A350 XWB First Flight

Just a quick post letting you all know that the first flight of the Airbus A350 XWB is scheduled for Friday 14th June 2013 at 10:00 am local time in Toulouse, France.

The A350 looks to be a very promising new aircraft and it featured heavily in my Extended Project which can be found in my earlier post Efficient Flight. I am definitely looking forward to seeing videos of the first flight. For more information have a look at the A350 Website.

The Perfect Words

Seen as I haven’t done one yet I thought that I would do a post on music. Anyone that knows me well will know that music is a huge part of my life. Not necessarily playing music as I don’t get the chance to play too much anymore, but occasionally it’s nice to sit on my Cajon for half an hour and tap along to something on iTunes or YouTube. Mainly what I enjoy is listening to music and using it to understand or manipulate how I’m feeling. 

As a start I shall let you know about my taste in music. Favourite artist or band? Not a clue. It’s one of those things that very much depends on my mood, in my favourites there is everything from reggae to rock and country to classical (admittedly the amount of classical is limited but here is some there none the less). Some of my more favoured Artists/Bands are; Newton Faulkner, The Killers, The Who, AC/DC, Bastille, The Weatherfolk, Train, Fall Out Boy, The All American Rejects, Rascal Flatts, Royal Republic, Owl City, Ansell Brown, John Mayer, Brad Paisley. 

That’s just a short list of people I like, but to me music is a lot more than just enjoying the sound, it’s much more about the connection I make with the song or music which is why my preferred listening varies so much. Of course I do like some things simply for how they sound, but depending on my mood or how I want to feel there are many different things that I like sometimes and yet immediately skip at other times. One song can make you feel incredibly sad one day and yet the day after it can fill you with joy or make you thinks about things. I find it amazing how we can all interpret music differently and how songs can mean so many things to so many people.

Personally, I find music is a great way to express or understand my emotions, or a good way to overpower them (usually involving rock music played rather loudly). An example of expressing emotion or a thought through music is a book that has been sat on top of my bongos and was only an arm’s reach away. (Now you may be questioning why I am picking up a book in order to write about music but just go with it...) This book was given to me by my girlfriend; clearly she loves me seen as it’s made from recycled elephant poo. Her message on the front page makes slightly more sense for the choice of notebook, but it isn’t the notebook that’s important, it’s what’s written inside it. I’ll put a few pictures below of what’s inside, but the general idea was that I sent her a song each day and she sent me a quote. This was a way by which we could both express how we felt without having to find our own words to explain, and it also gave us a reason to say something more than the norm.

I called the post ‘The Perfect Words’ which is a song quote that I was certain should be in the book but isn’t, it’s from the song ‘Signal Fire’ by Snow Patrol, the words mean a lot to me but I’ll let you make your own mind up. It seemed appropriate as a title as I’m sure what I’ve written probably isn’t the best way of saying things, but also because it’s not difficult to find a song that has the perfect words to explain how you feel.

I’m going to leave this post there and let you browse through the pictures and listen to any of the mentioned music as you please, I’m sure you’ll probably interpret some of it differently to how I do, or you’ll have a story that relates to one of the songs, but hey... that’s music. Thanks for reading, please feel free to comment, share and subscribe.

If you need a link to any of the music then give me a shout and I shall try to find one.

Efficient Flight

As revision has drained most of the creativity and inspiration from me I decide to write a post on my previously mentioned extended project.

The main reason that I decided to undertake an extended project was to be able to put it in my personal statement for university. For now we’ll assume it did well in its primary purpose as I got 5 offers. As a secondary reason for writing it, I thought it might be quite nice to research and write about something that I am actually interested in. The project definitely did well in this respect as I enjoyed finding out about what’s going on in the world of aviation, but more on the interesting stuff in a second. It also did well at keeping me entertained on many train journeys all over the country, I haven’t a clue what I would have done instead.

If you do wish to read the whole project or at least glance through it then you can find it at

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28582440/EPQ-Essay%20Final.docx

If you don’t wish to bore yourself with my slightly more formal writing then I shall try to give a more entertaining overview here.
Have you ever looked up at a flock a birds flying in formation? Ever thought it’s pretty cool? (Maybe you’re not as weird me if you answered no to the second.) Anyway, if you now have the iconic image of geese flying in a V formation in your head...good. Now swap the geese for passenger airliners and tell me that that as an idea isn’t cool. It gets even better when you learn that all the aircraft in the formation would experience an increase in efficiency, even the front one.

If that’s not interesting enough for you, then how does flying at 10 times the speed of sound on the edge of space sound? This would be one of the most efficient ways to fly and would cut journey times down dramatically.

Flying quickly isn’t the only cool thing in the future; taking off quickly using catapult launchers like those on aircraft carriers is also in the realms of possibility. Okay, so maybe they wouldn’t be quite so intense, but assisted takeoffs and landings are looking to be the future of air travel. They’ll save fuel and allow larger aircraft to use smaller, city based airports.

Finally, meet the aircraft of the future; blended wings, supersonic speeds and assisted takeoffs.

As always please like, comment, share and subscribe (It’s nice to know people are reading).

Eyes Open

For a post that’s going to be about feeling a moment it hasn’t started well if we consider that ECG was a month ago and it’s been nearly two weeks since I went out with the camera. Anyway, I shall press on regardless...

This post starts with the picture below that I noticed on Facebook the other day.

Now that’s not entirely relevant to what I wanted to say, but it reminded me of a thought that I had one of the days at ECG back in the Easter holiday. I’m guessing very few people reading this know what ECG is. So, in short, ECG stands for Equipping, Calling, Going. It is a Christian conference that has been held in ‘Sunny’ (and it was this year, though the sea was still rather chilly) Scarborough for the last couple of years and Llandudno before that.

The thought that I had was along the lines of “How can a God love something so small?” By something, I mean me... A warning at this point, if you have low self esteem you may want to skip this bit. ...What I was pondering at the time was why would a God care about me, I’m a comparatively tiny spec on a comparatively tiny planet, next to a tiny star which is one of billions in a galaxy that is unimaginably small when you attempt to think about the size of the universe.

I’m not going to pretend to have an answer at this point, but I do have a suggestion. Sit back and relax for a minute, think of all the good things that have happened in the last few days, weeks or months. Now think of the series of different circumstances that led up to that. If you’re struggling then take a simple task like making a cup of coffee, first off you’re probably in a house, there’s a readily available water supply when you turn on the tap, you have a wonderful invention for heating water which does amazing things when you flick a switch, it uses electricity that’s created a number of miles away and then you mix the water it heats with coffee created half the world away. When you start to think about making a cup of coffee like that then it starts to put some things into perspective.

I took the camera to school with me a couple of weeks ago, thinking that I would take advantage of the bit of sunshine that we had. I discovered something on the way home and I thought it was fairly intriguing, with one eye shut I could see more than with both eyes open. I’ve put some of the photos below and you will probably notice that most of them are taken quite close to the subjects. Looking closely at things smaller than I am really opened up my mind, and seeing the colours of spring filled me with joy. I only mention the photos because without staring into the viewfinder on the camera then I wouldn’t have seen anywhere near as much as I did that day, I would have just walked home looking mainly at my feet. 

So there we go, one eye closed means two eyes opened.

If you wish to ask me about anything then please feel free to leave a comment.

Folding @ Home

What is folding at home?

I’m guessing that most of you don’t know about Folding at Home, what it is or what it does. Basically Folding at Home, or F@H for short, is a programme developed by scientists at Stanford University that you can run on your PC or Playstation 3; it runs in the background using up your spare computing power in order to fold proteins. If you want to know more about what that actually means then go and have a look at the Folding at Home website folding.stanford.edu

The Folding at Home website homepage

If you don’t want to read the complicated bit, Folding at Home simply calculates what proteins will do in certain circumstances. By doing this cures for Cancers, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s are being discovered. Are you wondering how your computer can manage all that yet? Well with over 150,000 computers folding worldwide the folding at home network is the largest distributed supercomputer in the world. Distributed computing is simply the distribution of work units to someone that completes the calculations for that unit and then sends the result back so they can be compiled with other results in order to discover the above cures.

Why fold?

I fold because it makes me feel a bit better when watching comic relief and all the adverts for charities that are on TV. Seen as I don’t have the money to give to charities, folding is an easy way to help out and I don’t really have to do much in order to do it. I know my reasons are fairly simple but from reading forums I know that many people fold as they (or people they know) have been affected by one of the issues that F@H sets out to solve. An excellent feature that has been introduced to the programme allows you to choose what sort of work units you fold, for example you could only fold Alzheimer’s work units, though you can just fold any unit given to you. Some people just have F@H running in the background like I do, but others have dedicated systems running 24/7.

Folding at Home Viewer

How to fold?

So hopefully you’re interested in making a difference and folding. If you want to get involved then head over to folding.stanford.edu and follow the instructions (it’s really not difficult), you don’t even have to open the programme up when you start your computer. I fold for team 98860 which is the Redline@OC3D team. OC3D is a reviewing website for computer parts, and in my opinion it’s one of the best out there. The team is currently 45^th in the world which is impressive when you compare it with the teams around it.

If you do start folding then just be aware that checking your stats is slightly addictive, whether it’s to see if your latest work unit has been added or seeing how you’re doing compared everyone else in the team. Stats can be found on the F@H website by clicking the link in the F@H client or a slightly better website in my opinion is http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_list.php?s=&t=98860&p=2 which creates graphs of everyone’s and every team’s stats. If you click on the link then you’ll find me about half way down the page under the user Hails13.

My folding stats

If you are interested in folding then click one of the links to the F@H website and I look forward to watching you fly past me in the team table. If you have any problems with setting it up then give me a shout and I’ll do my best to help.

Well I promised in my last post that the rest would be shorter, I lied... sorry. After the feedback that I’ve had so far it doesn’t look like many of you will mind though. Thanks for all the feedback and please feel free to continue liking, sharing and commenting on the blog.