The 2009 Christmas Diaries III

Right now you may be thinking: "Christmas is long gone, along with my interest in reading these tiresome Christmas Diaries." Well for us students it is most definitely still Christmas, and given that New Year is still round the corner I'm hoping you'll cut me some slack.

New Year's resolutions have never been my forté. In fact, I have become so bad at keeping them that I have decided they are stupid. From time to time I do set my self goals, I suppose they are resolutions in a sense, yet I'm not usually that good at keeping them either. As I was writing The 2009 Christmas Diaries I, I firmly believed I'd write a blog entry a day - truly making a unit of Christmas entries. Well, you see the result in front of you, hardly very impressive. It is sad how easily we let ourselves down so often, even in more serious cases our resolve is often shamefully weak.

I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day at my aunt Gill's house together with most of my British half of the family. Spending time with family was great; especially catching up with my twenty month old cousin Kirsten, and my cousin Matt's three year old daughter Maddie. Little kids are great fun, and they have an innate ability to make everyone else more fun as well. Uncles, aunts and cousins all hade a great time playing with the toys we got the toddlers for Christmas; especially Rolf's rocket balloons were a great hit. Balloon proppelled cars and planes - you can only imagine...

True to my word I'll give you another chemistry titbit before the year runs out. Scientists have a talent for being delighted by the seemingly obvious; and devoted to making simple things complicated. Last year I had a presentation on how everyone should love quantum mechanics - because without it there would be no fireworks. Now, in truth fireworks we invented long before anyone even thought of quantum mechanics. Quantum theory didn't make fireworks possible, it just explains why fireworks flash in bright colours. Analogically scientists take great pleasure in explaining that we owe our lives to Chemical Kinetics. It is a fact that the human body in air is thermodynamically unstable - this is because the atoms in question are more stable in the form of ash, carbon dyoxide and water than the human body in air. This reaction is also exothermic, meaning that according to the laws of thermodynamics the human body should spontaneously burst into flames, producing heat. Luckily for us the reaction of the human body with oxygen is kinetically extremely slow. (Combined with the fact that our respiratory system increases the entropy of the universe, chemical kinetics preserves our lives.) As fireworks could not exist without Quantum Mechanics, we would not exist without Chemical Kinetics; or as the non-scientist would say: "Scientists have theories on why both humans and fireworks exist."

As this Christmas' chilché section has been a huge let down I'll spare you the agony of having to endure another torrid attempt - though I challenge you to make a New Year's Resolution that will significantly change your weekly routine and keep it up for at least a month.