Stand and Deliver!

“Context,” Richard Neville once informed me over the phone, “is everything.” It was back in 1994, before I even knew how email worked, let alone had an address. And I hadn’t googled him – had no idea how the internet worked – rather I’d found his number in the phone book and had been chasing him by phone and fax for an interview. “If I hadn’t returned your call, would you have continued to destroy rain forests to get in touch with me?” he’d asked when he finally phoned me back. I’ve no idea at which point during the ensuing interview he’d pointed out the necessity of context, to render a thing relevant.

But you know what? Apart from the quote itself – “context is everything” – Richard Neville has nothing to do with this blog post.Context and relevancy does, however.

Note the lovely image above. I saw the top of a page of the Daily Telegraph out the corner of my eye in the local café as I bought a coffee to take back to the office. And I couldn’t work out what the picture had to do with the headline.

Turns out to be nothing.

It’s just that, that’s exactly what Obama appears to be whispering into the woman’s ear: sweet nothings. Is she a prime examples of one of the things he’s getting ‘done’?

In the digital age, it seems we’ve forgotten how to construct a page of information so that it makes logical sense. Proximity between two elements suggests a relationship where there is none. Particularly when they are positioned next to each other – since we still read left-to-right, even if virtually every portable source of information requires that we scroll down.

Irrespective, it made me laugh.

"Sexy Pills for Women: Viagra Trials a Success". Meanwhile, in other news: page design not as simple as it seems.

Star BPM 37093 is now officially a girl’s bestest-estest. Friend. Evah. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has announced that this heavenly body, situated some fifty light years away as part of the constellation Centaurus, is in fact a mass of crystallised carbon. That is to say, BPM 37093 is now the biggest known diamond in the galaxy.

Scientists have renamed it ‘Lucy’ – after comedian Peter Cook’s daughter, of whom John Lennon’s son Julian painted a portrait, depicting her in the sky, with diamonds. Oh, the scientist would be citing the song that John Lennon wrote, inspired by that painting, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, located on the album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and long believed to be both tribute to and proof of Lennon’s experience with LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide). A substance, you may consider for just a moment, that may have also given rise to scientists believing there are huge gemstones in outer space. Perhaps Mars is a great big ruby, and Venus, a hunk of gold? (That’s just silly; everyone knows Venus and Mars are billiard balls!)

With an estimated diameter of 2500 miles (4000km), Lucy is thought to weigh around 10 billion trillion trillion carats – ie 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 carats – or some 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes, give-or-take. “You would need a jeweller’s loupe the size of the sun to grade this diamond,” said Travis Metcalfe, the astronomer from the Havard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the team that discovered the interstellar gem. “Imagine trying to construct one – you’d most likely fall on your lens grinding machine and make a spectacle of yourself,” he might have added, had he been a Groucho Marx fan.

The diamond, naturally, is mostly carbon, coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases. It was formed by the crystallisation of a white dwarf – which itself is the hot core that remains of a star after it has used up all of its fuel (like the embers of a fire, I guess, except, since they don’t crystallise, once the fuel runs out, they become solid, unburnt carbon – more like graphite rather than diamond.)

Turns out astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised for more than four decades, but the ability to determine if this was the case only became possible recently. The white dwarf radiates not only light, but also sound, ringing “like a gigantic pulsating gong”, apparently. (So that’s what the constellation Orion is doing – it’s not the hunter at all, but a huge J. Arthur Rank gong-ringer!)

By measuring the pulsations, scientists were able to study the interior of the white dwarf in the same way geologists study the earth’s interior by measuring the pulses of earthquakes with a seismograph.

“We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy’s largest diamond,” says Metcalfe.

This raises some important issues – like should the Seven Dwarfs sign up for those space flights that have now become available? “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s into space we go” for the biggest diamond so far located in the known universe must make better sense than chipping away in the diamond mine day-in, day-out. Maybe they can get Mitsubishi to sponsor their trip (because ‘Mitsubishi’ means ‘three diamonds’).

And, if scientists have only just determined that there’s a star made entirely of diamond after four decades of suspicion, how did Jane Taylor know that a star could be exactly “like a diamond, in the sky” when she wrote the lyrics to ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ back in 1806?

What about our own nearest star, the sun? Why have we been lumbered with a so-called ‘mass of incandescent gas’ when other solar systems appear to be sporting bling? Fear not. Look forward to our own sun becoming a white dwarf when it dies. How long will that take? Astronomers reckon about 5 billion years. And a couple of billion years later, the core should crystallise to form a giant diamond. Until then, would Sir be interested in some cubic zirconia just beyond Pluto?

Meanwhile, the biggest problem facing the massive diamond in our galaxy is making the most of it. How the hell are we supposed to mount it onto one of those rings of Saturn?