New Blogger features

Those of you that are blogger users may have noticed some new features (long over due).

There is a new flexible template feature, which includes more control over how a template works. I'm un-decided yet whether to use this. I think if I had known a few weeks ago, I would have used it, but now I have changed the template, I'll probably keep the current one, at least for a while.

A more interesting feature is the addition of stand alone pages. This has been available in Wordpress for a long time and Blogger have been slow to do the same. This is something I will be using, so the blog will change in the coming months. One obvious use will be to put the walk to Waterlooville map on its own page.

Windmill Biscwits

Having bought some flour at Bursledon windmill I decided to have a go at making some biscuits. I found a recipe for digestive biscuits and got the ingredients together:

Wholemeal flour
Porridge oats
Baking powder
Butter
Sugar
Salt
Milk

See recipe link for amounts and directions.
I used organic milk, butter, porridge oats and sugar.

Here are all the ingredients mixed up, excluding the milk. I just used my hands, that was fun. Haven't done that since helping my mother or grandmother in the kitchen.

This is where it went a bit pear shaped.
I added far to much milk, at first it looked OK but then puddles of milk appeared. Anyway it was all or nothing now, so no turning back.

When cutting out the shapes, the mixture was far to soggy. When I did the second batch I abandoned rolling/cutting and just grabbed some mixture, made it into a ball then flattened it.

First batch finished, turned out quite well.

Tea and biscuits. Actually they are more like wholemeal soft cookies. But very tasty, the amount of sugar was just right.

I think less milk and a thinner/flatter amount of mixture per biscuit would give a thinner crisp biscuit.
Or maybe a different recipe?

Wind Week...

It is totally coincidental that the week I publish a story about a windmill, it happens to be Wind Week!

The nearest wind turbine to Waterlooville and opening for public viewing this week is at Greenpark nr Reading and is owned by Ecotricity. Open this Sunday at 11.00 am.

Wind Week 2010

A Sunday trip to Bursledon Windmill

Introduction

I recently discovered that we actually have a working windmill in Hampshire. Located at Bursledon, between Eastleigh and Southampton. It was originally built between 1813 and 1814, coincidently finished 1 year before the battle of Waterloo!

On Sundays the museum is open and the windmill is 'fired up' so the sails are made to turn the workings. During the week staff actually grind flour using the windmill and pack it up into bags for sale to visitors. So in this respect it is a real working windmill and museum.

The journey there

I used public transport to get to the museum, not always the best option on a Sunday! This actually turned into an unintentional adventure in its own right, since there were rail works between Fareham and Southampton.

Anyway, I first walked to Waterlooville town centre and took a bus to Cosham. Didn't plan that to well because I missed the train at Cosham by seconds and had to wait an hour for the next train. So at Cosham I went to a cafe, had a cup of tea and then watched some pensioners playing bowls at the local green.

It gets worse though. Once on the train at Cosham, I didn't know about the rail works and instead of getting off at Fareham to transfer to a replacement bus service, I ended up in Southampton. By now I was getting used to the idea of an adventure!

So I got the replacement bus service at Southampton back to Bursledon, this wasn't all bad because the bus passed through some interesting areas of Southampton which brought back some family memories.

Phew. All this just to go and see a windmill. At Bursledon it's about a 1 mile walk from Bursledon station to the windmill, on the way there, I noticed a pub, The Crows Nest (more about that later). In my opinion, the travel issues were not a problem, if you set out with the idea of an adventure, then you start working out ways to fill in the delays with other activities.

Bursledon Windmill

Having got to the windmill, seeing the sails turn in the wind made the journey worthwhile. I have seen windmills and watermills before, but I have never seen a working windmill before. I managed to take some video on a small camera whilst there, which I put together into a compilation (this is the first time I have uploaded a video to Blogger, I hope it is OK):

BTW, some of the noise in the outside shots of the video are actually the camera. Despite being solid state electronics (no tapes), it still managed to make an electronic whirring noise.

The staff at the windmill were very informative and I really enjoyed chatting to them. Apparently since the windmill was built, woods and buildings now surround the windmill, however they still can catch Southerly and Northerly winds, which luckily are the main winds in the area.

The sails are pointed in the correct direction by hand, using a chain that turns some gears at the top of the windmill. The sails are fixed pitch, unlike modern wind turbines that have variable pitch blades. This means the amount of sail has to be adjusted depending on the strength of the wind.

Also the windmill could drive up to 3 stones at once, so I guess originally the number of stones could be changed depending on the strength of wind. As well as the windmill, there is an old barn building which houses a small shop, and other facilities. You can watch a video that explains how the mill works and even mill some samples of flour using small stones of different historical periods.

Outside there is a small pond (with Dragonflies) and a granary stood up on some staddle stones. Staddle stones are an old method of keeping rats and mice out of the granary.

Flour

Personally I think the windmill is a great place to visit. At the museum shop you can buy three grades of strong wholemeal stoneground flour produced at the mill. I bought a 1.5 kg bag of medium flour (the others were fine and coarse) for £1.50, which I thought was a good price considering it was made by a windmill.

I hope to make some biscuits or bread with it. Never done either before, so that should be fun. What must be remembered is that when the windmill was built it was an industrial building, and was a place of work. We think of windmills as being quaint today but that was not the case when there were thousands of windmills and watermills dotted around the country in the 1700s and 1800s.

On the way back, I realised I had another hour wait for the replacement bus service back to Fareham rail station. So decided to have a beer and meal in The Crows Nest!

Link to Bursledon Windmill web pages

Summer of Cycling 2010

There are a lot of cycling events across Hampshire this summer.

Some events include:

Big Bike Celebration - June, Eastleigh
Cycle Cavalcade - June, Southampton and Winchester
Introductory off road cycle - June, Winchester
Urban Rides Southampton - June, Southampton
Portsmouth Bike2Work day - June, Portsmouth
Back to Biking for Adults - June, Winchester
Cut Throats and Cut Thru's - June, Portsmouth
New Forest On and Off Shore - August, Lymington

For details of these events and rides and many others, go to the Summer Cycling 2010 web site.

Water and Music Festivals in 2010

I think anyone living near Waterlooville knows about the 2010 Waterlooville Music Festival, because of all the banners around town, so won't need reminding. However those that live some distance away might not know, so if you don't know, you will once you have read this.

The festival is from 12th June to 20th June.
More details on the Music Festival web site.

Also next month there is the Hampshire Water Festival over at Staunton Park. It's a 'green fair' that is very light green and the councillors don't like calling it 'environmental' because apparently it will frighten Mr and Mrs Carbon away!

But anyway Friends of the Earth will be there, as will other less 'active' organisations, such as Portsmouth Water, who will be flooding the area soon to make a reservoir.

The Water Festival is on 24th and 25th July.
More info at the Water Festival web site.

Quantum Physics, electron clouds etc.

This week I finally got my head around waves and particles, mainly the visualisation of electrons and atoms. Over the last 20 or so years, I have read a number of popular books about quantum physics and particles and vaguely understood the concept of the wave being a graphical representation of the probability of finding a particle in a location. But I could never really visualise this in 3 dimensions or how a wave could be constricted in a three dimensional space.

When I was a teenager we were taught the old school orbiting electrons idea of an atom, which frankly was never really satisfactory and was purely an attempt at visualising something scientists didn't really fully understand. At the time I don't think I was really interested in abstract concepts of atoms etc. Higher level implementations of physics were of more interest, eg. digital electronics.

I think the modern models of electron clouds based on wave functions (spherical harmonics) around an atom are far more beautiful, even if they are extremely complex once you go beyond the hydrogen atom.
Harmonics are interesting things and adding two dimensional wave forms together can give some interesting shapes, so it should be of no surprise that electrons of an atom would create some interesting three dimensional shapes, depending on energy levels/frequency and the number of electrons involved.

One has to always remember though that the shapes are just zones in which an electron is likely to be found, at any point in time it would be detected at a single point in one of the lobes/nodes created by the wave functions.

The maths are beyond me, although it does look familiar. I think that is enough for one week on that subject! I'm just glad that it makes sense to me now. Or does it...

If you want to play around with spherical harmonics, Wolfram Mathematica have a player that can be downloaded, plus if you also download one of the spherical harmonics demonstrations on the site, you can play around with electrons and see what shapes it creates.