prɪˈtɛnʃəs pretentious: professing or making claim to great merit or importance, especially when unwarranted among […a]nd amongst. Most such forms ending in -st, such as whilst and amidst, are archaisms in American English. Amongst is no exception: in American English it is pretentious at best. Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009) I bow … Continue reading Pretentious
Dave Hutchinson: Cold Water
What can readers expect?If they’re already familiar with the other Fractured Europe books, it’s more of the same kind of stuff. Pocket universes, insanely-complicated intelligence ops, hotel breakfasts, huge conspiracies, Texel sheep, trains. That sort of thing. Dave Hutchinson, talking about Cold Water (2022) I’ve reviewed Dave Hutchinson’s previous novels from the Fractured Europe Sequence … Continue reading Dave Hutchinson: Cold Water
The Advent Of Atomic Time
This is, to a large extent, a companion piece to my post about leap seconds, in which I described how the irregular rotation of the Earth means that the time as measured by our atomic clocks would fall out of synchrony with the actual movement of the sun in the sky, were it not for … Continue reading The Advent Of Atomic Time
Moebius 1/144 Discovery Spacecraft: Part 3
Last time, I finished lighting and preliminary painting on the engine compartment of my Discovery spacecraft from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. This time, I’m working on the cockpit. I’m using the Paragrafix photoetch set for this, combined with the HDA Modelworx decal set. There are two areas to light—a rear corridor and the … Continue reading Moebius 1/144 Discovery Spacecraft: Part 3
Angel
ˈeɪndʒəl angel: One of an order of spiritual beings superior to man in power and intelligence, who, according to the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other theologies, are the attendants and messengers of the Deity And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.And, lo, the … Continue reading Angel
Ralph Bagnold: Two Memoirs
In the following pages I shall try to trace the unpremeditated steps by which a few army officers, with no initial thirst for exploration, and no desire to do anything unusual except to see the country they were in came gradually to break away from this conventional city outlook towards things outside; and how, beginning … Continue reading Ralph Bagnold: Two Memoirs
Système International Prefixes: Part 4
Back in 2016, I wound up my third post on the topic of SI prefixes with the words “And that’s all we’ve got so far …” followed by a table summarizing the complete set of SI prefixes at that time. These prefixes are a shorthand way of indicating that some base unit of measurement should … Continue reading Système International Prefixes: Part 4
Moebius 1/144 Discovery Spacecraft: Part 2
Last time, I got all my wiring runs in place to illuminate this model. Now it’s time to add some lights, starting with the engine bells. There’s room for a couple of large LEDs inside the flare of the engine bells, which means I can get a light behind both engine nozzles on each of … Continue reading Moebius 1/144 Discovery Spacecraft: Part 2
Sassenach
I must have gone for years without hearing or reading this word until the advent of the improbable television series “Outlander” in 2014 (based on Diana Gabaldon’s novels), which brought the word to the attention of (apparently) the entire English-speaking world, if not beyond. The first season of the series introduced a time-travelling twentieth-century nurse to Gaelic-speaking eighteenth-century Highland Scots, who call her a “Sassenach”. At which point, people started talking nonsense about the word on the Internet. So no change there.
Pole Stars Of Other Planets?
When I wrote about Philip Latham’s juvenile science-fiction novel Missing Men Of Saturn (1953) recently, I pointed out that Latham had made an astronomically well-informed guess about a possible pole star for Saturn’s moon Titan. Latham (a professional astronomer) knew the orientation of Saturn’s rotation axis, which would have allowed him to deduce the location … Continue reading Pole Stars Of Other Planets?