I can barely get a seat.

Without further ado, I bid you adieu.

Good night interpeeps!