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Ray Bradbury at a NASA symposium (organised by Carl Sagan) dedicated to the imminent arrival of Mariner 9 at Mars, 1971.

Nothing more to say, really.

Goddammmmm British weather.

I've been up since 4:30 am to catch the transit of Venus. And I had to watch it via a webcast from Tromsø. The solar projecting, viewing thingy I built is now only good for sunspots.

Meh.

Today, 2pm to 8pm, I'm getting a final assessment from the Snowsport England person as a snowboard instructor. I'm taking my mind off it by doing some soldering.

I feel like I'm doing my MSc viva again, but without the funny clothes.

Actually that's not true. This is snowboarding, so it's different funny clothes.

WE Johns small number of Science Fiction books tend to get overlooked in amongst his fairly prolific output of Biggles and Worrals adventures. I get the feeling his heart wasn't really in it - possibly they were something he opportunistically had a go at in the late 50's, when the Biggles, World War 2 thing was starting to seem old hat and Sputnik ( Read more... )

In 1973, the rocket-scientist John D. Clark,Note 1 actually a propulsion chemist, published a book called Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. I've seen it on spaceflight and rocketry bibliographies, but never held an actual copy as the few out there in the wild change hand on ABEBooks for US$400 or more. This is why I was ( Read more... )

A few days ago, a friend sent me this, a clip from the BBC Nature unit.



With a little detective work on his part and a little local knowledge on mine, we worked out the location, and I mooched out there yesterday evening before sunset to take a look ( Read more... )

A couple of days ago, I had a brief, IRC conversion with somebody about old Atlases. I mentioned that I had a copy of the 1922 edition of the Times Atlas of the World, about the size of a broadsheet newspaper and the thickness of a phone book ( Read more... )

In Cambridge today, for a Mathworks symposium thingy on using Matlab with instrumentation. The first few talks were a succession of blokes from Aglent Technologies going on and on about using Matlab to talk with verious boxes they make, using SCPI (I showed up an 40 minutes late and spent quite a while baffled as to who or what "skippy" was) and ( Read more... )

As today is Ada Lovelace day....

Can I draw your attention to Beatrice Shilling? Most books on the Spitfire will give her a paragraph; Gunston's, well-regarded book on aircraft engines gives her a bit more, as so it damn-well should.

Her fascinating life deserves a better memorial than some pub-name in Farnborough.

Crossposted from Dreamwidth.

The snowboard lesson I took on Monday went well. Though without the slightly surreal note of last week's one - an airship circling overhead. That made it an effort to keep my attention on the lesson as I really really like airships ( Read more... )