Читать книгу How to predict the weather with a cup of coffee: And other techniques for surviving the 9–5 jungle - Matthew Cole - Страница 49

Five thousand years ago the inhabitants of Orkney built Maes Howe, a stone chamber expertly aligned so that on the winter solstice the setting sun sends a shaft of light along the entry passage to hit the back wall where the bones of the ancient elders were buried. Going to see it is a pretty good way to enthuse children with the whole idea of the celestial calendar. Or you could just show them the Indiana Jones movie that uses the same idea. Either way, you need to know that you can adapt the window-sill mirror trick to make your own bedroom version of this sacred shrine.

 Pick your significant date (say a birthday).

 Through careful positioning of the mirror mark a suitable spot where the celestial beam will hit the wall.

 Now position your chosen icon (football poster, cartoon character, darts trophy) so that at sunrise or sunset on the given day it is kissed by the golden rays that peep over the horizon. You will need to provide the soundtrack yourself.

Alternative suggestion: I often use the sunspot as a random CD-selection technique. But as a seasonal touch you could arrange things so that at 10am on 25 December a sunbeam illuminates the Phil Spector Christmas CD on the shelf, in preparation for its annual outing.

Urban bushcraft through the ages: Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) 1753–1814

To round off our exploration of the indoors, here’s an account of what happens when a great inventor turns his mind to the home.

Benjamin Thompson was by all accounts a scoundrel, and a good-looking one too. One biographer says he was ‘overbearingly arrogant and had no friends’, which seems a bit pointed. Anyway, he had to leave his native America in a hurry after he backed the wrong side in the War of Independence and spent the rest of his life in Europe, picking up wives and titles while pursuing his career as a scientist.

But what I love about him is that his boundless curiosity was unfettered by the snobbish view that science is too grand to be turned to domestic matters. A lover of the mundane, he begged to differ with this supercilious assumption. ‘It is really astonishing how little attention is paid to things near us, and which are familiar to us…How few persons are there who ever took the trouble to bestow a thought on the subject in question, though it is, in the highest degree, curious and interesting!’, he wrote.

Rumford’s area of expertise was heat, and everything associated with it. But there were no steam locomotives and spinning machines for him. Instead, he revolutionised the domestic fireplace forever, did the same for the cooker and then repeated the feat for the coffee percolator. And then came his chef-d’œuvre. While remarking upon the low heat conductivity of egg white he found another of his fantastic domestic applications for science when he gave the world Baked Alaska.^* I can’t imagine that Leonardo, for all his much-vaunted inventiveness, would have thought to putice cream inside a baked dessert.