Gallery preparations, Gove plays to the gallery and Trump plays the bully

First call of the day was from my mother back from her holiday by the Baltic coast, which seemed to have been a good break. This was followed by a bit of problem solving - to get a document page to write in on one side of the screen and an image to transcribe from on the other half. Then it was off to pick up Louise and her artwork in readiness for our joint Cambridge Open Studio. We then spent the rest of the afternoon sorting out the layout of our 3 different collections of art in our gallery for the next weekend, also known as the garage during the rest of the year.

Whilst the other's chatted, I spent the evening trying to solve a microscopy problem. I wanted to illuminate some insect samples in dark field - where the subject glows against a dark background. A strong LED wide field light and a five pence piece covered with black card worked remarkably well in the end. I went on to take image stacks totaling over 1200 images of dog lice, assorted mites, ticks and microscopic chalcid wasps. Now need to process the image stacks.

Environment Minister Michael Gove came up with two different proposals today. The first continued the rising tide within the Tory's, arguing for a relaxation of austerity. Gove suggested that the government should listen to the review bodies on public sector pay. The pressure to remove the 1% pay cap is increasing.

The second was that the UK was to withdraw from an international fishing convention of 1964 with the Irish, Dutch, French, German and Belgian, and regain control of the 6 to 12 mile offshore border. Which created irritation with current allies in Ireland and consternation on Brussels, which saw the arrangement as having been superseded by more recent EU law, The Common Fisheries Policy. The Scots were however pleased as they had been pressing  for this UK decision for some time, though the SNP decried it as a cheap ploy to garner one more bargaining chip in the Brexit negotiations.

President Trump showed the depths towards which his 'Modern Day Presidential' approach towards the media he hates has sunk. He retweeted a video which apparently shows him flooring a man with the CNN logo over his face and repeatedly punching him. Fortunately this is not really the case as this was an edited video of a mock fight he had been invited to play in at a WWE wrestling event, back in 2007. The video had been posted on Reddit by a pro Trump supporter. The President then retweeted it on both his own Twitter feed and that of the official presidential Twitter feed. Quite frankly, the man has no real perception of the climate and promotion of bullying that this furthering.

Speaking to the BBC News on his 75th Birthday, (celebrated here in Cambridge with many from the world of science) Stephen Hawking warned that US President Donald Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement could lead to irreversible climate change and turn the Earth into a hothouse planet like Venus.

Professor Hawking also feared aggression was "inbuilt" in humans (see today's Trump video tweet and the ongoing attacks and wars around the world reported today. He though that our best hope of survival was to live on other planets.