Why can't a bicycle stand up on its own?

... because it's too tired!

When I think of my bicycle, the word that comes to mind is ‘freedom’.

I enjoyed a childhood of being able to go to school and out into town without relying on my parents driving me everywhere, or train schedules dictating when ‘home time’ was. The other major plus of my bicycle was speed. It halved the journey time for walking into town, and even when I was unfortunate enough to have to walk, I found myself drifting into the cycle lane dreaming of being on my bike (much to the annoyance of actual cyclists). 

It was interesting to watch ‘Thoroughly Modern: The Bicycle’. In the same way that I think of a bike as freeing, so it was for the Edwardians. The bicycle became available to everyone, from the working class to the affluent middle class. Sitting upright on the two-wheeled contraption allowed the rider to see the world, as I do at home as I ride standing up to look over walls and other obstacles! The countryside began to see more visitors and cycling groups became loyal to their favourite pub. The bicycles design had come a long way from the Penny-farthing, thank goodness too because I struggle on bikes with thin handlebars, let alone bikes with one massive wheel!

 Bicycles are astounding too just purely looking at the ways they can be used. Commuters from around the world now choose to cycle to work and beat the morning traffic, students make their way to school, postmen do their local round, athletes race on the roads in various global tours, and recreational riders and professionals go off-road to get the adrenalin going! 

Stealing someone's coffee is called 'mugging'

I'm not a fan of coffee. Don't get me wrong, I see that it has potential as a social drink, as a stimulant, as a thing to be analysed and discussed, yet for me the taste and temperature will always be off putting. Unlike the seventeenth century European, I, as a twenty-first century European, do not require coffee as an uncontaminated drink. For those Early Modern Europeans, coffee was regarded as the antithesis of alcohol - I would be interested to ask the question today of which beverage people could choose if they could only have one: beer or coffee?

As I sit typing at my desk in the Middle East, it is appropriate to note that coffee originated in the Arab world. Coffee had reached Mecca and Cairo by 1510 and became a social drink, sold in the markets and offered in dedicated coffee houses, the Starbucks of the times, and respectable people could come together in these places. Interestingly, religious law found coffee hard to place - it wasn't alcohol, but it did kind of intoxicate a person - there was even a big meeting of religious leaders in 1511, Mecca, to try to answer the question, (based upon the Arab's modern love of coffee, I guess the answer was that coffee was 'legal').

Continuing from their Arab roots, coffee houses triumphed in seventeenth century London and continue to triumph around most of the world. In my home city alone, there is a Starbucks, Cafe Nero, Cafe Rouge, Boston Tea Party, Coffee Mocha, Carwardine's, Bird and Carter... each of which is less than 100m away from the other... in many cases less than 20m! Coffee has become part of a greater social culture - for businessmen and women, for mums, for students, for tourists, and many more.

In Ethiopia, where I visited last week for Eid, they have a coffee ceremony, taking time to roast the beans and then pour out the coffee in prearranged porcelain cups. The ceremony gives the participants three cups of coffee each. Though coffee is a stimulant that speeds up life, I feel that this ceremony is a nice way of slowing life and allow one to ponder...

Ponder things like, "How fast can a coffee powered car go?"

Through the looking glass

In physics, the term glass refers to a solid formed by rapid melt quenching.

In other sciences, the term glass refers to every solid that possesses a non-crystalline structure and that exhibits a glass transition when heated towards the liquid state. 

In everyday use, the term glass refers to a material composed of silica, sodium oxide and lime, which is commonly used to make windows and vessels. (Thank you to Wikipedia for those...)

This is all sounds quite scientific. Appropriately so, since, without glass, science would not be the same beast that it is today. 

Glass, with its glorious transparency, mouldability and relative toughness, has made it an essential material for science. Microscopes using light and magnifying glasses have allowed us to explore a microscopic world that was previously hidden from man's gaze. Similarly, the ability to measure liquids in a vessel was made a lot easier when beakers and measuring cylinders were created from glass. These vessels could also be heated and moved without losing their shape, all whilst still being able to observe the reactions that were happening. Prisms refracted light and revealed the colours of the rainbow from a single beam of white light.

Glass was possibly the first time a transparent, safe barrier could be put between an observer and subject, with shaping enhancing the viewing e.g. magnifying.

The potential for the creation of a diverse range of glass products is the reason why glass was and is still valued. Yet, before the advent of scientific instruments, glass was being used as a substitute material for the fashioning of established tools. Obsidian, naturally occurring volcanic glass, was used by Stone Age societies for sharp cutting tools, perhaps due to it being easier to craft and fulfilling the cutting purpose better than rock. Not just for pure practical use, glass jewellery, beads and artworks are examples of the aesthetic beauty that can be attributed to glass products too.