Happy New Year

It's the time of year again for New Year's resolutions. You know the sort of thing; lose weight, exercise more, spend less - a thousand and one good intentions prompted by the purchase of a new calendar. Problem is though, the calendar usually lasts much longer than our resolve.
It's strange how we think that the new year provides special potential, that somehow we're much more able to change when the year does than at any other time. Truth is, though, that there's no difference between the minute before midnight on the 31st December and the one that comes after it. They're only man-made divisions of time and both provide the same sixty second's worth of opportunity.
When we make New Year's resolutions but fail to see them through we can fall into despair and think everything is lost, but in reality we can make a new start at any time. This is a great truth we often miss, and one that's worth remembering. Every day is a new day, and every morning brings new possibilities. So does every minute and every hour. You can't change the past, but you can shape the future, and every second that passes is a chance to strike out in a new direction.
This year, resolve not to be held back by negative thinking, small faith and past failures. Let go of old grudges, clinging resentments and the "I Can't" mentality. If you make up your mind to change on the inside, things will change on the outside. "With God, " the Bible says, "all things are possible," so even the giants you can't manage are possible with His help.
Be encouraged, my struggling friend, and press forward constantly for all God intends you to be, whether it's the first of January or the twenty-sixth of November. Refuse to give up, don't stop believing and never quit. That's the way to have a Happy New Year.

A Good Night's Sleep

Stella and I went out for a shopping-date yesterday, and after some superb Thai food we ended up in Dunelm Mill, a cornucopia of discount fabrics, homewares and soft furnishings at reasonable prices. There were loads of reductions in the Sale, so we went on a bargain hunt.
I headed straight for the bedding - strange behaviour, you might think, for a tools-and-gadget-loving male. Perhaps I should explain...
I have a problem with pillows. I've tried many in the past, looking for the one that will give me a consistently good night's sleep. They never deliver. The last one I bought was a 'rebound pillow', which was meant to return to its former shape time and again. After a few weeks, however, it ended up like all the others; supportive at the edges but with a void in the middle that no amount of tugging, pummeling or shaking could remedy.
Maybe I have a heavy head? Stella's head is about the same size and weight as mine but her pillows remain annoyingly serviceable. I've even tried stealing them, but once they get under my head they're doomed and the same cavity soon develops. Maybe I roll around or kneel up and repeatedly head-butt the pillow in my sleep? It's possible, but since I'm asleep I've no idea. What I do know, though, is that I've been waking up tired and with headaches and neck pain for months.
I'd heard of memory foam before. Apparently developed by NASA, it responds to your body and moulds itself to your shape before returning to normal when you get up. And it's usually quite expensive, so I was intrigued to find memory foam pillows in Dunelm Mill at discount prices. One pillow from their most expensive range was on display with an invitation to "touch me". So I did. I can't say I was impresssed.
My hand sank into it, and when I let go it popped back out, but it looked and felt and even smelled pretty much like a block of bog-standard foam I could have bought on the market for a couple of quid. Undecided, I stood there pushing and squashing it for a while, walked away then came back again and squished it some more. Surely there must be something to this memory foam thing?
Eventually, lured by a 50% discount and sheer nocturnal desperation, I bought it.
That same evening I put it on my bed and when night came I lowered my head, waiting for paradise.
It felt like a block of foam. My head sank in a bit and then stopped, so I lay there for a while, determined to give it a chance.
"Feels a lot firmer than my old pillow," I grumbled. Then I fell asleep.
My first thought when I woke up, though, was how comfortable I felt. I felt like I'd slept, too; there was no dull, slow awakening, no residual headache and my neck didn't hurt. Even now, six hours later as I sit typing, my neck feels better than it has in a long time.
Have I discovered the perfect pillow? Only time will tell, but if I have then it will have been money well spent, every penny of it. I'll report back in a few weeks, but in the meantime,
have you tried memory foam? If so, what did you think?

A Letter From The President

Recently, in the bicentennial year of Abraham Lincoln's birth, a letter sent by the famous president was sold for £36,000.
Big deal, you might say. What's so special about that? Well, what's special about this letter is not so much who sent it but who it was sent to.
You see, this letter, delivered nearly 150 years ago, was sent to an eight-year-old schoolboy.
The story is an interesting one. As a young boy, George Patten was with his journalist father when they both met the commander-in-chief. When he went back to school George excitedly reported the encounter to his classmates and teacher - but nobody took him seriously.
Mocked by his disbelieving classmates George stuck to his story to such an extent that his exasperated teacher wrote to the president. And back, by return, came a hand-written, signed letter.
It read: "Whom it may concern, I did see and talk with master George Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois. Respectfully, A Lincoln."
What's so precious about this letter is that it was sent just two weeks after the president's inauguration. At such a time, having just become the most powerful man in the nation at a critical moment in its history, I'm sure Lincoln had many worthy things he could have devoted his energies to. I'm sure there were many important documents waiting to be read and signed, people to meet and places to go, but it says something about the man that he recognised the importance of this simple plea for help and responded, settling all doubt. Now, nobody could ever say again that George Patten had not met with Lincoln.
The parallel for us is simple yet profound. No matter how unimportant we may feel, our prayers before God carry the same weight as those uttered by the great and powerful. No matter how personal our request may seem, God never writes it off as unimportant or not worth considering. God, like Lincoln, resists the modern tendency to lump people into categories and instead sees the value of each individual. And, like Lincoln, each individual gets his undivided attention and a personal response.
So next time you get down to pray, remember Lincoln's letter and realise that the author of all time and space just put down his pen for a moment to listen to you.

Procrastination

I've always been prone to procrastination. Once an item gets onto my to-do list it becomes a little indicator light winking away in the dark part of my brain, a constant ticking metronome that says "do me; do me; you know you've got to do me..." If I ignore it begins to flash faster and the voice protests "Hey! I'm still here! Do me now!" You can imagine how bad it gets if I put something off until it becomes embarrasing or critical (or both), and given my busy schedule it's small wonder that my head sometimes feels like a Christmas tree in imminent danger of meltdown.
The problem is, just because I put something off doesn't make it go away. It sits there with its other unfulfilled brethren, draining my time, resolve and energy with their incessant demands. I have to look at each one of them, sort them into priority order and then make a plan. Once I've promised myself "I'll do this next Thursday," the flashing stops and I can find the mental space to do what I'm supposed to be doing right now.
It's a problem that affects us all, particularly in today's world. The urgent can so easily overshadow the important until the urgent is all we ever do. We become driven by the tyranny of the moment, so busy putting out fires that we never get to what needs doing later - until it becomes too hot to handle. Then we have to deal with that, which means we never get round to what needs doing later, and so the cycle goes on - a mad runaway ferris wheel of doom sweeping us around so fast that we can never get off.
When we live like this the spiritual always gets neglected. That's because it never becomes urgent - until the day we die or have a nervous breakdown of course. But spiritual well-being is crucial. Where else can we find the inner resources to deal with life's demands? How else can we put our lives into context and so dedicate our time and talents to the things that really matter? No tall tower can ever be stable without a good foundation, and the higher you build the better your foundation needs to be. How much time are you investing into yours?

Wanted - Energetic Men

"We love upright, energetic men. Pull them this way, and then that way, and the other, and they only bend, but never break. Trip them down, and in a trice they are on their feet. Bury them in the mud, and in an hour they will be out and bright. They are not ever yawning away existence, or walking about the world as if they had come into it with only half their soul; you cannot keep them down; you cannot destroy them. But for these the world would soon degenerate. They are the salt of the earth. Who but they start any noble project? They build our cities and rear our manufactories; they whiten the ocean with their sails, and they blacken the heavens with the smoke of their steam-vessels and furnace fires; they draw treasures from the deep mine; they plow the rich earth. Blessings on them! Look to them, young men, and take courage; imitate their example; catch the spirit of their energy and enterprise, and you will deserve, and no doubt command, success."
Readings for Young Men, Merchants, and Men of Business, 1866 - from www.artofmanliness.com

The Bladeless Fan

I don't know if you've seen any articles about the new 'bladeless fan' (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5ba62a00-b755-11de-9812-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1 for example), but I was challenged earlier today by a good friend to to explain how it works.
Certainly.
There are two key passages in the article:
First: "As a result, Dyson claims the bladeless fan, which works by forcing a jet of air out of a narrow circular slit and then over an aerofoil-shaped blade, is at least as efficient as its bladed counterpart, more comfortable and much safer"
Forcing air out of a narrow slit is going to speed the air up considerably, and then this faster air is going to be passed over an aerofoil shape. This is classic stuff for Bernoulli's principle which is what makes aeroplanes fly. Basically if you have a current of moving air flowing over an aerofoil (wing) shape, the air going over the curved top has further to go than the air going under the flat bottom so it has to speed up to make it to the far side in the same time.
When any moving fluid (air in this case) speeds up, Bernoulli's principle states that it's pressure goes down and vice versa. So above the wing the air is moving faster than it is below the wing, which means the pressure above the wing is lower than the pressure below it. Thus the wing experiences an upward force and voila - make the air go over the wing fast enough by whatever means and we have lift off.
Okay, so that's the background. How does this apply to the bladeless fan?
Consider the second passage: "The new fan works by drawing air into the base of the machine. The air is forced up into the loop amplifier and accelerated through the 1.3mm annular aperture, creating a jet of air that hugs the airfoil-shaped ramp. While exiting the loop amplifier, the jet pulls air from behind the fan into the airflow (inducement). At the same time, the surrounding air from the front and sides of the machine are forced into the air stream (entrainment), amplifying it 15 times. The result is a constant uninterrupted flow of cooling air."
Okay, so they got an "annular apeture". Annular means ring and for apeture read slit, so there's a slit all the way round the ring that's blowing a ring of high-speed air across the surface of the shaped ring and out the other side. We're told the air "hugs the airfoil-shaped ramp" so we know we're on the right track.
This moving air crossing the aerofoil is going to cause low pressure at that point, so there's going to be a ring of low pressure created on the rear side of the ring. This will suck air behind the fan forward and cause it to go through the ring and into the airstream - a process they call 'inducement'.
They've also got some 'entrainment' going on, and basically what they're saying here is that once this thing gets going there is a current of moving air pouring quickly out the front. Moving air equals higher speed equals lower pressure, so the quiet air surrounding this low-pressure airstream is going to be drawn into it as well, amplifying the effect.
They quote an amplification factor of fifteen times, meaning that the little blower in the handle can be fifteen times smaller than would be required to generate that amount of air movement by conventional means.
What an amazing little device!

Seasons

It's that time of year again here in the UK. I realised this week when I changed back onto the early shift and woke to find it dark outside my window. The nights are drawing in, the heat has gone out of the sun and it won't be long until the dreaded season of winter has us once again in its icy grip.
I hate winter. I hate getting up in the dark, driving to work in the dark, watching the dawn from my desk and seeing night fall again all too soon from the same spot. Then I drive home in the dark and try not to feel as if every second of my 'real' day has been stolen by my employer. I hate standing in the cold and dark driveway, trying to scrape impenetrable ice from the car windscreen with a plastic scraper that always breaks, then finding as I try to drive away that I still can't see because my breath has frozen on the inside of the glass. There are some days I'm only warm when I'm in bed, and being of slim build the cold grips me to the core of my bones.
For years I used to say there were only three good things about winter: Bonfire night, Christmas and my birthday. But I was wrong. There's a fourth - winter ends!
No matter how much I hate it, the thing that keeps me going is that spring is just around the corner; that sooner or later the cold will break, the trees will bud, the garden will flower and I'll be able to throw my thermals back into the cupboard for another year.
The seasons are God's way of reminding us that dark times don't last forever and better days will come. This is true of life itself and not just the weather. If things are hard for you right now then hold on to the thought that life won't always be this way. Look ahead to good things down the road, and let their prospect cheer your soul as, like me, you ride out the winter storms