Categories: random
Date: 20 February 2008 21:30:18
I think I've wondered before on this blog how people make certain choices - why for example would anyone choose the luge as the sport at which they personally would excel at the Olympics? This evening while I was doing the washing up I was listening to a programme on the BBC World Service about acoustic researchers and scientists - one of those jobs that I can't imagine anyone telling their teacher they wanted to be one of those when they grew up, or suggested by the careers officer. But it was *so* interesting! Now I know nothing about physics, engineering, acoustics, etc etc, but it was just fascinating. They talked to the people involved in making the recordings of the winds on Titan, who explained how they could use the different types of sounds depending on how and where the probe landed to calculate depths and chemical composition and all sorts - how clever is that?! And then they talked with a guy who was recording soundscapes from various dangerous places around the world, charting how sounds in the environment change, and he talked about the stuff he'd encountered when he went to Chernobyl walking round Pripyat (the deserted worker's town), and walking through the whole area with a geiger counter. It certainly made the washing up more interesting! Goodness knows why anyone would choose to go into that area, but I'm so glad they did. I really like listening to people who are passionate about what they do. It doesn't really matter if I've no idea really what they're talking about. I just love that people are still finding out things and coming to interesting conclusions about all sorts of stuff, and helping the clueless masses (like me) find out about aspects of the world that would never occur to us normally. How fantastic is that?!