Have you seen the 2012 summer festival line-ups? Some cracking stuff going on. I've thought long and hard but my festival of choice this year is Suffolk-based festival of music, comedy, arts, coloured sheep and general strange-goings on, AKA Latitude. Check it out.
Rach x
If you're stuck for a Bank Holiday activity for this weekend, pop down to Yorkshire Sculpture Park and witness sculpture - live.
Artist Florence Peake is coming to Yorkshire to conduct the live build and then deconstruction of a monolithic structure before the eyes of a live audience. The build/performance begins at 17.00, is FREE to attend and will last for about an hour, with refreshments available (theatre-style).
http://www.ysp.co.uk/events/florence-peake-make
(Image – PROTEIGON from BURAYAN on Vimeo)
If you're anything like us, at this time of year we're inundated with cards, calendars and choccies - most of which will end up in the bin or landfill site... So last year, in the vein of saving the planet and keeping you entertained, we created a Christmas-themed blog and packed it full of Christmas-themed posts that would either inspire, instruct or just generally entertain.
It went so well it looks to have become a new favourite festive tradition of ours - and so for 2011 we've turned blue, gotten crafty and sexist, shared secret recipes, put together an abridged TV run-down and much more. Pop over just for a quick stop and we're pretty sure you'll find something to amuse or assist, whatever your tastes!
Merry Christmas from the Team at Thompson.
Some of us are eating carbs like we've never heard of Atkins, some stretching like Black Swan auditionees and others (like me) are just trembling in their trainers...
Why? Well, this Sunday come rain or shine the most dedicated members of the Thompson team will be taking part in the annual Age UK 10k, The Abbey Dash.
We're running in aid of a fantastic cause, the NET Patient Foundation - a charity close to our hearts. The charity is the only one in the UK to offer advice and support to sufferers and families of those with NETs (neuroendocrine tumours), a relatively uncommon group of cancers. Symptoms are often confused with more common complaints such as IBS, meaning NETs are frequently diagnosed incorrectly or missed completely.
The money you help us raise will enable the NET Patient Foundation to continue their amazing work offering up to date support and advice, raising funds for vital research projects and increasing awareness of this little known illness. Read more here: NET Patient Foundation
So please dig deep for Sarah, Guy, Jonny, myself and the NET Patient Foundation and help us to hit our target of £1,000. And if we do, we promise to take share lots of pictures of Jonny's goosepimply legs.
Thank you! x
We booked family trip to Disneyland Paris during the October school holidays and had a wonderful time. It’s funny but I started reading about the history of Disneyland Paris when I got back and was shocked to see that it struggled when it first opened with low attendance figures – amazing to think when it was heaving while we were there.
Apparently one of the reasons for its slow uptake was the name. Originally launched as EuroDisney, this was seen as a negative name. For Europeans the word Euro is a term associated with business, currency and commerce and not with the fun and excitement of a theme park. Euro was dropped in 1995 and Disneyland Paris was born. The power of words never fails to astound me!
Anyway, I though I would put down some top tips for anyone planning to visit Disneyland Paris in the not too distant future.
Coffee - You can’t get a decent cup of coffee for love nor money so if you need a certain amount of caffeine to get you going on a morning, you might need to think again.
Cost - You can pay up to €9 for a pint of beer and €17 for burger and chips (which is simply glorified McDonalds). At today’s exchange rates it becomes an expensive do. We took some basics with us to help combat the food costs.
Location - Choose your location well. We booked a self-catering hotel on the outskirts of Disneyland in a town called Serris. The hotel was next door to a huge shopping mall that had a great supermarket and it provided a free shuttle to the Disney parks.
Footwear - Long days especially if you go over a special themed event such as Halloween. We spent over 14 hours on one particular day in the parks. Although the kids had a great time, my feet were not so sure.
Length - For us 3 days was enough. We actually went for 4 nights, 5 full days but we were ready for home after 3 days.
Travel - Check out flights versus train. The flight time is approximately 1 hour and we flew from a local airport so no trip to London. It also worked out cheaper to fly!
Shows - Watch them all. You’ll be pleasantly surprised as each one is different and they all offer some form of excitement – even the ones for the younger children.
Plan, Plan, Plan - The big rides offer a Fast Pass facility so you can book a slot to ride. The kid’s rides don’t and often have the biggest queues. We found it best to get there early and jump straight on to the younger children’s rides before the queues started to form.
And finally,
French culture - It definitely takes some getting used to. Queue is not a word they seem to understand!
I hope this gives you some tips and you enjoy your time at Disneyland Paris, we certainly did.
I’m just back from our summer family road trip around California. There were many highlights, including Yosemite, Big Sur and San Francisco, but for me the most interesting was Las Vegas.
The city is going through tough times right now, with unemployment higher than ever and those much needed gamblers not coming in big enough numbers or with fat enough wallets. The Strip still shines throughout the night, but the number of dormant and half-finished casinos still surprised me, carefully hidden and only visible if you’ve got a long nose like me.
I am fascinated by the history of Vegas. How it grew to its heyday in the fifties, the gangsters and showgirls, and the fantastic design of the buildings, typography and incredible signage. The neon that has become iconic, plots the social history of the city, and still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck when you first drive down the Strip.
I was delighted then to find the following article on the BBC website when I got back. If you’ve got 5 minutes, this is a fascinating film about how the old neon is creating a history, and provides an excellent insight into the marvelous Las Vegas.
We’ve been in the City Centre now for a few weeks and our ‘New’ Stables project is well underway – enough for us all to have a quick peak to check progress. This led me to start thinking about if I prefer the centre of town or if I want to go back to Roundhay.
There are pro’s and con’s for everything:
Leeds is…
…fantastic for a drink straight from work
…full of restaurants and cool café’s for lunch
…the shoppers dream for retail therapy
…ideal for attending meetings with city clients
Leeds City Centre
But then again…
…Roundhay has some pretty good pubs and you don’t need to worry about car parking
…Roundhay has some great deli’s that are half the cost
…Roundhay doesn’t really have any decent clothes shops but lets be honest, who has time at lunch to fit in any retail therapy
…Roundhay might not be within walking distance of our city clients but it’s not too far away and who wants sore feet anyway
Roundhay Park
I’m not sure what the TBP team think but I definitely prefer Roundhay and can’t wait to move back into our new offices.
Liz
This month we witnessed one of the most shocking natural disasters to have happened in my lifetime. A massive earthquake, subsequent tsunami and then nuclear disaster that seems to have devastated the majority of Japan’s East coast. What has made this series of events so shocking to us, watching on in horror from our safe little tax ridden country is that we have been able to watch live footage of the disaster as each event occurred. I’m not really sure how to describe the images of that massive wall of water literally swallowing buildings/ cars and anyone in its path including the Fukushima l Power Station.
The coverage of the Earthquake/Tsunami combo has now quickly been dropped whilst the world watches a nuclear disaster evolve from the aftermath at Fukushima. People within a 30 mile radius have been evacuated and may already have been exposed to high levels of radiation and the workers desperately trying to fix the problems at the plant have been dubbed the Nuclear Ninjas on a suicide mission to save Japan. This got me, and evidently some of my younger cheerleading students thinking:
Why can’t they just turn the Power Station off??
I laughed when I was first asked this and then realised I didn’t actually know the answer. I had no idea about how Nuclear power works or is created. The only thing I really know about Nuclear anything is to be afraid of it? So I thought I’d spend some time actually finding the answer to that question. Why can’t they just turn it off??
Here is the brief explanation from my masses of research: (and helpfull diagram!)
Nuclear fuel comes in the form of enriched uranium, which naturally produces heat as uranium atoms split. (A similar process is used in Nuclear Bombs)
This heat is used to boil water, which then produces steam that drives a turbine, which then spins a generator to create electricity; the steam is then cooled and fed back through the system in a cycle. The amount of heat generated by the reactor is so vast that it needs a constant flow of water in order to ensure the fuel rods (made of uranium pellets) don't overheat and therefore melt down which would be catastrophic.
The temperature is also controlled by aptly named control rods, which control how much heat is generated by the fuel. When fully inserted they have essentially shut down the fuel rods, when pulled all the way out the fuel produces maximum heat. Now when the earthquake hit the control rods automatically inserted fully into the fuel rods and the plant went into shut down. Done! Well not quite….
Uranium fuel doesn't have an off switch and even in shut down continues to produce heat for quite some time and therefore needs the cooling system to continue operation to prevent meltdown. Obviously this was already considered and the plant has back up systems in case the electricity to the pumps supplying water was ever cut.
1: Their main electricity source
2: The main grid can then supply the power
3: If that fails they have back up diesel generators
4: If they fail they have battery-powered pumps that can last several hours until electricity is restored.
When the earthquake hit the worst-case scenario unfolded. The plant went into shut down and therefore their electricity supply went too. Next the main power grid became unstable and therefore also shut down. Then the tsunami hit and destroyed the diesel generators, which were not high enough to withstand the force or quantity of water. The batteries were therefore the last source of electricity but only lasted a few hours. More generators were sourced but weren’t hooked up in time and without power to the pumps the fuel rods began to overheat. This cracked the metal tubes holding the uranium, exposing the fuel to water where it began producing hydrogen gas. This is called Thermolysis! As you are probably aware, hydrogen is highly explosive and as the pressure built up we saw a series of explosions. These were hydrogen explosions not nuclear explosions.
In a last ditched attempt to contain the situation they flooded the reactors with boron infused seawater. The boron similar to the control rods acts as a coolant to the fuel. However flooding the reactor has now permanently damaged the plant but this was a better alternative to a complete meltdown, which would have been catastrophic.
The uncertainty now comes in Japan’s future supply of electricity. About half of Japan's power came from these plants damaged by the tsunami and they are now potentially permanently shut down. Building a new plant may take a decade.
To put it in perspective, Three Mile Island disaster was a level 5 incident... this is level 6, Chernobyl was a 7.
So there it is the not so simple answer to why you can’t just turn a power station off.
Coral
Read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale
http://science.howstuffworks.com/japan-nuclear-crisis.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
This picture was taken of Christchurch just after the earthquake this week. It amazes me how a modern city with skyscrapers and office blocks in a developed, modern country like New Zealand can be so suddenly shaken to its core. Watching the films of buildings falling down and people running for their lives had a deep effect on me.
What we all take for granted, the area of the earth we choose to live in/on and the foundation of the ground beneath our feet, was taken away from the citizens of Christchurch. And for them, it was the second time it has happened in 6 months, which makes it so much worse. Imagine commuting into work, lunchbox in hand, paper under your arm, only to have to scramble out of a collapsed building 4 hours later. And that was just the lucky ones.
A few years ago, I witnessed (well felt really) an earthquake of about 7.5 on the Richter Scale whilst staying in LA, which everyone around me thought was the 'big one'. Whilst they went into disaster mode, diving under tables and standing in doorways, I just marveled at the wonder of the earth shaking beneath me, the still, erie calm that followed and then the incredible sound of literally millions of car alarms going off together. The after shocks came and went for about 10 days and were something you nonchalantly mentioned... oh there's another one.
And then a few weeks ago, at about 9pm on a Sunday night, in bed with my wife reading the papers, I felt the earth move again, in Leeds this time. Not exactly a hot-bed of seismic activity, but it was clear to me what had happened. Apparently the UK gets an earthquake of a reasonable magnitude about once a year.
Anyway, enough rambling, the point I wanted to make was not to take things for granted and think about others who are facing incredible hardships right now. And having lived through 2 earthquakes, I'm beginning to fear that the next one might have my name on it.
I travel by rail a lot. Up and down to London. On to Lingfield via Victoria, for a current client. From Stockholm to Copenhagen, on a recent holiday. I've done my time on the majestic steam trains of Rajasthan, the Amtrak in New Mexico and Texas and numerous urban journeys through the great cities of Europe. And I'm a veteran of Edinburgh to York to Leeds to London trips with my last job.
Railway design is something I not only notice, but take a real interest in. Whether its the identities like the timeless British Rail logo or the superlative design of the original Shinkansan (bullet rain) in Japan, railways are a hot-bed of good design and a great opportunity for designers to make life easier for the consumer. That's what design is all about after all, isn't it?
Every time I go to London, I am stilled impressed with the classic piece of information design that is the Underground map. Something so complex, yet so logical and intuitive. This classic design has not required revision over the years and enables everyone, whether resident or visitor, to understand everything they need to make that journey. Try the underground for size in Tokyo, and believe me, you'll dream of having such a helpful map... as you get lost at least 4 times a day.
Train travellers, more than anyone, need good clear information design to be confident they are on the right track (literally) and got the right ticket. Despite lots of talk about the simplification of ticket types in the UK, this is an area the train operating companies still have lots to learn. You need a degree in ticket options to know when off peak starts (and it differs on train to train), whether you can get on a specific train or whether you need a separate seat reservation. The combination of ticket types, travle conditions and price bands beggars belief. Just look at my tickets from a journey last week and the various codes, and you start to get an idea of confusing they are. Any idea what STD means, or Anytime S or SEAT tickets? Does any permitted route mean any permitted train? And what happens if you miss the train?
My challenge is to the authorities to really make it easy for us travellers. Put the customer first and design a ticket system that is straightforward and easy to understand. Easy to normal human beings that is. Tell us what trains we can use, in a way that makes sense to everyone, whether its their first journey or they use the railway everyday. And include all the information we need in a form we understand.
It can't be that hard. Really, it can't. We'll do it for you if you need some help.
