Six Things, Volume 74

Feather | Acrobats | Acknowledgements | Osmosis | Journeys | Rock

Hello! Before we get to the things, a brief plug. I went on a lovely walk and chat in Richmond Park a few weeks ago with Fergus Collins, presenter of BBC Countryfile’s podcast, The Plodcast. Luckily he had a microphone with him, so our conversation is preserved for posterity. You can listen to it here.

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Thing 1 – Feather

Here’s how it starts.

You pick up a feather. It’s a beautiful thing.

It’s from a ring-necked parakeet, if you were wondering.

You examine it for a while, admiring the gentle curve of the central vane, the morphing from dark grey to green, the pleasing symmetry of the interlocking barbs and barbules. You ponder the miracle of evolution that enabled it to exist.

You get to thinking about the role of feathers in the lives of birds – how they protect and insulate, how their lightness and strength are pivotal to a bird’s ability to fly, and how some birds use them to advertise their suitability as a mate, sometimes taking the development of their assets to ridiculous lengths.

I mean, honestly.

And then you find yourself descending into a series of rabbit holes. Featherbase, for example, a database of bird feathers to help you identify that feather you found, or just for browsing and admiring. Or the extraordinary feather art of Chris Maynard. Or the science behind their evolution, the different kinds and their various uses.

You emerge, blinking, look at your feather again, and are overwhelmed with a desire to see it up close. So you search ‘feather extreme close up’, and sure enough someone has made a macrophotographic film taking you deep deep deep.

While you’re lost in admiration for this insight into an unimaginable world, you do ask yourself why the makers have chosen to adorn this beautiful thing with that particular music. You briefly consider forming a Campaign Against Unnecessary and Irrelevant Music in Nature Films (CAUIMINF), decide against it (just think of the admin), rewind the video, turn the sound down and start again.

The video gets you thinking about the general scale of things, from the unimaginably tiny to the unimaginably vast. So you revisit Scale Of The Universe and take a one-minute journey from Quantum foam to the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall.

Prompted by this little excursion, you decide to compile a list of the various names for orders of magnitude – from Quecto (10 to the power of minus 30) to Ronna (10 to the power of 27) – noting briefly that a lot of them sound like lost Marx Brothers.

Quecto, Ronto, Yocto, Zepto, Atto, Femto, Pico, Nano, Micro, Milli, Centi, Deci, Deca, Hecto, Kilo, Mega, Giga, Tera, Peta, Exa, Zetta, Yotta, Ronna

And then you decide to have a little lie-down.

And when I say ‘you’, I do of course mean ‘I’.

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Thing 2 – Acrobats

I could have been an acrobat, but I didn’t have the physics.

Or the athletic prowess, balance, nerve, strength or imagination.

But mostly the physics.

Compagnie Barks have all of the above. A mesmerising few minutes.

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Thing 3 – Acknowledgements

My thanks to Fiona Erskine for this, a wonderful exploration of the unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements.

Acknowledgements have a quality which is hard to describe.

They feel like they’ve been drafted a hundred times in the head of the author, but then put down on the page in a hurry, the clock ticking on their deadline.

Like, they’re trying to tell you the most important thing they’ve ever said - at the very moment the ship is pulling away from the dock.

Thing 4 – Osmosis

I love this short film about art gallery security guards and the art they make.

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Thing 5 – Journeys

How far can you travel on foot? By train? By car?

Brilliant Maps has the answers (although do note the careful use of the word ‘potential’)

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Thing 6 – Rock

What beats rock? Try to be as inventive as you can.

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