Relative left hand finger length an indicator of a masculine/feminine brain?

I remember learning about this in Psychology a few years ago, and I heard it again today on 'Child in our time'. There is a theory that if your left hand ring finger is longer than your left hand index finger, you will have a more masculine brain.

"Since the relative lengths of our fingers seem to stay fixed throughout our lives, they are robust markers of what our early life was like in the womb-fetal fossils, if you will. Take a close look at your own hands. Pay particular attention to your index and ring fingers. In women, the two fingers tend to be almost equal in length, as measured from the crease nearest the palm to the fingertip. In men, the ring finger tends to be much longer. The ratio of the lengths of the index finger to the ring finger is called the 2D:4D ratio, and low ratios are considered "masculine", high ratios "feminine"."

This is such a dodgy theory! Lol, you can read the New Scientist article here.

Hmm...
MyHand
Originally uploaded by kipperfrog.

Autumn & Wisley Gardens

Feeling the need for some photo opportunities on such a beautiful Autumn day, today we went over to Wisley Gardens, near Working. I only ever remember going there once before, and that was years ago with my friend, her Mum, and a group of foreign students from all over the world (her Mum taught English as a foreign language). What we actually did was go there for a picnic, and the idea was that each person brought some food from their own country, for everybody to try. I always thought that was such a good idea! I don't think you could get a more interesting assortment of food! Yum!

I was also reminded today, of my first year at uni when I was living in halls with lots of international students, including a couple of American girls. It was around this time of year that I went into the kitchen to find an enormous turkey sitting in the sink; I wasn't particularly surprised because in uni halls all sorts of strange things seem to turn up (particularly in York, I've heard.. boats?!). Anyway, it turned out that our Americans had decided to cook us all a proper Thanksgiving dinner! It was very sweet, they piled us all into the largest bedroom they could find in our block, with all our food, and special Thanksgiving bread (that was delicious -wish I could remember what it was called), and told us the story of Thanksgiving. Very nice and unexpected! =)

Anyway, I digress, Wisley gardens.. I always remembered the place as being very picturesque, and today we weren't disappointed. A selection of the photos are as follows, see the full stream here!

Slava's Snow Show @ The New Wimbledon Theatre..

is where we have been this evening! Seems to be a week for the theatre..

Here are a few pictures from the finale!

Stupid chavs

James and I went to Crawley last night for a bit of late night shopping, and ended up going over to the leisure park for some food. Just when we were heading back to the car, I felt a blow to the back of my head, I turned around a bit confused, and James was saying he felt something hit his shoulder, but we couldn't see anything suspicious. It was really wierd. And then the group of teenagers walking along next to us started apologising, which was even more confusing, because they didn't look like the sort of people to go around hitting people in the street. It turned out that they were running away from some chavs that they knew, who were pelting them with conkers, nice aim. I think they scarpered pretty quick when they realised what they'd done.

An evening (or sometimes an afternoon) with Bill Bryson

What a quality guy. We just got back from the Harlequin theatre in Redhill, where we saw Bill Bryson for an evening of book readings, anecdotes, and random slides. Today was the second day of his world tour, which started in High Wycombe yesterday.

So, after 8 years of living the American life in New Hampshire with his wife and kids, he is now back living in Norfolk, enjoying once more the eccentric British sense of humour, and our fondness for small pleasures such as cakes with jam and raisins, cold days in beach huts wearing anoraks, and nice cups of tea, "ooh lovely".

Apparently the move back to England was provoked, in part, by his neighbour Ted. Being brought up on a diet of puns and banter, Bill just couldn't resist winding this guy up. The entertainment value provided by these daily quips was increased tenfold by this poor guy's consternation; it just served to encourage Bill further. He would compliment Ted on the camoflaging he had created for his car, only to be informed "Oh no, Bill, it's not that at all, I'm taking this storm fall-down to the tip"; and he would reply to his questions, such as "Did you have a good flight? Who did you fly with?" with "Well, to be honest I wasn't introduced to many people of the flight..", you know, the way that you do. In the end, his wife actually had to ban him from talking to the guy because people were starting to think he was wierd. It seemed that despite living in an American idyll, the people just didn't get his jokes, so back to England they came.

He started off the evening by telling us how relunctantly the tour managers had agreed to an evening of book reading and questions, and how they had encouraged him to make the show more of an audio visual sensory experience. They suggested he perhaps should show some slides of America to break up the talking. So that is what he did, lol, quite literally. He had about 5 or 6 slides on a Powerpoint presentation showing childrens playground slides and helter-skelters from various places in America. Aha, very clever.

Anyway, he then went on to talk about his collection of amusing headline clippings that he had accumulated over the years. I'm desperately trying to remember one of the ones he told us now, but I can assure you they were funny. You know the sort of thing I mean, where a headline sounds perfectly fine one way you read it, but you look at it again, presumably after it has gone to print, and you realise the dreadful conotations of what you've written! He had a great transatlantic assortment of those.

What else..

He finished off with a Q&A section, where I think the best answer he gave was in response to what he had done so far as chancellor of Durham uni. He said that actually, he had done very little except shake peoples hands on graduation day, and that a chancellor is a little like a bidet (thanks for correction bigblue!): nobody knows what it is for, but everyone is glad to have one. Lol.


Check out my signed book! =) Signed for me personally after the show, wow!

My Little Klingon

Next up is my version of the custom MLP that started the whole thing off..

Bill Bryson

We're just off for "An evening with.." Bill Bryson =)

9 baby pandas!

Aww.. these things are so cute!

Virgin Galactic

I found this promotional video for Richard Branson's new commercial space travel enterprise, Virgin Galactic! Some excellent footage of the prototype spaceship and mothership on there.. take a look!

Children of Men

So this evening we decided to go over to Croydon to see 'Children of Men' at the cinema, the screen adaptation of the 1993 book by P.D.James. What an amazing, although entirely traumatic, film.

Barnet fayre..

So today I've been up to Barnet, the home of Friends Reunited, where the company originated in someone's back bedroom six years ago. Turned up at the restaurant with my colleague, with a crate of files to hand out to people, much to the horror of the poor girl working there! She looked completely horrified and dismayed at the prospect of a team meeting happening in her restaurant with no prior booking.. but after her initial reflex denial reaction, "Noo, but you can't..!", she sort of settled in to the idea, and offered to get us some drinks. Lol it was interesting to finally meet all the people I have been working with for the last month, and trying to guess who was who from their voices. We normally only have contact over MSN messenger, or over the phone for training due to our geographical diversity: it is a surreal working environment to not even know how old your colleagues are, or what they look like.

Due to box carryage on my boss' part, I managed to hitch a ride all the way there and back in a taxi, a full jouney time of about 4 hours in London traffic, but a really excellent opportunity for sight seeing! We went past the Millennium Dome, over the Dartford Crossing, past Bluewater, saw all the North London mansions, and all sorts of views of London that you normally miss on the train. With free pizza thrown in to the bargain, I would say all in all, it was not bad for a day at work.

Japanese word of the day IV

Oyasumi nasai --------------> Goodnight

Descended from Hugenots

I've been doing a little research into family history recently, what with my new full membership of Genes Reunited -courtesy of my job, and some amazing new family trees that have come into our posession from my Dad's uncle. Through both of these, we have now managed to trace one branch of our family all the way back to Agen in France, 1640. It appears that our ancesters were amongst the 50,000 Huguenots that fled France for London in c16th, establishing a community in Bethnal Green, and Spitalfields.

How interesting! I can see how addictive this can become.. Really, you would not believe the sheer number of people that are descended from those two people from Agen, I think our family is now populating most of London, lol.

Beautiful sunset

... over Hinchley Wood this evening

Electric toothbrush

Now this is a random question.. but have you ever brushed your teeth with an electric toothbrush whilst looking at a digital clock? Well I don't usually, but I noticed this yesterday when I walked out of the bathroom to escape the dandy-long-legs..

The display of the digital clock looked as though it has really bad interference.. I wondered what had happened to it, went over to have a look and took the toothbrush out of my mouth, only to discover it had stopped. I never realised how much an electric toothbrush actually vibrates your skull! It was only then I noticed when looking around at other things how blurry they were too. Wierd.

The Stig

I just inadvertantly found out who 'The stig' is! I don't know if it's any big secret lol, but I didn't know who he was! Turns out to be a F1 racer guy called Perry McCarthy. Well there you go. You learn something every day.

Anyway, the reason I found this out was, Dad heard on the news that one of the Top Gear presenters had had a nasty high speed crash while filming, and I was trying to find out who it was. It seems Richard Hammond was driving at around 300 mph when he had a crash, landing him in hospital. Apparently he is in a stable condition, which is good, but I bet the health & safety officer is in trouble.

Japanese word of the day III

Konbanwa ---------------> Good evening

Hitachi EMIEW

Well this is interesting. I was reading New Scientist today and spotted a new humanoid robot that's been developed, this time by Hitachi! The EMIEW (“excellent mobility and interactive existence as work mate”) was created to rival the Honda Asimo, and the Sony Qrio. I'm surprised I haven't seen it before. I think it must have been overlooked in my AI lectures because it only has wheels instead of legs =( lol, well I think it looks promising anyway. Here's a little video of it moving around.

Apparently it is the world's fastest moving robot yet at 6km/h (3.7 miles per hour), however this is not surprising when its competition have to do all kinds of incredible calculations with each step to maintain balance on dynamic surfaces. I guess it is kind of a cheat. On the other hand though, why have feet if you don't need them; the reasoning Hitachi gives is as follows:

"We want to make the robots useful for people ... If the robots moved slower than people, users would be frustrated."

That's fair. Excellent for bungalow dwellers. As for everyone else: I hope you have your Stenna Stairlifts installed.

Anyway, what it can do, is as follows: the 130-cm-tall machine apparently has the ability to avoid obstacles, respond to simple voice commands, perform basic household tasks such as sweeping the floor, and it can also read the weather forecast. It has additionally been suggested as a useful gadget for people with mobility problems, to be used as a walking-aid.

It seems the latest thing these bots have been up to recently is their installation at the Grand Tokyo Bay Hotel, acting as hotel clerks. Now that would be interesting to see! Almost as good as the robotic drinks waiter at Yo Sushi, lol! I like that thing, scurrying around the floor muttering Japanese in its electronica voice, its very nice!

UK tour writeup.. day 1: Oxted to Nottingham, Nottingham to York ctd.

Stop 2: York

UK tour writeup.. day 1: Oxted to Nottingham, Nottingham to York

First stop: Nottingham

So this was quite a while back now, but better late than never! We started off our UK tour from Oxted, bright and early, and headed straight up to Nottingham for lunch. Well it was supposed to be a flying visit, but we kinda got a bit lost trying to drive into the city centre, and ended up asking a random traffic warden the way to tourist information. Little did we know the traffic warden himself was a Cypriot, arrived in the UK the week before, and had slightly less of an idea of where to go than we did. He ended up radioing his friend, the 'local', who then legged it over from the other side of town, to tell us in a thick Greek accent that he had no idea but we had best park here and walk. Lol. We were a little dubious of this coming from a traffic warden, and were wondering if this was perhaps a little ploy.. hehe.. wait til they get round the corner and then slap a ticket on the car.. sort of thing, but it was fine. What a nasty suspicious mind, lol.


Anyway, in the end we found our way into town..

And even found our way to the grandest tourist information I have ever seen!

After we grabbed some lunch, we found our way over to Sherwood Forest. I don't think this has changed one bit from the last time I visited about 14 years ago.

and of course, the obligatory 'Major Oak'!

Japanese word of the day II

From the BBC book: 'Talk Japanese' by Yukiko Isono & Lynne Strugnell.

Ohayo gozaimasu ---> Good morning

Xaphoon

James' xaphoon turned up today! For some reason it sounds like a loud angry duck when I get near it, but when played properly it sounds just like a sax! The Xaphoon is made by Brian Wittman, a Maui resident who invented the instrument more than 20 years ago:

"I have made over 15,000 such instruments in the past 20 years, all because of a single instrument I made on the whim of a child. The young lad lived with his mother in a tent in the woods, and heard me playing the sax (the expensive metal variety). He approached respectfully and then boldly asked if perhaps I had a little one he could play. Why not? I fiddled around and whittled a small end-blown block flute out of bamboo. Its tone was wheezy and small, and satisfied neither of us. I had a small grinding wheel I was using to shape some wooden boat cleats, and in sudden inspiration I applied the flute to the wheel and ground off the whole corner of the mouthpiece at an angle, re-shaping it to take a sax reed. The child was delighted and couldn't wait to have it, so I passed it on, but immediately made myself another, this time a bit longer, and I made the mouthpiece first so I could hear the pitch as I located the finger holes. Somehow by chance I ended up with a serviceable scale in E, and I couldn't put it down. I even played it one-handed as I drove into town, not noticing the speedometer was reading 80 until I heard the sirens."

Japanese word of the day

From the BBC book: 'Talk Japanese' by Yukiko Isono & Lynne Strugnell.

Hajimemashite ---> How do you do?

The mystery of the mud and the manatee

Our puppy has a bit of a penchant for cuddly toys. She has a way of seeking them out, a kind of in-built radar. If for any reason, and however disguised, one such item is brought into the house, she will find it. Within minutes, the toy will appear between her paws, and she will wag her tail in pleased appreciation for your kind gift.

Well anyway, today, I was working upstairs, and Psyche had been running around in the garden. As a side note, today has been nice and sunny, the ground looking a little too dry if anything. After a little while, I looked up to see a slightly guitly looking, completely soaked dog laying down on my carpet. Caked in wet mud. Oops, I was meant to be on hole-digging watch! So I headed out into the garden to try and find the offending hole.. only to find nothing! Nothing but a completely untouched garden, and completely dry earth. I just don't get it. So this is the mystery of the mud.

This was more or less forgotten however, until just now, when the wierdest thing happened. Psyche waltzed in from the garden with a cuddly manatee. A manatee?! Brand new! Where did it come from?? Do we have a tardis in our back garden? I sincerely doubt our retired neighbours would have donated a nice new porpoise to the Psyche fund, and we certainly didn't give it to her. This is all very strange. All I can say is, if your garden if full of holes, and you're missing your manatee, I'm very sorry! And your manatee is in good hands (well, paws).

Wireless internet rocks

I can't believe it, the wireless works in the garden, now I can sit outside in the sunshine and answer e-mails all day! Well, for one day only actually, if the weather forecast is to be believed, doh!

Star Trek XI Poster

So, the new Star Trek film set for release in 2008, really looks as though it's really going to go ahead now. I noticed today that they have started a little teaser publicity, such as this here poster.. this sort of confirms the idea of a Kirk/Spock prequel if you ask me!

A day on the trains at the Bluebell Railway, Horsted Keynes

This Saturday was the day for Dad's long awaited birthday present. A day learning how to drive the steam trains at the Bluebell Railway, down in Sussex. Coincidentally, a bit of news.. apparently there are plans underway to extend the Bluebell Railway line, currently running steam trains from Horsted Keynes to Sheffield Park, to East Grinstead: joining up with the British Rail (or whatever it is!) line up to London. It should be great when they've done it! I think they have to clear their way through some kind of disused tip first though, so it may be a little while.

This was Dad's train for the day: Fenchurch. It used to do the London to Brighton run, back in the day!





This is the view out of the window: it was absolutely roasting in there! I can see why steam train drivers always drive along with their heads out of the door..

This is the bit of track they got to practice on: the idea was to try and stop before reaching the end of the platform!















Dad and the crew.












Hmm.. easy peasy..
















And here's Dad, finally getting his go driving!

Steve Irwin

Oh my goodness, I just heard from my sister that Steve 'crocodile hunter' Irwin has died. You can read the news here. I can't believe after all the crazy things he has done, the way he went was as unprovoked as swimming over a stingray.

Hmm..

it's definitely time for some holiday photos on here.. to be honest, we took so many that I am still uploading them to flickr, and we got back I'm not sure how many days ago! Oops. Must try harder to be economical with photo taking instead of just foraging for more memory cards, lol.

Anyway, today was the day of the big cricket match in Oxted (we won apparently), and the last day of the holidays for James, boo! (Although I still get one more day before mine starts ;) hehe..) so the order of the day was lesson plan writing madness, otherwise known as 'watching too much Smallville and Buffy the Vampire Slayer', and berry picking. It is now the season for blackberries, sloes, and elderberries; the fields around are full of them! So what else to do but head out armed with ice cream tubs to do some collecting. The sloes are used for making a lovely sloe gin (with bonus caterpillars if you're lucky), and the elderberries are yummo with warm milk and Ribena -just in case you were wondering. Oh and blackberries, just eat em! =)

I can't forget to mention also, that this eve we went for dinner in Dorking with Ruth the anti-blogger, who would entirely disapprove of this post. Lol. Well at least I didn't write some poetry for you.

My Celebrity Lookalikes

Lol, cheers for the link bigblue! Hours of fun to be had with this website.. basically, what you do is load in a photo of yourself, and it throws back a list of celebrities that you look like(!), well, apparently! On my first attempt it actually said my top matches were Pierluigi Collina and Deep Roy, now that's scary.

Back again!

So, we got back from Cornwall yesterday. We somehow managed to stretch the journey back to approx. 12 hours, stopping off at Tintagel, Cheddar gorge and Stonehenge along the way. Needless to say, now even more tired than before! So much for a rest down in Newquay, lol.

Oooh!

The graduation video turned up whilst we were on holiday! You know, I think that camera guy was stalking us; there's more footage on there of us than anyone else I think - he just kept creeping up and grabbing more embarassing pictures, lol. I think he was on a hunt for eccentric looking people, so we obliged whole-heartedly. I've put some screen captures up on flickr so you can take a look, they're quite funny!

Oh yeah, I also managed to grab a close-up of me shaking hands with Richard Attenborough, how exciting!

Travels with Zippy

Hello! We just got back from the first leg of our UK tour! In the last four days, we have been up to Nottingham, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Bathgate, Windermere, Kendal, Blackpool, Llandudno, Llanberis, Snowdon, Much Wenlock, and Ironbridge! I'm not entirely sure how we fitted it all in, but we did, and have the photos to prove it, lol, all 300 of them! ;P

Anyway, more later, I have some pictures to upload before we head off down to Cornwall for the second leg!

We took this photo yesterday: after climbing Snowdon; this is the road running from Llanberis back towards Wrexham and Shewsbury!

Lorimers

I heard on the Oxted grapevine the other day that a new Sainsburys local is going to open on the high street. On Monday, James wandered over to J H Lorimers to buy some paint only to discover that they were in the process of moving across the road to where the card shop 'Something Special' used to be; an interesting choice because it's a much smaller building. We reckon the new Sainburys must have paid off Lorimers to shift premises, so that they can nab the bigger building! It's a shame actually because they now only stock half the things they did before, and have completely done away with their toys section, and modelling paints! Noo! I'm going to have to go to Croydon for those now! What they actually appear to have done is merged the two shops together, so now its pretty much the same as Sussex stationers, only without the books. I just hope this isn't a sign of Oxted changing in the same way that Reigate did, into a giant eatery. Hmm.. oh well, it might be nice to have a Sainsburys down the road I guess!

Gerald Kipper

Hmm.. I'm not entirely sure who Gerald Kipper is but I seem to be receiving an awful lot of his junk mail, lol.

Job & holidays

So, on Monday I walked about 30 metres from home for an interview @ friendsreunited, and walked out again 20 minutes later with a job, starting in September. Hooray! That's me sorted for the next 6 months then =) . This also means that we can now go on holiday without feeling too guilty about spending money. We were planning to head off to the south of France; that was however, before I checked my passport and noticed it expired in June! Apparently they can rush me a replacement if I go up to London next week and pay them 80 odd quid, but it won't get here until at least the 22nd which is pretty much the end of our time off anyway!

Being limited to only the UK, we have decided to do it properly: a grand tour. We are thinking of going all the way up to Edinburgh and back again through Wales, and then down to Cornwall for a bit of camping. It should be good, and we can see if we really do agree with what Bill Bryson had to say along the way! Ooh, he's actually doing a show at the Harlequin in Redhill in October, I think I may have to get tickets.

London photos

So this is what we saw on our wanderings..

This was taken in Westminster, sums up London in a strange kind of way.


This is the Royal Academy of Arts; we passed it when we were trying to find Oxford Street. This very large pregnant woman, with peeled back skin (The Virgin Mother by Damien Hirst) towers over the courtyard, it is part of this year's Summer Exhibition, along with some kind of red wooden structure that looked a bit like the foundations for something.


This is inside the Queen's Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue: the stage.



And the ceiling..

London baby, yeah

On Wednesday we decided to go up to London for the day. We haven't actually been there to look around for over two years now, so we thought it was high time we visited! It actually turned out to be a bit of a long day, as I find is always the way with London, you just keep thinking of more places you want to see. I worked out on the train home, we had actually been on our feet for near on 12 hours, as we had been walking everywhere instead of catching the tube! Well probably a little less than that because a couple were spent in the theatre, lol - we managed to grab some half price tickets for the evening performance of Les Miserables from a place on Leicester Square. Excellent! (if a little sarcastic when I asked for cheap tickets, grr).

So anyway, this is the route that we took. We arrived at Victoria, walked through Westminster, past Big Ben and Westminster Cathedral, went past Downing Street and all the hoardes of tourists, and in to Green Park.

I think you can see Buckingham Palace through there across the water if you really squint! The place was absolutely packed with armed guards: both the proper soldier types with cool swords that people try to

make laugh; and the scary ones with big machine guns, who have a 50 metre radius of non-tourist filled space around them.. hmm, no-one fancied posing with those ones for some reason. There were also military helicopters flying above the city the whole time we were there.

Next we headed over to Trafalgar Square, and lunch in the crypt of St Martin in the Fields; a very unexpected place for a restaurant! The food was really excellent there actually, I would definitely recommend eating there if you pass by; I had a nice veggie tart thingy with an amazing salad -figs and slices of orange and all sorts in there, it was delicious and not too pricey either. That is what we like!

Then on to Leicester Square to grab our tickets, Regent Street, Oxford Street, Hamleys and Portobello Road. We took a bit of a detour trying to find Oxford Circus, ended up at the Ritz, and then had to turn back on ourselves, but we did stumble across this random thing that blogger won't let me upload a photo of, sorry!

Then, back to Leicester Square, China town, got lost and ended up in Soho, lol. Back to Leicester Square, then Covent Garden -watched the street performers --there was the guy on stilts that always seems to be there -- and looked around the market as it was closing up for the day! I can't believe the Doc Martin's shop has gone though.

Anyway, on our way back to Leicester Square for dinner we found this camping shop that downstairs has an ice climbing wall! I really think that is the coolest thing I have seen in a shop! I would definitely like to try that one day. The other thing we found was the Australia shop which sells all kinds of stuff ranging from touristy Oz/Nz stuff like cuddly koalas and boomerangs, to special Australasian food as can be bought from Cybercandy. I think we did quite well to come away with only a miniature Aborigine boomerang and a mint Freddo. I love that shop.

We grabbed a slice of pizza and a Planet Hollywood smoothie for dinner before going to see Les Miserables at the Queen's Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. That is such an excellent musical, I've been putting off going to see it because the title does not inspire confidence in a good time, but we really enjoyed it, despite the morbidity! We were also surprised to see Jon from the band S Club 7 playing one of the leads, and then slightly embarassed that we recognised him, hrm.

This is the view of Big Ben we saw on the way back to Victoria. James reckons the speckles are dust particles in the air that the flash is bouncing off. It wouldn't surprise me! We managed to get back to the station just in time to catch the last train home!

Brighton Pavillion

Brighton Pavillion
Originally uploaded by kipperfrog.

On Saturday we popped over to Brighton for a bit of shopping, and a BBQ thingy at Tom's new house, and I spied this view of the Pavillion that I hadn't noticed before. Very picturesque!