New Triops and National Flour

Late Saturday evening, shining a light into the aquarium revealed a tiny motile organism, still less than 1mm long. Sunday morning found at least three of these small organisms in the tank. At present it is still impossible to establish whether these are truly Triops but my hopes have been raised.

Mrs Thomas has been busy baking oat biscuits today and as we perused the collection of wartime recipes, in "We'll eat again" compiled by Marguerite Patten (ISBN9780600325246), we came across mention of "National Flour". Intrigued, I was tempted into a serious online search to establish the exact nature of the flour.

Basically, National Flour was a less refined flour that still contained wheatgerm. It was promoted on health grounds by the then Ministry of Food in the UK, between the years of 1942 to 1956, when it was discontinued. 

During my search, I also found that the colonial government of Kenya had in turn promoted a National Flour, though this comprised a mixture of 70% wheat flour and 30% maize flour. Apparently this made baking bread much more difficult, until an enterprising baker found that adding some oil to the bread dough dramatically restored the quality of baked loaves. The story is recounted in Madatally Manji, “Memoirs of a biscuit baron”.

The gathered information has now been added under "National Flour" to the Wikipedia page on Wheat Flour.

2012 gradually accelerating, New ideas and opportunities

At last, the winter inertia is gradually diminishing. This was prompted in part by an unexpected invitation from Germany to visit for exploratory talks. This came totally out of the blue and was due to the host remembering me from a 2006 event.

With the book "A View from the Lodge" now printed and Mr James the author actively pursuing sales, attention turns to "Dark Seeds 3AM" by Mrs Lowry which is close to completion, following talks with the cover photographer and designer of Perfect Yellow.

A message left on the New Scientist group of LinkedIn requested mentors for US High School science projects. One of these was in the area of molecular biology, an area in which I have considerable experience. Contact with the student resulted in a favourable response and i now await the project initiation.

A casual internet search on certain technology matters revealed a dramatic change in accessibility and cost-effectiveness in certain areas. This has led to the exploration of a new venture which I am researching further assiduously.

Sadly, Hermione Triops is now deceased. Triops, like all arthropods, grow by repeated shedding of old skin and expanding before the new skin hardens. Hermione had a small amount of old skin was not shed, around her tail after one moult. The subsequent moult proved laborious because the old remnant made it impossible to fully shed the next skin. I did attempt microsurgery which did remove most of the old shell, but the tail was now so constricted that food waste could not be ejected and after two days, Hermione passed away.

Sad though this incident is, the different forums on the internet suggest that moults are a known crisis point, leading to premature death.

I have set up a new hatch of Triops two days ago but have yet to see any sign of life.

The headlines are currently dominated by the holing and capsizing of an Italian cruise ship, the impugned conduct of the captain during the emergency and the continued search for the missing passengers, numbering 20 or so.

Skype conversations and annotating stained glass photos.

Gradually getting back into the routine of work, with a promising Skype conversation as well as the usual chats with Mr Heker as we drafted a new communication text together for his company.

Placed copies of both the Stereomicroscopy book by Mr Woolnough and the “A View from the Lodge” by Mr James as for sale on Amazon. This time I was offering to sell worldwide.

I also quickly generated German pages for the front and end of the Flash game and uploaded that as a separate entity.

Hermione the Triops has a carapace now around 1cm long, demonstrating the tremendous growth of this species. Spent a large part of the evening beginning to collect annotations and information on the stained glass windows of Worcester Cathedral. Began with the seven East cloister aisle windows. This has introduced me to the Saxon Kings and the gradual penetration of Christianity into the British Isles. 

Eve Arnold, photographer, died at 99. Spent some time browsing her pictures online. Rather than studio work, she appeared to photograph on location or behind the scenes at studios. The one that really struck me was a picture taken during the US integration crisis. It shows two girls, one black, one white, at an integration party eyeing each other with spontaneous smiles.

Start of Working year and finishing game design

It was a slightly later start to the first working day of the year. It started well with a call from Mr Straus for design task. Starting to work back through the e-mails, there was an unusual one from Germany, responding to my Christmas greetings and asking for a meeting out of the blue.

Not being able to find out much from a quick internet search, I replied suggesting the individual call me for a chat for futher information. This they duly did and it turned out that we had met briefly back in 2006 at the BIK business exhibition in Germany, where I had assisted my sister.

I had stated at the time that I was happy to meet up with people for idea exchanges if my visit costs were covered. My caller was offering just that. There also appeared to be synergies with another of my contacts in NRW and I put them in touch with each other.

In the evening, I could not resist working to finish the flash game that I had begun to design. Completed as “Your Business Startup”, I eventually published it on the StencylWork site, see http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/10438 and have a play! What was most amazing was that within an hour there had been over 40 clicks onto the site.

Triops, sunspots, Snowdrops and Stencyl game design

A colder but sunny day led to the cheap refractor telescope being dusted off to project the sun onto the ceiling at around 11 am this morning. One bold and four fainter sunspots were clearly visible and Mrs Thomas attempted to photograph the image on my behalf – pictures still to be uploaded. Seeing the magnified solar globe at about 30cm diameter on the ceiling also brought home the Earth's rotation as the disc could be seen visibly creeping along at a couple of millimetres per second.

Hermione, the Triops seemed a bit slower today when she suddenly turned on her back and started twitching. I dashed to get a camera but by my return she had just moulted, leaving her ghost of a shell behind – collected for microscopic observation. Within an hour, Hermione was actively feeding again, now another millimetre or so larger.

It was such a lovely day and we were in dire need of exercise after all the Christmas feasting, that we drove to Anglesey Abbey for a walk. We took the longer path leading to the wildlife trail. As we were on the return part of the walk we came onto the open lawns where snowdrops were already emerging under the scattered trees. Diverting along the Winter Garden walk, we saw more snowdrops at various stages of emergence and flowering. They had been beaten to it by the dwarf blue Irises that were fully open. Winter cherries were in bloom and several other trees were also flowering.

Late afternoon and evening, I continued with the design of the flash based game that I had started using StencylWorks. I designed a few additional simple characters or actors and ascribed a variety of properties to them. I aimed to have some that would kill my main actor on contact, a number that my character could stomp on and also two items that could be “collected”. Wasted some time trying to get an active scoring system from the available StencylForge library but could not get them to work properly. The game will have to do without scores for the moment.. All characters and functions set, The remaining time was spent designing the maze and location of the different characters that would interact with my character. More work to be done yet.

First battles with Stencyl

The first day of the year was heralded in by firework displays occuring on the hour in a sweep from the first dateline in the Pacific until reaching us here in the UK. Judging from an earlier walk, many could not wait until the allotted hour of midnight, with fireworks going off sporadically in and around Milton and Cambridge. Still, not a patch yet on the explosive mayhem seen in Germany on “Sylvester”.

We took the day gently and I resumed battle with Stencyl – a freely available flash game design software I had heard about on the BBC's Click program. The demonstration/tutorial of designing a simple walking and jumping flash game seemed straightforward enough.

Encouraged, I designed some simple PNG versions of a walking and jumping figure plus an enemy in CorelDraw and then attempted to import them into a new program. What I had not realised, was that for each new game, you had to access a resource that gave you the basic functions. Also, whenever features were changed within the program you were designing, you needed to update the game regularly. My first over ambitious attempt therefore failed in a combination of malfunctioning downloaded elements and lack of regular updating.

Going back to using one of the “kits” with most functionality included finally lead to the first signs of success. By the end of the afternoon, I was more confident of beginning to start a simple game that worked.

This was only the start, and I have to see whether I want to persist.

My Triops is now about 4mm long at the carapace and because of the potential hermaphrodite or even parthenogenic nature has been named “Hermione”.