Occulomency

Scotty.... Beam Me Up.....

Simon Pegg as Scotty.

Scotty....

Pegg....

Woohoo!

Fellow Traveller

50 years since Sputnik 1 propelled humanity into the space-age.

So I started my new job on Monday, and it is going quite well I think. I've got my notebook and my fancy phone (not a Blackberry yet, that'll turn up in a week or so) and a nice desk in an office down in West Sussex.

The folk seem nice, and I'm learning the software at the moment, which seems to be quite well executed and reasonably intuitive. Overall, I can see this working out quite well.

The drive is a bit of a pain in the arse, but it won't be that frequent I feel. I'll be going to York and Chester a fair bit though, and the occasional Bournemouth trip.

All in all, quite pleasent, apart from the Tiger.

What else? Halo 3 in on-line mode is a hoot and a holler. James & Matthew were on last night and it was a good deal of fun shooting up zombies. Loving it.

Finished reading the Hamster's autobiographical account of the crash and it's aftermath. Great book, brilliant bloke, looking forward to the new series starting on Sunday.

Things are settling nicely, now if we can just sort this house out.

We've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again, thanks a lot......

I admit I'm impressed, I'd never have thought that you'd get that. Bloody Google. There is a futility in this Q&A session, as the net is such a suppository of all knowledge, that it is tricky to find a question that cannot be answered with a carefully worded search term.

And yet you have.

The question was 'name the mission this photograph is from':

So it is from either Apollo 15, 16 or 17 as they were the 'J' missions designated to carry the Lunar Rover.

So which of the three is it?

Apollo 17's Rover had a damaged fender, they repaired it with a check-list, so it looked like this, so it can't be that one.

So that leaves 16 and 15.

15 landed at Hadley Rill, a fairly smooth yet mountainous region of the moon, and it just don't look like Hadley in that photograph. So I'm thinking that it's Apollo 16. It looks like the photos of Descartes, rocky but without the really spectacular highlands surrounding the landing site.

Additionally, on 16, in order to differentiate between the two astronauts on EVA, the Commander (John Young) had red stripes on his sleeves. I must therefore deduce that this image is of Charlie Duke, 10th man on the moon, CAPCOM on Armstrong and Aldrin's Apollo 11 moonwalk.

My favourite Duke story comes from Andrew Chaikin's 'Man on the Moon' the definitive text on the Apollo programme.

Six months before Apollo 16, Duke had a vivid dream that he and Young discovered mysterious rover tracks while riding across the lunar surface. They turned to follow the tracks and eventually came upon another rover upon which sat two unmoving, spacesuited figures. Duke lifted the reflective sun visor on one suit to discover his own face. The other figure proved to be Young's double. They took suit and rover samples at Mission Control's request, and subsequent testing proved them to be over 100,000 years old.

How cool would that have been?

Deo Adjuvante Labor Proficit

OK.

It just so depends on which variant of the XLR-99 we are talking about, Milt Thompson, describes in detail the development of the XLR-99 through it's long life in the excellent 'At The Edge of Space'. So. A - true at some points, B - True, C - Nope, it seems to have been more like 1 hour between major overhauls, D - Probably true, it seems to have varied between 10,000lb/m and 15,000lb/m depending on variant. E - True in initial variant, F - Very true.

What was interesting about the Exocet Missile that hit the HMS Sheffield in May 1982?

Sigma Seven

Wally Schirra has died, aged 84. He was the only Astronaut to fly Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions during the '60s. He

also wrote one of the better Astronaut autobiographies "Schirra's Space". Worth a read.

Piffle

Yellow and black is natures symbol for danger, not red and black.
Wasps are yellow and black and fecking scary, robins are red and black and have never ever savaged anyone to death with their talons or their beak.

Thus I prove that this new radiation warning label makes radiation more dangerous than a wasp. I am therefore going to have to try and trap radiation under a pint glass which has a bit of lager left in it.

Oh my God it's coming right at us...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH

Curse the lack of a robin warning symbol.

Bloody Rudolf.

4154 Page views. By the way.

Right. Lets clear this up once and for all. The man to the left of this text is Rudolf Diesel. He suggested back in the year 1348 or something that it would be a great idea to drive about in a car that sounds like a tractor and turns the Earth black.

Funnily enough, Bugatti, when developing their 16 cylinder quad turbo-charged masterpiece for the Veyron, they did not say "ooh, lets make it a diesel, because they are efficient and amazing" they chose petrol. The 6064cc V12 BMW developed for the McLaren F1 could not run on used chip-fat. Ferrari have never made a diesel.

Diesel cars are never cool. Ever. What you are saying when you buy a diesel is that you are either:

a) a redneck who secretly yearns for a tractor, or
b) cheap.

Neither of these options is good, and the bad news is, in my universe (the one you signed up for when you started reading this) there is no option c.

Right. Now we can move on. First the food, kindly sponsored by Jacques this year. Marc was brave. He ate:
Whereas I repeated my burger experience from last year. We saw a man in a Chef's hat hanging about near the kitchen. He looked:

Pluto

So, the world's top astronomy people have had a big old important meeting at a nice posh hotel with lots of beer and chips and Buffy the Vampire Slayer evenings, and decided that Pluto is not a planet.

I could have told them that. He's a cartoon dog and faithful friend to that spherical eared freak, Mortimer "Mickey" Mouse.

Idiots.

Tighten your belts

American physicist James Van Allen, who  discovered the bands of radiation that surround the Earth that were later named for him, has died.

I think one of the earliest memories I have is reading about the Van Allen radiation belts in one of Andrew's many books on spaceflight.

The belts (well torus) of radiation that surrounds the earth were first discovered by an experiment designed by Van Allen aboard one of the US's first spacecraft.

Of course, the most famous thing about the Van Allen belts is that they are flamable, which can cause a deadly global heat wave so we all have to get on board the submarine Seaview with Admiral Nelson.

Anyway the seaview can launch a nuclear missile into the belt, extinguishing the fire and thus save the world.

In other news, Brisbane's Royal National Association (RNA) show, the Ekka, opened today.

Hundreds of thousands of patrons are expected to be entertained at the
130-year-old annual extravaganza which is situated right next to where I work, meaning that getting home is a flipping nightmare.

And on it goes for ten days.

The ABC says that show judges have been busy and many champions have been already named.

The best quote comes from the owner of the champion lightweight steer, Leonie Ball.

She says "He just has everything... he's got the muscle content and he's just a
well put together package,"

And so she is sending her prize winning animal off to the abattoir today.

Funny, farmers always seem so sentimental.....

Well as one door closes, another one opens. 

Unless your name happens to be Simon of course.