Dulce Et Decorum Est, Pro Patria Mori

This is my second project that I’ve been slaving away on for the past month and a bit.
Along with astronomy, I’ve always liked to read history, specifically (in typical boy fashion) anything to do with war and human conflict.

Like many people, I find the Great War of 1914-18 morbidly fascinating. I remember finding it weird as a young one to find out, whilst reading about the First World War, that tanks were invented back in 1916! That cavalry was still in wide use at the start of the conflict! The early battles of that conflict seemed to me more reminiscent of the Napoleonic wars than that of a 20th century war.

And the casualties, they seemed huge. This wasn’t brought home to me until I considered that on the first day of the Somme in 1916, approximately 58,000 British soldiers lost their lives. The home of Arsenal Football club, the Emirates stadium, can hold 60,000. Can you imagine a stadium’s worth of people dying in a single day? Horrific.

People seem to be more receptive and understanding of scale when you relate large numbers down to more everyday numbers, like above. So with this in mind I set out to illustrate the human cost of the Great War in book format. I stuck with the Western Front, due to time constraints and because I’m based in Europe, people will be more familiar with the likes of the Somme and Ypres, rather than Gallipoli and Tannenberg.

Each book contains dots. Each dot represents a soldier who was either seriously injured, killed or ‘missing’ (missing usually means being blown to unidentifiable pieces) during the battle.
The cover colours progress from the light, fresh, green fields of rural France, to the muddy browns of crater-ridden trenches, documenting the change in the landscape and battlefield and in an abstract sense, the nature of the battles fought (a slow progression from the fluid battles of 1914 to the muddy stalemate of 1917).

In short, it’s a visual history of the Western Front of 1914-18 and a personal memorial to those who gave their lives. I’ll hopefully be showing this at the Leeds International Bookfair next week. Feel free to leave feedback!

Solar Systems

The deadline for my University work passed without a hitch on Friday, leaving me absolutely knackered but ultimately happy that I’d completed everything on time without compromising on effort or quality too much. Seeing as I now have no deadlines for the immediate future, I might as well showcase what some of my work!

I had a mild interest in Astronomy from a young age, when we covered the planets in Primary School. It complimented my obsession with Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000 quite well I suppose.
It was as I discovered the Skeptical movement and community on the Internet a few years ago that my interest in Astronomy was rekindled (I recommend Bad Astronomy and APOD).
Carl Sagan’s Eulogy on the ‘Pale Blue Dot’ nearly reduced me to tears with its poetry and ideas when I first read it. It got me thinking about how we perceive ourselves in the universe, and how insipid and false it seemed for most religions and people to think that Humanity was the centre of the Universe when we’re all but invisible from within our solar system.

So here is my take on the ‘Pale Blue Dot’. It is a book that hopefully makes the mind-bogglingly huge distances involved with astronomy more tangible to most people.









It is essentially a scale model of the solar system, from the Sun all the way to Pluto, contained within a foldout book. Shrinking down the Sun to about the size of a grapefruit (about 100mm) using this website, gave me a scale of 1mm=13919km. At this scale all the planets are (just about!) visible and give a total length of approximately 328 metres. I had to construct a box to hold the amount of paper used in its creation, it’s a hefty pile!









Each line is a continuous path to each of the planets. Most of the distance within the book is taken up by the outer planets, with all the inner planets squeezed into the first 16 metres of the book. In the picture below, my friend in purple is where Mars is and each clip on the floor next to the paper marks Mercury, Venus and Earth respectively.
Our own beautiful little planet is barely a millimetre dot of blue, the whole of Humanity encapsulated within a millimetre…






I included Pluto, despite its recent re-classification as a ‘Plutoid’, for old time’s sake and because most people are familiar with it as a planet. If I remake and refine this book I’d probably also include other Plutoids within our Solar System (Ceres, the Asteroid belt, etc) for the sake of completeness and education. Also, because of Pluto’s eccentric orbit, I decided to try and figure out it’s near exact distance from the sun as of this year. With the help of a friend who knows Astrophysics, we worked out that it’s currently about half an AU past Neptune. (Is this right? I’m still unsure on this and would welcome any more information on this for future reference!)

Anyway I hope this makes people think about the scale of our vast universe and our place within it.
This whole idea of communicating large numbers by using visual methods seems to be an emergent theme in my latest pieces of work, as you’ll see in the next project I’ll post about.
Any feedback would be much appreciated!

A Picture Is Worth...

...A thousand words, so the saying goes. 

But what about a picture made of words?

This little website I found on Bad Astronomy takes the words from whatever text you paste into it and visually displays the frequency of which words appear the most ( a 'Word Cloud'). The bigger the word, the more common it is. 

This one I made using one of my previous posts: (Click to biggify)

I can see this being quite practical as well as pretty. Words that are repeated too much instantly stand out, not to mention mistakes. Without doing this Word Cloud i wouldn't have realized I have used the two variants of 'Skepticism/Scepticism' (I prefer it with a 'K')

Another cool website that demands time be wasted upon it!

London & Theology

'When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.'

- Samuel Johnson

While I wouldn't go as far as Mr Johnson in his quote above, I agree with it's sentiment; London is awesome!

Whilst I imagine living there for a long period of time would strip away the veneer of excitement that i've applied to London, for an occasional visit it is amazing. So it was with great excitement that I set off for the Capital on Wednesday. Not even the heaviest snowfall in decades could dampen my spirits! My mission; to visit the Imperial War Museum and the Tate Britain. Both were very informative and interesting, some useful research for some of my college work and fulfilling in a personal sense. (I went to the Tate to see two paintings by Whistler, one of my favourite painters. I'll have to post why I like his work another time)






I also saw some of the infamous Atheist bus adverts and Tube cards! A small thing to see, but it made me smile no end! Quite how people find these shocking or offensive i do not know. I'm not the most impartial observer of these adverts but come on! Where's the offensive bit in the ads? they seem so friendly and lighthearted. More so when you compare it to the counter-adverts that have appeared asserting:


'The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God -Psalm 53:1'

Questioning the existence of deities and displaying some uplifting quotes is considered offensive (The atheist ads don't even say there is 'definitely' no God, it says 'probably'. It could be true or not, and it leaves room for discussion) but calling non-believers 'fools' is quite ok and not at all offensive. Hypocritical much?
I was annoyed that they put up those rather clunky counter-ad's, but that's what happens in a free society, you hear views contrary to your own. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from offense.

A witty riposte to Psalm 53.1 i've seen elsewhere, and sums up my attitude to Atheism, made me chuckle:

'The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God...But the wise man says it out loud'

Overall, quite an interesting and thought provoking trip!

Trick of the Mind

A quick post because i'm snowed under with project work at the mo, i'll write about them after i've actually finished them! But in the meanwhile i thought i'd post a link to a fascinating Richard Dawkin's interview with Derren Brown, two people I admire immensely.

Comment 18 below the video is pretty much exactly (apart from the religion bit, I'm not from a religious background at all) how I stumbled into skepticism and critical thinking:

'It was Derrens' book, that I assumed would be all about mental tricks and secrets, that actually started me on my trip out of religion. Exactly because it superficially didn't look like a book about scepticism, but about magic.In fact looking at his book now, it seems almost obviously engineered to teach scepticism of religion etc.From this book I read The God Delusion that was recommended in it and here I am now.'

Couldn't have said it better myself! Enjoy :)