Scare Hill (NJ 683193, 280m) Millstone Hill (NJ 676202, 409m) Mither Tap (NJ 682223, 518m) Oxen Craig (NJ 662226, 529m) Watch Craig (NJ 653224, c490m) 17.4 kilometres 820 metres of ascent Bennachie is the last eastward gasp of the Cairngorms—a low ridge of moorland dotted with granite tors, beyond which the ground descends into the … Continue reading Bennachie
əˈpɒstrəfiː apostrophe: 1) A rhetorical device in which the speaker breaks off from discourse in order to address a person or thing, absent or present; 2) The sign ’, used to indicate omitted letters, or the possessive case [I]t appears from the evidence that there was never a golden age in which the rules for … Continue reading Apostrophe: Part 1
And still I persist in wondering whether folly must always be our nemesis. Edgar Pangborn, “My Brother Leopold” (1973) Edgar Pangborn had a great name—not enough people mention that, I feel. He’s the latest author to feature in my intermittent project of rereading classic-but-not-now-famous science-fiction stories from my formative years—the sort of stories that some … Continue reading Edgar Pangborn: The “Darkening World” Cycle
No matter how many times he considered it, Jophiel shivered with awe. It was obviously an artefact, a made thing two light years in diameter. A ring around a supermassive black hole. Stephen Baxter, Xeelee: Redemption (2018) I’ve written about rotating space habitats in the past, and I’ve written about relativistic starships, so I guess … Continue reading Relativistic Ringworlds
This is Pegasus Hobbies’ version of Wernher von Braun’s original conception of how we’d land on the moon—in a stonking great 4000-ton spacecraft with 30 engines and a crew capacity of 25. (Actually, three stonking great ships were planned—one carrying cargo and the others carrying crew.) The landing would be preceded by a lunar fly-by … Continue reading Pegasus Hobbies 1/350 Von Braun Lunar Lander
At the end of my previous post on this topic, I left you with this map of the area around the mountain of Blaven (Gaelic Bla Bheinn) on the Isle of Skye: That concluded a three-part tutorial on using Ordnance Survey OpenData products in QGIS mapping software. (To go to the start of the series, … Continue reading Ordnance Survey OpenData In QGIS 3: Part 4
[D]espite Maskelyne being portrayed in popular literature as a self-seeking academic astronomer with a less-than-personable style, the stories of his interaction with the Nautical Almanac [human] computers reveals that he went to some lengths to provide stop-gap employment to mathematically inclined people, as well as providing long-term stable employment for those with families to support. … Continue reading Rebekah Higgitt (Ed.): Maskelyne
prɒrəʊˈɡeɪʃən prorogation: the act of discontinuing the meetings of an assembly without dissolving it For present purposes, the relevant limit on the power to prorogue is this: that a decision to prorogue (or advise the monarch to prorogue) will be unlawful if the prorogation has the effect of frustrating or preventing, without reasonable justification, the … Continue reading Prorogation
This is the final post of my three-year project to assemble Revell’s 1/96-scale Saturn V model kit. It’s intended to provide a few views of the completed model, and to act as a sort of index to the various sections of the stage-by-stage build log I wrote as I went along. The kit is fundamentally … Continue reading Revell 1/96 Saturn V: Fully Assembled
If you were (according to my usual scenario) sedated, abducted and awoken in a foreign country, then a glimpse of a road-sign featuring all three of these special letters would mean you were in one of two places—Norway or Denmark. These are the three additional characters that go to make up the 29-letter Dano-Norwegian Alphabet—added, … Continue reading Letters From Abroad: Ash, Slashed-O, A-Ring