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Gus after Oscar

June 30, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Gus has started to worry a spot on his leg. He lies on the floor and dozes between bouts of licking the spot clean. The same spot gets licked over and over again. He’s snoring at my feet as I type about this worry for a dog who is 14 years old.

Tales of two dogs are probably not what you’d expect now. However, these are stories of a past and future I can’t change. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon has made me reflective, sad and now, even a worry spot on the dog’s leg makes me worry that I will somehow let him down.

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A Novel or is it?

June 29, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

The past is done. I can’t change the fact the first president of Israel was born in Ireland. No more than I change that he was born on the island of Ireland as distinct from being born in a unified nation of Ireland that does not exist. He appears to have taken troubles with him, created by a mitosis that produced two daughter troubles.

The future may not be done but it seems that while the die is cast, those who will die are never finalised. I cannot change the fact that Israel will annex more Palestinian lands from the West Bank this week. Teflon Netanyahu has vowed it. Entrepreneur Trump supports it. Some agencies have warned that this is a war crime. Is a war crime wilful if such opinions are ignored? Is a crime during time of war different to an act of war?

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Argan Oil

June 28, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Funny how even the size of a word on a bottle of shampoo can float memories back to the surface. ‘Hair Shampoo with Argan Oil’ was written on a bottle on the shelf in front of me while I shaved. Glasses off, ‘Argan’ is unclear yet unambiguous. My subliminal messaging retrieval kicks in and I’m back in a restaurant pouring an Argan oil dressing on my salad. I was there with five other colleagues. It had been a long day towards the end of a complicated three month geophysical project. We had been recording two dimensional profiles in a hunt for commercial hydrocarbons.

Morocco 2012: 15 sappers check a 15 m path for landmines.

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Plenty of Times II

June 24, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

Gamma ray bursts are flashes of gamma rays that hit our planet quite regularly. They can last for fractions of seconds or minutes. They can be detected from enormous cosmic distances.

Back in April 2010, a satellite detected a 10 second GRB burst. That’s ten seconds of gamma rays that we now know travelled 13 .7 billion years to reach us from a supernova in a galaxy that occurred about 630 million years after the Big Bang.

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Beaks and Travel

June 20, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

I was sitting alone in a cold, damp bed-and-breakfast type bedroom in November 1995. It was a dreich Scottish night in Aberdeen and I started to read The Beak of the Finch (1995). It remains a stand-out science read and one of the most influential books I’ve enjoyed. The room was cold enough that I felt the need to wrap myself in blankets pulled off the bed, wishing I was like the Tierra del Fuegans who needed no clothes. Darwin was a great diversion when I was undecided; besides being cold, I couldn’t be sure if I was humiliated or amused.

‘The mind is our beak, and the human mind is ever more variable than the brain’ wrote Jonathan Weiner in The Beak of the Finch.

Reasons to need offshore survival training. Tierra del Fuego 1995.

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Sports Service

June 19, 2020 by Simon Robinson Leave a Comment

The numbers 7, 34, 46 and 93 probably don’t mean much to you. They represent four of my favourite motorcycle racing champions who carried those numbers for most of their wins. Texan Kevin Schwantz only won the world championship once and though he carried 34 the rest of the time and it’s been retired in his honour, he chose to use #1 for the 1994 season. Who?

Texas 2013: Marquez takes poll and then wins his first MotoGP

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