Wikipedia
That’s over $2,500 for every man, woman and child in the United States, and about $115 for everyone in the World. I don’t have a clue about politics, but that seems fairly significant.

You’ll have all heard in the news on Monday about London’s ‘Mass Skive’. If you haven’t, there’s a nice video of Boris Johnson talking about it.

It really has been a mass skive though. Imperial College Mechanical Engineering Department, usually a bastion of the protestant work ethic, was closed for two whole days (although were back to normal today). I needn’t tell you that London is a brilliant place in the snow. I went to church on Sunday night. When I went in, it was clear, when I came out, the ground was coated in snow. Me and some friends had fun throwing each other into the snow on the way back through Hyde park.

On Monday, the snow was really quite impressive. Enough of description… pictures!

The Albert Memorial and the Royal Albert Hall

Queen’s Lawn Snowball Fight

The view from the 6^th floor of Mechanical Engineering

The panoramas were created using Microsoft’s Seadragon technology. They don’t do a lot of cool stuff, so they might as well get the credit this time. They have a Deep Zoom composer which generates code for your site. Finally, I’d like to present the gallery (I expect I’ll put in captions later):

Hello all,
I’ve been back at Imperial for a week now, and I thought it was about time I gave you an update.
The most exciting thing to greet me on my return to Imperial College was a genuine Ferrari F1 car. Fortunately for you, my wonderful readers, I have pictures!

The Ferrari has been lent to Imperial college for a short time, although I forget the reason why. I recall it being something to do with the Mechanical Engineering department collaborating with Ferrari on something. I said it was a genuine F1 car, but that was a little misleading. It is actually a show model with no engine. I am no F1 expert, but it looks as though it is the Ferrari F2003-GA, but painted in 2009 livery. If you have time, take a look at Ferrari’s new 2009 F1 car.
On Thursday we had quite a fun lab in which we tested the efficiency of two different engines, a diesel and a petrol engine of 1.5 and 1.3 litres respectively. It was definitely one of the louder labs we have done.
But it’s not all fun and games here at Imperial. In fact, practically none of it is fun and games, and despite the light smattering of exciting new things like fiddling with Engines and learning MATLAB, there were also a series of rather horrendous progress tests. I’m not sure I’ve failed any of them, but I’m certain I haven’t performed spectacularly in any of them. I am most optimistic about Mechatronics. Before the test, I didn’t understand any of the questions, and things gradually started to dawn on me through the course of the test, although I forgot the equation to find the V_RMS of an AC wave.
Hope you’re having fun and I’d love to hear from you all,
Peter

Sam, who has recently become a Christian, was baptised today. We had a service in Hartshill, and then went on to Park for the actual baptism. Jonathan Gravil led the baptismal service, and my father supervised. A picture can be seen below:

It has been a while since we have had a baptism in our church, and this one was certianly special. Several of her family and friends came. For the morning service, my dad continued the series he had been preaching on John, and by God’s providence it turned out to be John 3 this particular morning. We finished with a church meal.

At the same time, we also thanked Trevor Knight for his ministry in our church. He has now moved on to Emmanuel Evangelical Church in order to have more contact with his family. He was presented with a copy of ‘Sermons on the Incarnation’ by CJ Alexander.

Ich habe heute meine schließliche deutsche Prüfung gehabt. Leider, habe ich letzte Nacht schlecht geschlaffen. Meiner Meinung nach, waren die Frage aus dem Prüffungsblätte ziemlich einfach. Ich denke dass ich habe denen gut bestanden. Anderseits, musste ich einen 275-300 Wörte Aufsatz auch schreiben. Das war nicht so gut. Ich habe nur c.200-220 Wörte geschrieben, und habe ich in denen viele Fehlern gemacht. Das war 25/60 der Noten, und 1/12 der ganzen A-Level-Noten. Jedoch, habe ich gute Noten in jeden anderen Anteil des Deutschsprachkurs. So Gott will, würde ich doch nächstes Jahr Imperial College besuchen.

Nanowire ‘pine trees’ on physicsworld.com

This morning I picked up a recent copy of national geographic and read through an article about environmentalism in Iceland. It was talking about the dilemma Iceland are facing surrounding renewable energy. Iceland has thermal and hydroelecticity in abundance, but also has an incredibly beautiful landscape, which the exploitation of such power sources, would, and is in the process of, destroying. ‘Green Energy’ and environmentalism have therefore in this case become enemies. You can see pictures on the National Geographic Website.

The reason I say all this is that it reminded me that for some time I’ve been wanting to find a good Physics magazine. It turns out physicsworld.com is a good one, and it’s online, so I don’t have to pay anything, which is of course a bonus. It’s the level of physics which is actually interesting, unlike ‘New Scientist’, which is just annoying… And produces articles which provide ‘proof’ for pantheism.

On English Russia there’s a post about a scale model of the entirety of Moscow. Quite an undertaking.

On a similar note, there’s a good chance my father’s model railway should be fully operational soon. This is a 47ft long beast of an O gauge layout. At the moment, it’s stored in his Tentmaker book storeroom, and that’s where it’s going to be kept for the foreseeable future. The layout was the labour of love of his Model Railway club. It is so long that the club were only ever able to fully erect it at model railway exhibitions, and only two of the many railway boards were permanently seen in the clubroom.

As fuel price rise rapidly, the Roberts’ acquire a new car. It’s very nice and I like it ^^. It’s also clean, which makes a change.

This weekend I had a really excellent weekend away in Conwy. Our CU shared the weekend away with Emma’s church. This meant that we could have a hokiday as a CU< which otherwise wouldn't have been possible.

The highlight of the weekend for me was definitely climbing Crib Goch with Tim, Mandy, Ben, Ben, Steve, Cesar, Katherine, and a couple of other people whose names escape me. Crib Goch, if you are not aware, is a mountain in the region around Snowdonia. The original intention had been to climb Crib Goch, then climb up to Snowdonia. Unfortunately, this wasn’t possible due to the weather starting to look quite bad, and me having boots that had little or no grip.

However, during the time, we did still manage to see some beautiful sights. The panorama below shows the view from half way up Crib Goch:

Another of my favourite pictures was the one you can see below:

A lot more pictures are available to see on Alastair’s flickr page. Here they can be viewed full, or however you want.

A lot of people have been having birthdays recently. One of those people was Ben Youd (Emma’s boyfriend, and a good friend from CU), who received a Nikon D80. I recommend you head over to see |yearn|only|until|dawn|, his photoblog on aminus3. I’ve been quite impressed so far, because most people who say ‘daily updates’ actually mean ‘I’ll update once or twice, then quit forever’. A good example of such a person is Monika Roberts, but it looks as though Ben actually means it so far. Good job! I was going to comment on how bad the name of his blog was. Then I remember what mine was called, and decided silence on that subject would be better.

To be honest, the weekend for me made me realise just how fantastic the people in my CU are. There’s only a few of us, but I’ll have to say I’m lucky to have such good friends. It was also very special to meet the people from the Word of Life church again, having not seen them since I broke up with Emma.

Lot of stuff has happened since I last updated in any interesting way. Some of the most significant were my trips to Imperial College London and Bath University.

Imperial College London

I visited Imperial sometime in November. Imperial is every bit as shiny as it looks on the prospectus. After having a tour of Imperial, I had my interview, which, thankfully, was nice and early so I could look around London before I left. I was taking pictures outside Imperial on the street with my really massive camera, when I was approached by a friend of someone in ICRacing, in order to help in a photo shoot they were doing. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I took a lot of pictures:

I spent quite a bit of time after taking these pictures making the panoramas etc. with Damjan and MJ afterwards, preparing the photos to be used etc. I found out after adding MJ on facebook that she is in the CU, which she tells me is very geared for evangelism and also a church that I have been told is very strong on the word (independant adjudicators being my dad and Ben Epps). I shouldn’t have to say this, but enough people have asked, so… I don’t intend to marry MJ. I hope that’s established now. The point is that I’ve found out about the CU and a good church.

Bath University

Both my parents went to Bath University, and my dad studied the same course I have applied to. Bath, like London, is the home of several good churches. The one I have been recommended most is Widcombe Baptist. A strong, Bible believing church, and, if I’m not mistaken, the one my dad went to. Anyway, on to the pictures:

I also have pictures of Cambridge, but we’ve spent quite a while already, and they didn’t give me an offer, so we’ll move on.

In my opinion, university is worth thinking about just for the open days. With the exception of Manchester, I had a most excellent time at every university I visited. I can’t help it, but most of the decision I made was based, rather than on raw fact, on the fact that I simply liked some places more than others. So what decision did I make?

1. Firm Choice: Imperial College London
2. Insurance Choice: Loughborough University

I think that’s all I have to say for now, except that tomorrow I’ve decided to have a birthday, and I’m very much looking forward to it.