The Higgs Boson Diet Plan

I know you will all have been thinking "I wonder when Bertie is going to get back to blogging about challenging scientific subjects. He really has been slacking lately".

Fear not, dear readers. I promised before Christmas that I would turn my attention to the Higgs boson, and I am not one to renege on my promises.

Now I suspect that many of my friends, both canine and human, will have made some sort of a New Year resolution which involves trying to lose weight, am I right?

(Please bear with me, I am not going off track).

The thing is, with the thrilling recent announcement from CERN that, following painstaking analysis of high energy proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider, this elusive missing elementary particle has possibly been spotted, I am increasingly confident that I shall soon be in a position to patent my new invention, the Higgs Boson Diet.

I hope you won't think I'm insulting your intelligence by reminding you that the Higgs boson is the particle that imparts mass to all other particles.

So, the way I see it, if you can rid your body of a few stray Higgs bosons, then you have a pain free way of losing weight which involves absolutely no cutting back on treats, cookies, bones, or whatever.

Up until now, the stumbling block has always been that it is hard to get rid of something that no-one has ever been able to detect.

I expect you are now beginning to understand why the imminent discovery of this boson, the existence of which was predicted by Prof. Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University, Scotland in 1964, is causing such a wave of excitement in the physics community.

My own ingenious idea is that if you just hang around inside the Large Hadron Collider whilst all those protons are whizzing by at 99.9999991% of the speed of light (remembering to wear a jacket 'cos it's -271.3ºC in there) then there's every chance that a passing proton will bash into and annihilate a few of your very own personal Higgs bosons and, as if by magic, the pounds or kilograms will dissolve away in the time it takes to say "particle accelerator".

Beautiful, isn't it?

Oh what now?  Gail is saying that she's thinks I might need to check my calculations as she's worried you might be losing mass but not volume.....

Really, geniuses don't want to be bothered by such petty details.

And those equations do look awfully difficult.

Mango Minster Entry 2012: Bertie the Great Adventurer

This year I am entering the 'Adventure Animals' category in the awesome cyber dog show extravaganza that is Mango Minster 2012. (I am so totally over the whole Cracker Dog phase. Really.)

Now it feels ever so slightly demeaning to have to explain why I should be considered the top Adventure Animal. But Gail has persuaded me to set out the reasons, despite the fact that, to even the most casual reader of this blog, they will already be clear beyond dispute.

Let's see now.....

I have Sir Edmund Hillary's head for heights:

It cuts no ice with me that I am not a husky. My skills in polar conditions rival those of Amundsen, Shackleton and Peary:

When it comes to deserts, I could kick sand in the eyes of Lawrence of Arabia:

I would presume to teach Livingstone and Stanley a thing or two about exploring rivers:

The Sheriff of Nottingham would be all a quiver, had he to contend with me as well as Robin Hood:

I feel a sublime affinity with John Muir after passing by train through his birthplace, Dunbar, last July. (No Gail that is not tenuous, there's no need to be all superior, just because you once spent two weeks in Yosemite):

My deep and abiding interest in science and geology would have made me a natural selection to accompany Darwin on his Beagle adventure:

In the matter of giant leaps, I am second only to Neil Armstrong:



Living in a port city, I could go the whole nine yards with Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, Magellan, John Cabot, Sir Walter Raleigh...

So.

I think you will agree that I can stand tall alongside the world's great adventurers.

Not to mention the inevitable motley crew of also-ran canine co-contestants....

A walk in Sherwood Forest and a Robin Hood fantasy

As you know, I spent the Christmas and New Year holiday in Nottingham.

Now I’ve already told you about my role in trying to lift Human Grandad's spirits. Well between you and me, by the end of the trip Gail needed a bit of cheering up too, and not only on account of losing heavily to Daniel on the Wii.

So anyway, I decided to take her for a reviving walk in Sherwood Forest before we returned to Aberdeen.

 

We went to see this huge and ancient tree, ‘The Major Oak’, where Robin Hood is supposed to have hidden from the Sheriff of Nottingham all those centuries ago. 

Oh I just loved it there in the forest, sniffing gnarled old oak trees, romping around grassy glades, admiring the novel waymarking posts, and milking the attentions of other visitors.  

This famous 'greenwood' was wearing its winter suit of brown, but Gail looked all rosy cheeked and happy again after our splendid outing.

Now that I’m back in Scotland I’ve been reading up all about Robin Hood and his Merry Men and my imagination has been running riot.

Oh how wonderful it would be if Gail and I could decamp together back to Sherwood and lead a new band of outlaws. I could be 'Little Bertie' to Gail's 'Robina Hood', and I'd roam all day in the forest while Gail honed her archery skills (last practiced on a bow and arrow won by her brother at Goose Fair circa 1967...) We would sleep on a soft bed of moss under the broadleaf canopy, launch daring raids on wealthy bankers travelling up the Great North Road with their bags of gold, and use the money to help the poor and vulnerable. I am sure that a latter day Friar Tuck (Giles Fraser?) would bring us some ale to keep us merry, and I would even be prepared to wear a coat of Lincoln green should circumstances require it...

Well blow me down with a feather.

Gail is staring out of the front window, onto our grey and chilly Aberdeen street, and she's muttering: "You know what Bertie, for once that isn't such a stupid idea of yours".

Bertie versus the Wii...

You’ll never guess what I’m being blamed for now. Just because a certain person is a very bad loser.

Let me explain.

Down in England last week, we paid a post-Christmas visit to one of Gail’s godsons.  Look, here he is, Daniel, the handsome chappie in the Argentina football shirt.

 

No soon as we’d entered the front door, than Daniel challenged Gail to a game of football on his new Wii computer thingy.

I don’t suppose it will come as a big surprise to you that my dear lady owner has hitherto not devoted too much time and effort to developing her expertise in this area. Unlike her twelve year old godson….

Now I will admit that this was my first opportunity to see a Wii in action too, but, in contrast to Gail, I naturally cottoned on pretty fast. As I see it, the game involves the humans waving their arms a lot, often very rapidly, to test whether the nearby terrier can either (1) grasp the moving human hand in his mouth or (2) take advantage of the fact that the humans are otherwise occupied and the field is wide open for toe chewing or ankle nibbling.

So by my criteria, I totally wiped the floor with the opposition. 

Daniel's version is that he won ten-nil.

And incredibly, Gail had the cheek to suggest her poor performance was due to being distracted by my embarking on a limb-grabbing rampage mid-way through the game…

Yeah, right Gail. Like you weren’t already eight-nil down when I first sprung into action.