Category: Stuff

World War One started in July 1914 when the Germans set out to make a rapid advance through neutral Belgium and take France quickly. It didn’t happen because the Beligians refused to move aside, and the delay resulted in four years of grinding trench warfare.

In the confrontation at sea, the German High Seas fleet was outnumbered and outgunned by the British Fleet. But the ocean is big, and the Germans took advantage of gaps in the British patrols to break out on raids from their safe harbour in north Germany.

In December 1914 the German fleet sailed to the North East coast of Britain and shelled the coast.

The German ships fired 1,150 shells into the town of Hartlepool, hitting the steelworks, the gasworks, the railways, and killing 86 civilians and injuring 424 more. Seven soldiers died and 14 injured.

If the raid had any lasting effect it was to harden the attitude of the British population against Germany, outraged that the Germans had targeted civilians.

They also blamed the British fleet for letting the Germans slip past them.

Four years later, at the end of the war, the German High Seas Fleet was interned at Scapa Flow. Then, through a misunderstanding over dates, the German fleet commander ordered the fleet to be scuttled.

In the years after the war, some of the ships were raised and salvaged. But three heavy battleships and four light cruisers were too deep to be raised.

The three battleships, SMS König, SMS Kronprinz, and SMS Markgraf, are still there on the sea bed at Scapa Flow.

The word hieroglyph came into Engish in the 1580s to refer to those carvings that were of the nature of Egyptian monumental writing. The word comes from the Ancient Greek hieros meaning sacred, and glyphe meaning carving.

The word hieros is also the basis of the word hierarchy, that came into English in the late 14th century, meaning a sacred order.

Charlotte Bronte was 4’9″ or 4’10” (1.45m) with a very slight build. One of her dresses on display at the Bronte parsonage in Haworth looks tiny.

And, here’s another fact: If her father had not changed his name when he came from Ireland to England to seek his fortune, she would have been Charlotte Brunty.

Dysphoria: A state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life: Typical of adolescents with depression, mania, and anxiety disorders.

The opposite of euphoria.

ORIGIN mid 19th century: from Greek dusphoria, from dusphoros ‘hard to bear’.

Anhedonia – the inability to feel pleasure.

Another way to look at pain and pleasure is that few of our pleasures and pains derive out of thin air. The huge majority are formed from living in the experience of others – what our environment wants, we are attracted to, and what the environment finds abhorent, we find painful. We have no more command over how we are affected than is a bull with a ring through its nose, led this way and that. Our only freedom is in the environment we choose.

These are all from the British Heart Foundation article about how to get protein without the meat. The article decribes the amount of protein in a serving, so I converted the amounts to the protein in 100g of the food

Baked beans 5g
Chickpeas 7g
Lentils 8g
Tofu 8g
Quinoa 5g
Peanuts 25g
Walnuts 13g
Hazelnuts 13g
Sunflower 19g
Pumpkin 22g
Wholegrain rice 4g
Oats 10g
Quorn 11g
Cheddar cheese 29g
Egg 12g
Fish 19g

The section that caught my eye is where it describes Quinoa, and says it is the seed of a green vegetable related to chard and spinach and that unlike cereals is has all the essential amino acids found in animal protein.

So what does that mean for a person who does not eat quinoa? Where do they get those essential amino acides that are not found in cereals?