Neodymium

After a small tray of sushi and a cup of chicken vegetable soup, we took a 5.5 km walk along the Grand Union canal, dodging overgrown hedging blowing in the gusts of wind. Our discussion covered house prices, tenancy and repossession stories. We also covered the ITV program last night that asked How Safe is Your Pension. Pension fraud is rampant - something the UK government has been slow to address. Meantime, some 11 million people are targeted each year by pension scammers. It's not a simple story. Pension deregulation in 2015 was but another step in the continuing asset stripping by government of cautious savers. It's as if the government are becoming the farmers who intensively farm cows, chickens and pigs, rather than let them roam free range. The wealth in pensions is being redistributed to benefit the masses at individual expense.

Snapseed has added a double exposure option which is how I combined the mallard family with a road sign.

We met a man magnet fishing under a bridge on the canal. He was casting and dunking a strong magnet from the tow path into the canal. At first, I thought it was a hook and asked what he was looking for. He showed us his haul for the day so far: a boat hook he was convinced was over 100 years old, a sword blade, some old bicycle parts, odd scraps of iron from cars and boats. He'd also lifted a bag of at least ten unused shotgun cartridges. We left him as he was lifting some more iron and I could see he was using a neodymium magnet - small and very powerful. Did you realise that there's about a kilo of neodymium (Nd2Fe14B) in the electric motor of every Toyota Prius? Don't panic: rare earths should be have been called diffuse earths because there's more Nd than Cu accessible to us on this planet.

Today I learned of a new word to express something I knew but could only describe with a pen and paper. Boustrophedon describes the surveying system used for land grids in most of the US. Positions on the grid can be hard to visualise for the nonprofessional. Ox turning for ploughing is the etymology and it described an early way of writing such as found on Mycenaean tablets from Knossos (Crete), a script form called Linear B. Printers tend to be boustrophedous, the head printing in one direction, then backwards in the other. 

The chart below is the order of our Yorkshire Three Peaks walk. The steepest bit is first. Aarghh, our rucksacks will be heaviest for the steepest bit. I'll have to practice now as if it was the real walk. I'll have to pack everything I'll carry at the start of the day. Spare socks. Survival blanket. Tissue. The camel-bak. Perhaps a spit roast chicken (joke) or whatever I intend to eat on the day. Like a refugee, everything on my back except not like a refugee at all (let's face it, I had sushi for lunch). Care sends packages to real refugees and others in crisis. That's the point. Please help us help them by sponsoring this challenge using the link at the top of this page.