Tag Archives: Christmas

We are no one without other people

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Decorative imageIt is the Christmas holiday season when many of us will be exchanging seasonal greetings and expressions of goodwill with family and friends.  In the Ubuntu philosophy, a person is a person through other people.  Genuine value arises from our connections to other people.  Life is not about the individual but about friendship, community, respect and compassion.  These interactions are experienced by our consciousness and determine who we are – our identity [see ‘Reflecting on self’ on November 23rd 2022 or ‘Is there a real you or I?’ on March 6th, 2019].  It seems unlikely that a computer could experience them in the foreseeable future [see ‘Conversations about engineering over dinner and a haircut’ on February 16th 2022 or ‘When will you be replaced by a computer’ on November 20th, 2019] so switch off your laptops and mobile phones and enjoy life.   Happy holidays!

Image: people at Pier Head Liverpool enjoying the River of Light festival.

Christmas diamonds

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If you enjoyed a holiday dinner lit by candles then you might be interested to know that the majority of the light from the candle does not come from the combustion of the candle wax in the flame, but from the unburnt soot glowing in the intense heat of the flame.  The combustion process generates the heat and the blue colour in the centre of the flame. However, due to the lack of sufficient oxygen, the combustion of the candle wax is incomplete  and this produces particles of unburnt carbon.  The unburnt carbon forms soot or graphite, but also more exotic structures of carbon atoms, such as nano-diamonds.  The average candle has been estimated to produce about 1.5 million nano-diamonds per seconds, or maybe 10 billion nano-diamonds per Christmas dinner! Unfortunately, they are too small to see otherwise they would add a lot of sparkles to festive occasions.

The picture is an infrared image of a 1cm diameter candle.  About 2cm of the candle height extends from the bottom of the picture and the visible flame is about 2cm high.

Source:

Helen Czerski, Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life, London: Penguin Random House, 2016.