November challenge; macro monday. Electric blue

I don’t know why but blue is my favourite colour. Especially that shade known as ‘electric blue’. My favourite bike was that colour (especially with silver shiny bits, like the wheels) and if I ever get a Harley-Davidson motor cycle, it will be that colour. I expect someone who has a PhD in these things might be able to provide an answer. Not that the ‘why’ really bothers me.

Electric blue gets its name - as you might suspect - from electricity; specifically, the spectral emission (colour) of excited molecules. This is all very appropriate because my molecules are rather excited today. We’re about to move into the 21st century with fast broadband.

Our current broadband is slow. So slow that I imagine the cable made up of a chain of Imps passing the electrons to each other, rather like those old films where people would pass a bucket of water whenever a fire broke out. Every so often, one of the Imps drops an electron and the signal stops while they all scrambled round looking for it. This would often occur when Anniemay or I were trying to upload to Blip.

Anniemay, quite reasonably, always asks why our broadband is so slow, when the telephone exchange is only a couple of miles away. The Imps idea doesn’t really wash, what with her being a mathematician and all, so I have to explain the history of Milton Keynes. This is usually guaranteed to stop her questioning any further.

MK was built in the late 1960s/early 1970s and coincided with two modern day plagues; the great brick shortage and the great copper shortage. The great brick shortage was caused by a …. shortage of bricks. Which is why many of the early estates were built with aluminium cladding on wooden frames (some are still standing - just).

The great copper shortage was caused by political upheaval in Zambia. Our house, built in 1974, has stainless steel plumbing because there was no copper tubing available at the time. It’s an absolute pain to deal with because over time some of the pipe work has needed replacing and we’ve had to use copper. Any chemist will tell you what happens when you have two dissimilar metals in water …. I can’t because I’m not a chemist.

As far as the implications for broadband are concerned, at around the same time, someone had the bright idea of using aluminium for telephone cables instead of copper. Aluminium cable has far fewer Imps than copper and they’re really clumsy. Not only that - they keep losing the electrons that they drop. Hopeless.

Carrying speech over wires needs far fewer Imps than carrying all your emails and all your photos. So it was fine at the time because no one had thought of broadband or the internet. Which brings us back to today.

Today’s blip shows our new modem, the blue light indicating that the molecules are excited. I tried my close-up lens to see if I could capture any Imps. But they’re a bit shy.

Anniemay looks over my shoulder as I’m writing this.

Her; “that’s lot of writing”.
Me; “I’m explaining why our broadband is slow…”
Her; “aaaaarggghhhh….”