May 2009

FEATURES

HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW SOUTHWOLD?
The Southwold Town Council Quiz
your chance to win £20 and a William Godell commemorative mug

The Town Council is organizing this quiz about Southwold as part of its commemoration of the 500th anniversary of William Godell’s bequest to the town of land including the Common, the marshes and so on.

Please write your numbered answers on a sheet of paper adding your name, address and telephone number and heading your entry "Godell Competition". Your entry must be addressed to the Clerk of the Council, Town Hall, Market Place, Southwold IP18 6EF and arrive by 31st May 2009. Answer papers can be posted through the Town Hall letterbox.

The winning entry will receive a prize of £20 and a commemorative mug. If there is more than one person who answers all the questions correctly, all correct entries will be put into a draw.

The Quiz
1. Where is the Casino?
2. Where can you see the rudder of a famous beach yawl, The Bittern?
3. How many cannon are on display in Southwold?
4. List the locations of the cannon.
5. Where can you see three children riding on an eagle?
6. Where can you see three children riding on a dolphin?
7. How many Greens are there in Southwold (excluding the Common)?
8. What are the names of the Greens?
9. Where is there a plaque commemorating the Great Fire of Southwold?
10. Where are Wake’s Cottages?
11. Where can you see a bassinette and two solleretes?
12. Where can you see a representation of two men in a boat?
13. There are two places in Southwold where the Town Motto is in public view. Where are they?
14. What is the Motto?

 

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This is the latest in a series of articles on stellar and tidal phenomena written especially for the Organ by astrophysicist, Prof. Michael Rowan-Robinson

The launch of PLANCK and HERSCHEL

Some time this month, hopefully around May 16th, the European Space Agency will launch two space missions which have been under construction since 1993, and thought about for many years before that.

PLANCK-Explorer will map the cosmic microwave background radiation, the relic of the hot early stages of the Big Bang, with exquisite detail, and will determine cosmological parameters with unprecedented accuracy. The small ripples in the background tell us the nature of the matter in the universe and allow us to measure the amount of ordinary and dark matter, and of the mysterious dark energy that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. We can also determine the age of the universe and how fast it is expanding today.

HERSCHEL is a far infrared and submillimetre observatory and is the largest space telescope ever launched, with a mirror diameter of 3.5 metres. Herschel will be able to study the physics and chemistry of stars in the process of formation from clouds of gas and dust, and will detect galaxies undergoing huge bursts of star-formation in the early universe. It can map debris disks around nearby stars that are evolving into planetary systems, and comets and asteroids in the Kuiper belt on the edge of the Solar System.

Planck and Herschel will be launched together, sitting one above the other in the nose-cone of an Ariane 5 rocket, from French Guiana. They will travel to the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrange point (I’ll explain this in a later article) about a million miles from earth and orbit there, far from the warming effect of the earth. Their instruments are kept cool by mechanical coolers for Planck and, in the case of Herschel, by a tank of liquid helium.

I’ve been involved with both missions since their inception and was a co-proposer on each back in 1993. Because the European Space Agency had funding difficulties each mission ran into problems at different times. In 1997 I organised a letter to the Space Agency from leading European physicists including Nobel laureates and luminaries like Stephen Hawking, to persuade them not to cancel it. For Herschel I was Chair of the Scientific Organising Committee for a conference later in the same year to demonstrate community support for the mission. So it will be a great relief to see them safely launched. It will then be very exciting to see the data come in from the two missions and to work with my colleagues at Imperial, and in Europe and the US, to make sense of them. And with the wonders of the internet and broad-band I can do much of this sitting at my desk in Southwold.

Stars’n Tides now has an email address for you to send comments and queries: starsntides@southwoldorgan.com

Past Stars’n Tides articles can be found at http://astro.ic.ac.uk/~mrr/starsntides/

 

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It's the WINE TALKING

by Leslie J. Brinton of 'In the Pink' 01986 872579

Despite the wealth of wines available to us in Southwold – referred to in this journal last month – I hope you will still find rich rewards in the selections available also from mailing list merchants, many of whom deliver to Southwold for free.

I have previously referred to Yapp in the West Country, who this year celebrate 40 years in the business; they started at the time, in fact, that founder Robin, no stranger to Southwold, was a dentist.

As far as I know, Robin is happily settled in France now, but the family firm still carries on: they are members of the Bunch, a small group of independent and innovative wine merchants which includes Adnams, but has just lost East Anglians Lay and Wheeler, who have been swallowed up by Majestic.

A big feature of good merchants is the annual, often collectable, bumper wine list that they publish. Usually clearly a labour of love, they are dwindling in number nowadays, but Yapps carry on and the latest is a joy: illustrated by John Burningham and with articles that are a mixture of the up to date and the archival (for example, the 1976 piece by Elizabeth David on Beaumes de Venise is unmissable).

Really, this book is essential for the wine buff and you should give them a ring (01747 860423) for your copy: you are in for a treat and, if you are minded to then place an order, your pleasure will be doubled.

Leslie J Brinton

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It is estimated that nearly 40% of wild plants in the UK are of conservation concern. Urbanisation, modern farming techniques and pollution have all had a dramatic effect on our plants. To highlight the issue, eight new First-Class stamps depicting rare and endangered plants will be issued on Tuesday 19th May. This is the third in the series ‘Action for Species’, following on the two previous years’ Birds and Insects.

It is unlikely that you’ll see any of the plants featured in this set of stamps locally. For example, the Floating Water Plantain, although slowly spreading eastwards across the UK, will take a very long time to get to us from its natural habitat in the lakes of Snowdonia. Given its reliance upon the canal network to assist its passage, it’s highly unlikely to crop up in our local lakes. The likelihood of it making an appearance locally however is greater than that of the Lady’s Slipper Orchid cropping up in your local field. There is a single specimen left in the UK and that’s in West Yorkshire.
You may wish to kid yourself that you have a specimen of the Allium featured on one of the stamps in your garden. It is, however, unlikely to be Allium sphaerocephalon (the Round-headed Leek), which was only discovered in 1847 in Bristol.

Those of you who took refuge in Malta to avoid the Southwold winter may recognise Sea Knotgrass, but, if you decided to try and bring some home and cultivate it here, you are on a hiding to nothing. Its UK range starts and ends in the most southerly part of the UK – and it’s vulnerable to exceptional tides. Marsh Saxifrage sounds as if it may be happy to set up home locally. However, it seems to prefer the northern Pennines and north-east Scotland.

Also in the series are Dwarf Milkwort, Upright Spurge, Downy Woundwort, Plymouth Pear and Deptford Pink, all of which sound as if they may be playing at Latitude this year as well as being rare plants.

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and to recognise Kew’s conservation work, a miniature sheet of four stamps will be issued depicting aspects of the Gardens. This sheet has two First-Class stamps and two 90p stamps.

So, following the men of the Industrial Revolution and the bloodthirsty Tudors, May at last brings some colour to our stamps.


Guy Mitchell, Spots

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