Oscar Wrigley

Is Oscar Wrigley a toddler Einstein? At the age of just over two years old, being accepted into Mensa seems to be quite an achievement.
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Oscar, just look at your blackboard and you'll see that it says E=MC². Oh dear. If you were so clever you'd know that the equation is actually E=mc²

You don't look so clever now, do you, Oscar Wrigley? Those BBC journalists you invited round to your house appear to have written a science cliché on your blackboard and failed to get it right, unless the MC stands for Maria Carey.

British Gas

One of the great cost cutting ideas of energy companies is to cut the cost of reading meters by not reading them. The electricity and gas meters hardly ever get read these days. A card through the door told me to read my own meter. So I could do it at my convenience online. Great. So I entered the URL and oh dear, this is what I got. Looks like they cut back on IT too.
--//--
Error 404--Not Found
From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:
10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Precious Slides

Precious memories fade and if they were on Kodacolor slides they become rosy memories. We just got a stack of commercially produced slides from various tourist destinations. They all appear to be Kodacolor. This one is copyright of Leicester Museums and is the AD 125 Jewry Wall. First is the raw scan that is pretty much what you would see if you projected it.

From blogpics

But all is not lost. It is possible to fix the colour and restore a reasonable colour balance.

From blogpics

Afgacolor also fades but tends to go the other way, the blue stays strong but green fades a bit and red a lot. The message is clear. If you have slides that you want to keep, NOW is the time to archive them to digital. Unless you were rich enough to shoot in Kodachrome then rest easy. Those images are supposed to last a very long time.
The next pair is a shabby copy of Campement de bohemiens, les roulottes by Vincent Van Gogh. Marked Cinemati Paris, Reproduction interdite. And indeed it should be forbidden as it is a cropped and out of focus duplication. The colour seems to have been wrong in the first place as it is impossible to correct. All the subtlety of the painting has been lost. Before:

From blogpics

After:

From blogpics

Better but still poor.

Stroud then and Now

The Fountain Inn in Slad road has had a long history and in the past thirsty cyclists graced the entrance. This is the Stonehouse Wheelers today.

From blogpics

And here is a serious bunch of Edwardians. Note how the old guys all have a cap with a metal badge and stand jauntily with one foot on a pedal ready to leap into action.

From Stroud and Stonehouse to Saul old photo tour

This was one of Wilfred Merrett's photos.

Tornado visits Stroud

From blogpics

Tornado 60163 at Toadsmoor making very light work of climbing up the Golden Valley. Tornado was making rapid progess up to the Sapperton tunnel. The safety valve blowing indicated that there was plenty of spare power.

It was a big treat seeing a brand new locomotive instead of the usual last century HSTs.