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Whitby harbour

Ode to Yorkshire

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YORKSHIRE – IT’S GRADELY!

Whitby harbour

A guest blogpost from Anne Hayto, folk music enthusiast and co-founder & Secretary of the Aylestone Meadows Appreciation Society

When planning holidays, as a Yorkshire lass born and bred, my thoughts usually turn northwards and this year it was an August week in Whitby, mingling with the scarily dense crowds of people who obviously had the same idea as me. What is it that brings people back time and again to the lands of their birth and childhood? I grew up in Wakefield, once part of the West Riding, but I left there in my early twenties to seek a life away from ‘the dark satanic mills’. I’ve spent most of the rest of that life wishing I had returned, but of course, the mills are now apartments and the coal mines which surrounded my home town are no more. I have remnants of family still in Wakefield, but most of them are gone now. Yet still I return even though I’m a stranger in the old town.Continue reading full article…

flame rising from Bunsen burner

Robert Bunsen – his burner and its impact on the gas industry

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flame rising from Bunsen burner

A Bunsen burner

Article by Dr Fred Starr PhD, FIMMM, FIE, MIMechE, CEng

When thinking of key German Scientists, I recollect our Chemistry Lab, at my school in Stockton-on-Tees, where adorning the polished benches, was, in a sense, the greatest of all scientific devices, a set of Bunsen burners. Artifact of every Mad Scientist movie. The first real job for our aged, silvery haired, and distinguished Chemistry master, Mr Dee, was to show us how this amazing device worked. When the slider was closed, flame was luminous and wafted around in a lazy manner. True magic came with the opening of the slider, when the burner was noisier, and although now a transparent blue, was obviously hotter. “Never allow the flame to light back” he proclaimed. “The gas that’s produced will kill you!”
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Home office or work from home?

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Thoughts on working from home and the term ‘home office’, by HE Translations director Herbert Eppel

Like many language service providers, I have been working from home for many years now, as described in the Leicester Mercury article from 2009 under the heading “Home work – we love it!”, which is available for your delectation here. Although the article didn’t foresee corona, it could perhaps be regarded as rather prescient in that it described a growing trend towards home working and envisaged a future in which this could become the norm, rather than an exception.

During the corona pandemic the term Homeoffice (alternative spelling: Home-Office) found its way into the standard German Duden dictionary – see here. Intriguingly, and perhaps mildly entertainingly, when Germans say or write Homeoffice, more often than not they refer to the activity (e.g. “ich mache Homeoffice“, literally translated as “I am doing home office” but indicating “I am presently working from home”), rather than a physical space.

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Person staring into distance on beach

Naming that indescribable ache to be somewhere else: Fernweh in days of lockdown

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magical misty seascape

Dreaming of faraway lands

Many of those locked away in long days of lockdown feel an indescribable ache to be someplace else, not just anywhere, somewhere nice and new and interesting. The German language already has a precise word for that aching far away feeling, and the German word has lately been been filling a void in the English language: Fernweh.

Fernweh isn’t just a case of “Get me out of here” or “Beam me up Scotty” or a desire to be nowhere at all, it’s a longing for faraway places that erase the ache and relieve the longing, and so the word is used in German travel adverts and even printed prominently on brands of activity clothing.Continue reading full article…

Fred Widmanstatten pattern

Widmanstatten meteorites

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Article by Dr Fred Starr PhD, FIMMM, FIE, MIMechE, CEng

In an earlier posting I mentioned the barely explicable Widmanstatten structure, seen in the iron-nickel Marburg meteorite, which was found by local people as result of Alfred Wegener offering a reward. Although a good deal is known about the Widmanstatten pattern or structure, I want to explain, why, in my view, there are some unanswered questions.

Fred Widmanstatten pattern

Etched section from part of a meteorite discovered near Muonionalusta, northern Sweden

To see the Widmanstatten structure one must take a slice from the meteorite, grind and polish the surface so it gleams like a mirror, and then gently etch it using a weak solution of nitric acid, dissolved in alcohol. The underlying structure is then visible to the naked eye. It has the appearance of a pattern consisting of fine strips of paper laid on top of one another. Sometimes the strips are at right angles. Other times they can be at 30° or 60°.

The German Professor, Fritz Heide, published the “Kleine Meteoritenkunde” in 1934, one of the first books on meteorites. It was subsequently brought up to date by Frank Wlotzka and translated into English in 1994. Although missing more recent accounts of meteor phenomena, and in situ investigations of the asteroids and planets, it remains one of the standard works on the subject. Nevertheless, this book, and what I have read on the internet, doesn’t really tell us where Widmanstatten meteorites come from. Heide and Wlotzka were more interested in the stony meteorites, that are much more common.Continue reading full article…

Alfred Wegener: Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane, 1929

Alfred Wegener: author of the theory of Continental Drift

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Article by Dr Fred Starr PhD, FIMMM, FIE, MIMechE, CEng

It was just a mention from our Welsh Geography master, in one of the better schools of Stockton-on-Tees, where, back in the 1950s, I first heard of what is now loosely called Continental Drift. It was also from this teacher that I learnt that there was a paper called the “Manchester Guardian”. The only paper you can trust, he affirmed. Since 1961, under its new name, “The Guardian” I have been buying this left wing rag ever since. His purchasing of the Guardian and his espousal of what was then a somewhat weird account of Earth’s geological history, suggests that my Geography master was in a small but thinking minority. He was also against nuclear power, when the rest of Britain was all for it!

It was years afterwards, when I took up a casual interest in geology and fossil collecting that I learnt that it was the German, Alfred Wegener who was behind the idea of Continental Drift. But learning about the geology of Britain, I was struck by the fact that that hundreds of millions of years ago this country was covered by deserts. If it was that hot, at 55 degrees north, what was it like at the equator, I wondered? Literally boiling hot??? Continental drift would explain it all, but why didn’t died in the wool, professional geologists ask such an obvious question, instead of rejecting the theory.

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