For a week the Measurement Shop went mobile and settled down in Thomas Tallis school in South East London where the performers from tangled feet got together with the students from the school to generate, create and explore the idea of measurement in all it’s forms.
This combined mission was aimed at helping to establish The Measurement Shop, a pop up theatrical experiment by encouraging the school community to reflect on why measuring is so important in our daily lives and why some things are almost impossible to measure.
A short video of the week long residency can be found at the Tallistube Channel (or see it below).
Fiona getting costume measurements for Cells in Stratford. I haven’t included my pics because i was disappointed at the results since i was last measured in that way.
After being measured against Thai people, and their t shirts sizes I was glad to come back to the UK sizes and feel less of a giant only to find that I had indeed ‘grown’ in size.
The Japanese space programme screens candidates by using extreme origami. Potential astronauts have to make 1,000 paper cranes to see how they deal with pressure and monotony. (Mary Roach – “Packing for Mars”)
The highest score in Space Invaders(Arcade Style) is 55,160 by Donald Hayes (USA) on the 7 Jun 2003. (Guiness Book of Records, Gamers Guide)
The most popular lottery numbers in the UK Lotto are:
38,23,11,44,31,33 (lottery.co.uk)
The most expensive house in the world is Updown Court which is thought to be worth £70 Million. It is 25 miles outside London and is owned by multi-billionaire crown prince of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
(propertyinvestmentproject.co.uk)
The heaviest baby ever born was to Canadian Anna Bates in 1879. She gave birth to a boy weighing 23 pounds, 12 ounces and was 30 inches long. He died just 11 hours later. (Guinness Book Of Records)
5 cups of tea
read 3 plays
sent 23 emails
eaten 2 crumpets
spoken on the phone for 41 minutes
on 2 different calls
I have thought about death twice
I have out on 3 different outfits
I have gone to the toilet 5 times (= cups of tea!) AND
only done 4 things on my to-do list
Been thinking a lot about the idea of a Hope-o-meter – as suggested by John Nicholls at Thomas Tallis School. Really inspired to work out the formula of how we measure hope… can we make an equation which something along the lines of positive energy + good cup of tea x sun temperature + good nights sleep – danger – doubt = hope??
In 2008, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (5×1020 J) with 80 to 90 percent derived from the combustion of fossil fuels. This is equivalent to an average power consumption rate of 15 terawatts (1.504×1013 W). Not all of the world’s economies track their energy consumption with the same rigor, and the exact energy content of a barrel of oil or a ton of coal will vary with quality.
Most of the world’s energy resources are from the sun’s rays hitting earth. Some of that energy has been preserved as fossil energy, some is directly or indirectly usable; for example, via wind, hydro- or wave power. The term solar constant is the amount of incoming solar electromagnetic radiation per unit area, measured on the outer surface of Earth’s atmosphere, in a plane perpendicular to the rays.
The solar constant includes all types of solar radiation, not just visible light. It is measured by satellite to be roughly 1366 watts per square meter, though it fluctuates by about 6.9% during a year—from 1412 W m−2 in early January to 1321 W m−2 in early July, due to the Earth’s varying distance from the sun, and by a few parts per thousand from day to day. For the whole Earth, with a cross section of 127,400,000 km2, the total energy rate is 174 petawatts (1.740×1017 W), plus or minus 3.5%. This value is the total rate of solar energy received by the planet; about half, 89 PW, reaches the Earth’s surface.
The estimates of remaining non-renewable worldwide energy resources vary, with the remaining fossil fuels totaling an estimated 0.4 YJ (1 YJ = 1024J) and the available nuclear fuel such as uranium exceeding 2.5 YJ. Fossil fuels range from 0.6-3 YJ if estimates of reserves of methane clathrates are accurate and become technically extractable.
Mostly thanks to the Sun, the world also has a renewable usable energy flux that exceeds 120 PW (8,000 times 2004 total usage), or 3.8 YJ/yr, dwarfing all non-renewable resources.
The term “slum,” probably originating from an old English or German word meaning a poorly drained or muddy place, was applied to housing in the early Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom before the railways were in place, when canals transported heavy goods along the length and breadth of the country. During Britain’s rapid industrialization, most factories were built beside canals, the main channel for transporting coal for their steam engines and other inputs of production.
Poor workers, migrating to cities for factory jobs, could ill aff ord to walk long distances to and from their places of work. Before electric trams, other forms of transport were expensive. So workers settled close to factories. Cheap housing grew around these factories in low-lying, poorly drained areas. Housing was overcrowded.
Sanitation was inadequate and in most cases nonexistent. And air quality was poor, with soot and other pollutants. Sickness was commonplace. Diarrhea, typhus, respiratory diseases, measles, and scarlet fever cut the life expectancy of those born in cities by 12 years compared with those born in rural areas. The growing public health hazards in Britain’s urban slums exacted a terrible health toll that eventually reached out beyond the working class, finally motivating strong political action. But rather than attempting to stop more workers from coming, or clearing out these areas of disease and poverty, the government in the 1870s passed legislation for strict building regulations, prescribing the dimensions of streets and houses, and making it mandatory that all dwellings be connected to newly built sewerage systems. Major municipal investments in water works, sewage facilities, and public health dramatically reduced mortality in Britain’s cities between 1874 and 1907.
Despite atrocious and filthy conditions, millions of migrants keep leaving rural areas for the teeming economic opportunity off ered in the cities of poor and middle-income countries. Even though health hazards and mortality rates are far worse in the shanties around many cities in Africa, people there are trading, working, and sending large sums of money home.
The challenge facing policy makers today is similar to that faced by the Victorians in London: how to nurture these agglomerations with functional land markets, better transport, and public health infrastructure to capture the benefi ts of economic growth.
Sources: Satterthwaite and others 2007; Crafts 2008; The Economist 2007a.
Christoph Rehage decided in 2007 to walk from Beijing to Germany.
Going on foot for 4500 km he didn’t make it to Germany but stopped a little short of his target, making it passed the Gobi Desert before deciding to stop the journey for now.
He did, however, manage to have some great experiences on the way and blogged about them on his website (The Longest Way ).
He also posted up an inspirational video of his journey which can be seen below and shows how he changed as the journey went on.
More than 12 billion years of cosmic history are shown in this panoramic, full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly.
This image was taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
The image reveals galaxy shapes that appear increasingly chaotic at each earlier epoch, as galaxies grew through accretion, collisions, and mergers. The galaxies range from the mature spirals and ellipticals in the foreground, to smaller, fainter, irregularly shaped galaxies, most of which are farther away, and therefore existed farther back in time. These smaller galaxies are considered the building blocks of the larger galaxies we see today.
The image shows a rich tapestry of 7,500 galaxies stretching back through most of the universe’s history. The closest galaxies seen in the foreground emitted their observed light about 1 billion years ago. The farthest galaxies, a few of the very faint red specks, are seen as they appeared more than 13 billion years ago, or roughly 650 million years after the Big Bang. This mosaic spans a slice of space that is equal to about a third of the diameter of the full Moon (10 arc minutes).
The new Hubble view highlights a wide variety of stages in the galaxy assembly process. Ultraviolet light taken by WFC3 shows the blue glow of hot, young stars in galaxies teeming with star birth. The orange light reveals the final buildup of massive galaxies about 8 to 10 billion years ago. The near-infrared light displays the red glow of very distant galaxies — in a few cases as far as 12 billion to 13 billion light-years away-whose light has been stretched, like a toy Slinky, from ultraviolet light to longer — wavelength infrared light due to the expansion of the universe.
In this ambitious use of Hubble’s observing time, astronomers used 100 Hubble orbits to make the ACS optical observations of this slice of the GOODS field and 104 orbits to make the WFC3 ultraviolet and near-infrared exposures. This set of unique new Hubble observations reveals galaxies to about 27th magnitude in brightness.
The International System of Units (SI) defines seven base units for a set of physical quantities of measure, or dimensions, that are used to define all other SI units, known as SI derived units.
The set of SI basic units consists of the metre, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela, which are the units for length, mass, time, electrical current, temperature, quantity of substance, and luminous intensity, respectively.
The SI base quantities of measure form a set of linearly independent dimensions as required by dimensional analysis commonly employed in science and technology. However, in a given realization of these units they may well be interdependent, i.e., defined in terms of each other.
The names of all SI units are written in lowercase characters (e.g., meter, symbol: m), while the symbols of units named after persons are written with an initial capital letter (e.g., ampere, symbol: A).
The Measurement Shop is tangled feet’s latest interactive performance, currently in development.
Our vision is to create a durational piece of performance that can happen in an empty shop anywhere in the UK, which will be free and open for the public to come in and creatively discuss how we measure things, and which will respond afresh to each new environment.
Read more by clicking About on the top menu.
