Sign in Subscribe

Alison Hawke

Alison Hawke

Reading the dictionary

BBC News: The man who reads dictionaries. Ammon Shea spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary - 20 volumes, 21,730 pages and 59 million words - and he rates poring over a dictionary as enriching as reading a novel. Why? The prospect of talking to a man who

Snow on Mars

BBC News: Phoenix detects Red Planet snow. The Phoenix spacecraft on Mars has detected snow above its landing site. The US robot used its lidar instrument to probe the structure of clouds and saw large water ice-crystals falling through the Martian "air". The instrument, which works by scattering

Spin cycle

Went to the Weaving Dept Spin in on Saturday 11th, and spent a happy few hours spinning outside with Susan and Kay. I got more spinning done that day than in the preceding six months, and learned an important lesson: Stop spinning like a hamster on meth. It's

Whine and Cheese

PhoeKnits posted recently about the seeming forced happiness on knit blogs. I keep most of the personal stuff off these pages and I have reasons for that. This space is about knitting and science and news and spinning and writing, stuff that bounces around my head that I want recorded.

Going to the Spin-In

Myer's House is having a Spin-In on Saturday 11th October from 11am to 3pm! I'll be there with my Louet S10 wheel and probably a spindle too. I'll probably be working on some Cormo fibre. If you've never spun and are interested,

2008 Ig Nobel prizes

The 2008 Ig Nobel prizes are out! I have experimental proof of the physics prize with my iPod headphone cable. There's a summary in the BBC News, and here are the winners: Nutrition Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK,

Fratello

I'd ordered the Fratello kit from Yarnissima on Sept 24th, thinking it would take a while to get here from the Netherlands. It turned up on October 3rd, a mere nine days later, and packed with goodies: It comes with a skein of coveted Wollmeise yarn in a

NaNoWriMo planning

It's October now. My novel idea has more shape, my good guy has a face, and a sidekick, and a couple of minor quests to pull off before she faces the bad guy. I have a way to tell a bunch of back story and experiment with writing

Aquarium Day

The next day in Chicago was Aquarium day. We took the blue line into the centre of town from the airport. At least, we tried, there was a section of line closed so everyone was dumped off the train and onto shuttle buses to reach the next train. After some

Visiting The Fold

Friday morning we drove out to The Fold, about an hour from our hotel, going from city, to suburb, to country. It was a nice sunny day and we were driving past cornfields and farms, and houses. We almost drove straight past The Fold because it looked like just another

Follow me on Mastodon