Fergus Murray

Author: ferrous

  • Podcasts

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    I started listening to podcasts regularly some time early this year, when I finally got round to installing software for it on my phone (Podkicker). I’d previously been a regular BBC Radio 4 listener at various times in my life, and started pulling together the Everything2 podcast a few years ago, but it was only…

  • Ionic Bonding

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    What Ionic Bonding Is Ionic bonding is the type of chemical bonding that binds non-metals with metals, and occasionally other things*, forming ionic compounds. An ion is just an atom (or sometimes a molecule) with an overall electric charge – many atoms and molecules have exactly as many electrons as they have protons, so the charges cancel out; when that doesn’t hold true, we end up…

  • The Everyday Signs of Light Waves

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    Light, like all the basic constituents of our universe, seems to be made of waves. Waves that act a bit like particles, sometimes, but which spread out and interfere with each other just like other waves. It’s about 200 years since physicists finally agreed that light behaves like a wave, after Poisson proved himself wrong…

  • Iron Noder

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    This November I posted 30 finished pieces of writing on Everything2, on whatever I felt like writing about at the time. By doing so I completed the Iron Noder Challenge, which has been running every November since 2008. This was the first time I took part in earnest – making the effort to write and…

  • Reading about Thinking

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    This year I’ve found myself reading a bunch of books about the mind, the brain, and the nature of the self. For some reason I’m reading them all in parallel, picking one or the other depending on how I’m feeling on any given day, which is probably why I haven’t actually finished any of them…

  • Camellia’s Tea House

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    I am currently working part-time at Camellia’s Tea House, in Kingly Court, on Carnaby Street. It is the sort of place that immediately feels like a slice of heaven to a tea lover – you enter and there is one wall filled almost to the ceiling with caddies and big glass jars. There are about…

  • The Rain in Carballo

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    I’ve been a little slow to start going through my photos from this Summer’s two-month trip around the Iberian peninsula. I stayed for about two weeks in the town of Carballo, which is 35km from A Coruña, 45km from Santiago de Compostela and 10km from the nearest beach. It’s a small, quiet town full of…

  • Travel in Iberia

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    I spent much of this summer travelling overland around the Iberian Peninsula – the parts of the world commonly known as Spain and Portugal. I was teaching and looking after kids at a summer camp in the Basque Country for two weeks, and then I had about a week and a half travelling in a…

  • Photo Point

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    I crouch below the eyeline of the crowd Half-watching  Water dance, half  in-camera. The drumming and the wash-rags beating loud I strive to  trap in electronic  amber. With flashes or by squatting frozen-still I  take away the movement of the night. This festival of  Nowness on the hill Distilled in  slices,  slides for  future sight.…

  • Climate Camp

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    Climate Camp (or the Camp for Climate Action, in full) is a reaction to the failures of our governments to take anything like the steps that science tells us will be necessary to avert catastrophic climate change, and to the failures of our democratic system to represent dissenting voices. When even majority opinions are readily…