Soup

Two new pictures. One, sitting down, taken by Lucy Levene for the interview in The Telegraph last year. (And now carelessly cropped by me, to make it fit). And another taken by a friend outside my flat, showing me apparently about to embark on some dangerous military/ninja training. I notice in both pictures I'm attempting to force a smile, something I struggle with in front of the camera.

Soup. You know when you eat soup while you're sort of slumping in front of the TV? I mean, practically horizontal, like Homer Simpson on the couch? It means the soup spoon is travelling over quite a large area of clothing before it reaches your mouth. Leading, inevitably, to soup stains on the t-shirt. You can't transport soup this far horizontally on a spoon without spilling some. There just doesn't seem any way round this. Apart from sitting up straight, I suppose, but that really defeats the object of slumping on the couch. Technology should have solved the problem, inventing some new device. I mean, how long have we been using spoons? It's practically stone-age technology.

While my soup-stained t-shirts were in the wash, I lay in the bath reading New Scientist. Scientists are puzzled as to why there isn't as much anti-matter in the universe as there is normal matter. Various theories to explain this have been proposed. After diligently working my way through the article, I now have a vague understanding of these theories, though I'd have difficulty explaining them. When the new CERN particle accelerator starts operating, there may be more information about anti-matter. And maybe more about the mysterious Higgs Boson. I like popular science articles about nuclear physics, and wish I had the mathematical prowess to understand it all better.