Drafts

Some of my drafted posts have been waiting for a while to one day get published. I started working on my post on food waste a few months before it was finally published, partially due to me having some reservations on what would end up in the blogpost. Over time, these posts have ended up being forgotten, never looked at again, destined to remain an irritating stub that never goes beyond a few hundred words.

The first draft is a post called "Small Things", and it was going to be physics related. This is all the blogpost ever amounted to:

The universe is quite big, and very old. We don't know exactly how large the universe's diameter is, and it's 13,800,000,000 years old. Indeed, the universe is expanding, and will continue to do so until it doesn't, and who knows when or what that point will be? 

There are, however, very small things in the universe, too. There are many limits to certain concepts in the universe. 0K, for example, is the coldest temperature in the universe. You can't get much smaller than an electron in an atom, once thought to be the smallest indivisible thing in the universe. And then you have the Planck units, defined through the Planck constant.

It was going to be partly about the Planck constant, or 6.63x10^-34, but I never got round to it. I last worked on it in July, and instead of reading that post, you got treated to posts on e, the UN, and the Sutton loop instead. It might eventually get published, except not as that exact post - I've been reading about quantum theory, and have also studied the photoelectric effect; now that would be an interesting blogpost.

This draft on opposition leaders under Prime Ministers is suddenly rather topical:

Before the 1911 Parliament Act, there were two Leaders of the Opposition of equal rank - that of the House of Commons and that of the House of Lords. Therefore, we can't definitively give Disraeli this position in front - he was only the offici

Yes, I really did stop writing it mid-word. I went on a walk with my mum and sister so had to put it on pause, and I guess I never cared enough to get back to it. It's a boring concept, I must admit.

I had this rant on automatic updates lined up back in February, but it quickly got out of date when I went on holiday to Egypt and generally stopped writing:

My phone does something which gets on my nerves. When I go to bed and let it charge, the operating system might update - usually, this update will be rather minor and therefore doesn't affect me much. The annoying bit is that it will update without letting me tell it not to - I'll know if it tried and failed as I will get a notification saying so.

But then it will put me onto a completely different version of the phone's operating system, as happened a few days ago when I got iOS 17. It's not significantly different from iOS 16 to be fair, in fact if my phone hadn't told me it had (successfully) updated, I wouldn't have noticed. The only change was that now Apple have some weird journal app which, if I used, would be replacing some of my blogposts and I would hate to do that. But that's not what I'm really annoyed by.

If a device is going to update, it will usually come up with a notification asking if I want the device to update now or later. Never is the option no. And perhaps my complaining is needless, but it’s still something I think is a bit snide.

I have a friend who says I complain too much, and this draft is proof he is right.

I began discussing odd university courses in this post, but clearly was put off by just how many weird courses there actually are. Besides, my heart is mostly set on a few options, provided I get the grades I need in them:

Marine Sciences is only offered by five unis, the highest ranked (according to the Complete University Guide) being Essex, but Marine Biology is offered by twenty-five unis, including St Andrews (one of the most presitigious in the UK). Compare that to subjects like history and politics, with almost three times more unis offering them than offer the marine subjects. But only one uni (Lancaster) offers Politics and German Studies. 

Here is more proof I complain too much - this was going to be called "Engaging":

My lack of success in getting indexed makes me think that Google simply doesn't appreciate posts that take a long time to make on a diverse range of topics. Obviously they'd prefer I made posts that took fifty seconds to read, that seems to be all the rage nowadays, and if it was on Taylor Swift or some popular Netflix show, maybe I'd do even better. Where's the market for a post-punk-loving Millwall fan who studies chemistry? And who cares about personality anyways - after all, looks are surely everything nowadays in an influencer-heavy market. Some even go on shows to find love, and get a sponsorship with Boohoo whilst they're at it. They're engaging, intriguing, beguiling. Who am I? Just another student writing up a supercurricular project - the social networks would hardly wait for me to catch up.

And there are countless other drafts, but they're somewhat interesting so don't count. I'll be writing about the three types of twilight again, I'll discuss some more National Trust sites, I even have a post on r values waiting to be filled in. In the meantime, I have 162 posts and over 100,000 words written up - I think at least half of them deserve to have made the cut.