Tom Womack

This is the Sri Aruloli Thirumurugan Hindu temple at the top of the hill in Penang. Most Hindus in Malaysia are the descendants of Tamils brought to Malaya in the early 1800s, so this is in the Dravidian architectural style of the southern tip of India, rather than the Moghul style of Delhi in the north.

Thai Buddhist architecture is not noted for its economy in materials or its restraint in design. Shiny glass is, however, shiny.

This is the queue of people visiting the Bahai temple in Delhi. The temple itself is remarkably reminiscent of New Hall:

Apparently four million people come to this temple each year.

Ranthambore Tiger Park, 8 November 2005. I didn't manage even a four-pixel photo of a tiger, though we did see one, once, for a few seconds, on the other side of a lake, in eight hours of driving around the park in a jeep.

Amazing filigree marble carvings at the Amber fort in Jaipur (6 November 2005)

I have run out of disc space; I have a spare hot-swap disc bay in my computer; I'd like to put a 1TB disc in it.

www.scan.co.uk list thirteen models of 1TB SATA hard disc, ranging in price from £77 to £165, with no idea as to what differentiates them. I currently have three Seagate drives and a WD drive, so diversification suggests the cheaper Hitachi one, but that's a justification not much better than writing down the list and using a pin.

Given my curse, I wonder if I should buy two 1TB drives from different manufacturers and keep them as a RAID1.

I recently bought some samples of rare-earth elements from elementsales.com - gadolinium, terbium and dysprosium - to play with their magnetic properties. They're supplied as coins inside plastic discs, since they're reasonably reactive.

The gadolinium behaves roughly as I was expecting it to; it's quite strongly attracted to a magnet when cold, and less so when hot. I thought the Curie point was a sharp phase transition and the material would be non-magnetic above 19C, but the material sticks to a magnet even if I've freshly taken it out of hot water. I've been a bit wary since the Curie point of NdFeB magnets is only about 80C; I should get hold of a more-robust magnet. eBay has a very limited range of SmCo2 magnets (most hits for samarium-cobalt are guitar pickups); possibly I just want a large iron bar magnet, but I'm not quite sure where to buy those in the real world.

The terbium and dysprosium, however, are also attracted to the magnet (the Dy less so than the Tb) at room temperature. It's a fairly fearsome magnet, so I suppose that the Tb and Dy have some traces of Gd left in them and that's what's being picked up; in which case I should try boiling them and seeing how the magnetism goes away. I need to think more about how to measure the forces here; I can't think of a setup with magnet, element, spring-balance and bits of string where I can just read off the force, and a model where I pull on a spring balance until the element comes free of the magnet seems impossible to get good readings from.

I imagine a note to the element supplier saying that they are supplying inferior gadolinium-laced terbium would not be useful; separating adjacent rare earth elements is proverbially hard.

Any advice on better magnets, better terbium, or better experimental setup?

I get into Gare du Nord at 7pm on Monday; the train to Nancy where the conference is leaves at 8:12am on Tuesday, so I have an evening to spend in Paris. I've booked a room at the station hotel.

Can anyone suggest something more fun of a Monday evening than watching Tropic Thunder soustitré à la Français?

The seaside, except in places prone to disturbing tectonic excitement, is flat. Norfolk is so flat that its mountain rescue service is too obvious to be the topic of surreal jokes. So how come the ride from Happisburgh to Cromer appears to consist exclusively of thigh-melting hills?

I got up at 8:30, caught the 9:12 to Norwich, and was in Lowestoft around 11:30. A brief visit to the easternmost point of England, then along coastal roads to Great Yarmouth and a little beyond; a Ploughman's lunch in a caff by the beach at Caister. More coastal roads to Cromer, via the top of the tower at Happisburgh and candid shots of the UK-EU Natural Gas Pipeline Interconnect at Becton and the golf-ball of the coastal defence radar at Trimingham, and onto the 17:59 to Norwich. http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2277967 is the route.

I took my newly-cleaned DSLR, for which my neck will not thank me come the morrow; it is not a light body, nor is the 18-200 lens easily confused with a helium balloon.

Ah. I've been distinctly lucky. Just as I put the bike onto the train home, the front gear cable snapped and fell off.The gear cable lying under my bike as I moved it to a more convenient place on the train turned out not to be mine.