2012 — 23 December: Sunday
Being firmly in the embrace of my good friend Morpheus at the time, I was unaware of the train1 of thought I'd kicked off by my casual observation in my late-night email reply to Len — who'd just told me he'd been watching (and enjoying) the recent remake of that hoary classic "First Men in the Moon". All I said was Cavorite was invented on my birthday, by the way because that first page fictional factoid had quite naturally stuck in my memory for over half a century.
Ahhh, cavorite. I had not given that particular example of unobtainium a thought for many years until, a couple of days ago, there was a Register article on a new form of magnetism which only occurs in an
odd class of crystals. The researchers used high-purity Herbertsmithite, an unlikely appellation which immediately made me think of Wells' gravity-blocking substance. Apparently it demonstrates fractional
quantum states, which seems on the face of it weird even for quantum physics.
PS: "Cavorite was invented on my birthday" is a strange Mounceocentric view of time. Would it not be more correct to say that you were born on the anniversay of the invention of cavorite?
I'm currently re-reading an old favourite — "Macroscope" by Piers Anthony — which coincidentally devotes several pages to the precise problems that Len independently went on to ruminate amusingly over in his follow-up email:
The interesting question is how quickly would a gravity-immune object leave the surface of the earth. This is not too difficult to calculate if you assume the earth to be a rotating sphere stationary in space. Once you start taking orbital rotation and stellar drift and galactic rotation/drift into account things are a little more complex. I don't think it ever goes downwards but I can't yet prove it. It's a bit like one of those fairground rides where you sit in a spinning pot on the end of an arm rotating about a bracket on the end of another arm from the centre of the infernal device, trying to calculate which direction the vomit is going to go.
Since he clearly needs a) to get out more, b) to sleep more, and c) to cut back on his attendance at the astronomy lectures at the Intech place outside Winchester, we shall go out next week for a post-Xmas lunch.
Assuming his stomach has settled down :-)
Which reminds me, I should probably do something about breakfast, what with it being 10:40 or so. Meanwhile, the semi-divine Cerys, displaying a certain amount of brass(ica), has been filling her show with sprouts-related puns. (The game "Sprouts" features in Macroscope, of course.)
I was trying...
... to track down an SF novel I read many years ago. It featured a lad who, by some weird ability, always knew his location and orientation with respect to the centre of the Universe. I had thought it was by Ursula Le Guin, but got badly sidetracked (having recently mentioned the Hans Christian Andersen story) by the news that she'd received one of these wonderful awards:
The book was probably "The Man with Absolute Motion" (1955) by Noel Loomis, writing as Silas Water. Not as interesting as Billy Bragg's "John Peel" lecture, however.
Guns and crazy people
Were it not so tragic, some of the editorials in the wake of one of the latest massacres of innocents on the far side of the Pond would be hilarious. Random example:
For decades, when the public has grown more sympathetic to gun control after an attempted assassination or a spike in gun murders or a harrowing school shooting, Wayne LaPierre and his fellow NRA officials have hunkered down to wait for the "emotional period" or "hysteria," as they call it, to pass... LaPierre, who literally trembles when the omnipotent gun lobby is under siege, went ballistic painting a threatening picture of the dystopia that awaits if we don't protect our schools from guns by putting guns in schools.
"War is peace". Here's a transcript of Mr LaPierre's text. I wonder how many drafts it went through?
Music while I "work"
It's almost exactly one year since I had what I (foolishly) thought at the time was a bright idea. Namely, dispersing the 8,387 tracks on my 635 CD compilations among the 2,898 subfolders I already had at that point of other (non-compilation) CDs by many of the same performers. And a mere six months since I last moaned about the hatefulness of this entirely self-imposed task.
I am now very nearly at the half-way point, having (of course) decided to do the job properly — a masochistic code phrase that really means "clean up all the crap festering in the meta-tags" when I picked them up from a variety of free databases of the things. The evidence suggests they had been populated (largely, it seems) by musical illiterates. It's the glitches and inconsistencies in this meta data that variously upset each of the MP3 library systems I've been experimenting with as I try to wrangle2 my collection.
I hasten to add, this has not been a task I've devoted every waking moment to. Merely one I've nibbled away at whenever it was convenient and had bubbled more or less to the top of what I laughably still like to think of as my "to do" list.