I watched a NASA moon launch live last night (UK time). Artemis 2. This mission sends a crewed spacecraft around the moon1 but you probably already knew that.
Cannot remember anything of Artemis 1. Still sinking in that I’m old enough to at least have been alive during the Apollo mission programme. I do not remember any of that either but I am lucky enough to know someone who does.
And as I have the Pale. Blue. Dot. feels right now I’ll go to bed thinking of great things.
A grainy low-resolution scan of a 35mm film photo of the moon, taken many years ago using a series of lenses and teleconverters.
I wanted so badly to say “fly” but it just does not sound right somehow. Need to refresh my nerd creds. ↩
To begin with, a Hawaiian pizza is a pizza with ham and pineapple toppings. The odds are good that if you could get over the shock of fruit on a pizza you tried it, at least once. The ‘Bazwich’ though, probably not, if you ever heard of it.
I made a sandwich a couple of decades ago, a sandwich of polarisation. People who try it either love it or hate it. It has to be said though, nobody has given me feedback, maybe nobody tried it.
21 years ago today I got together with my wife to-to-be.
Today we shared a large measure of Dooley’s toffee cream liqueur – around the 21st anniversary of my first sip from my favourite whisky glass. It’s a Glencairn (thistle-shaped) bought in 3 days time 21 years ago from a little shop in Edinburgh.
And today is also the 20th anniversary of my proposal of marriage, in the romantic setting of a ferry ship cabin on the way back from a mini cruise to Bruges. She says I did it in international waters to avoid future complications. 🙂
Narrator, “There were many many future complications.”
Maps have fascinated me for most of my life. Old maps, new maps, paper maps, ring bound or fold-flat books, modern online digital maps, maps on CD, satellite navigation maps. Maps in general.
For the majority of my life consumer satellite navigation systems didn’t exist so we bought and planned trips & holidays using paper maps – maps of the major road networks down to town street maps. Back then I could memorise a route from home to any destination and had a decent sense of direction in case of a need to recalculate due to roadworks or unforeseen circumstances.
I bet I could still do it despite my age. Maybe. No, it’s not me challenging myself so don’t you try!
Speaking of old things, one of the most useful sources of historic data for the United Kingdom is the National Library of Scotland’s ‘Map images’ site at https://maps.nls.uk. 13 browsable categories are enough to please anyone like me. But that’s just the beginning.
Walking Pumpkin dog yesterday we came across an anomaly at the side of the road, a dropped kerb led directly nowhere. Well ok, into an unbroken well-established wall against a small earth bank.
6 maps in I found it on an Ordnance Survey1 map surveyed in 1928 – a ‘reservoir valve house’, whatever one of those is. It existed before the 1890 survey and was removed a decade or two before the end of the 20th century (I used to cycle up there, and have seen a lot of changes since I was young and fit)!
There are loads of reservoirs around the town, and to be honest although I’ve walked by and around some I never gave the engineering a second thought. Well ok, I’d be somewhat troubled if a dam wall burst and flooded the town.
Speaking of mortality and history, this again reminded me that of the 3 schools I attended as a child, only one still exists. Of the pubs I drank in as a young adult none now exist as pubs (they’re funeral parlours, offices and a private residence). Of those I frequented until my forties, one stl. Of the company buildings I worked in my family first is now a supermarket, I still work in the second, the third company (also the first) mismanaged their way out of the third building, and I still work in the fourth’s which is the second’s…2
And when my generation’s gone will anyone be interested in any of this, or will have other things taken attention spans?
Speaking of limited attention spans, I wondered earlier if my family is within the range of the ‘bad guys’. We have first to define bad guys – which is not as easy as it appears. Let’s say for the sake of advancing this the bad guys have missiles with a 2500-mile range.
Looking for a straight line distance measuring thing I found the ‘distance.to’ site, but it does more than straight lines. Check it out at https://www.distance.to. It’s translated into 17 languages and uses OpenStreetMap data. Nice.3
Are we within range? It’s marginal. Ask me next month when the bad guys may not be so simply and clearly defined.
An overview map of one of the Shetland islands – with a pushpin locating the hamlet of Twatt.
Not the rabbit hole I expected this weekend.
Anyway, both sites get Baz’s seal of approval. 🦭
I’ve not linked to the Ordnance Survey’s main site, it’s not tailored for casual users so I don’t visit. I use their excellent app instead. ↩
distance.to is a part of Stefan Georg’s https://distance.tools site – a very comprehensive set of online distance measuring tools for all kinds of users. ↩
I just acquired a Casio fx-102(Reddit r/calculators link) calculator – a device rooted firmly in the days when the display illuminated without a backlight such that it could be read at night. So you can’t see the buttons, so what?!
Buttons.
A Casio fx-102 calculator resting on its slip case. The display reads 5318008 – something familiar to anyone who’s ever turned a calculator upside-down.
And it’s not exactly pocketable, it’s wi-iiide. And sadly it does not play a little melody when pressing down a special key. So much for me trying to fashion an easy link to the Kraftwerk song (from 1981).
Ok, it has a 12-digit green LED display and it’s quite frankly awesome. The input method is straightforward for most people (it’s not RPN). It’s old-school operand-operator-operand… and there’s no computer algebra system, no brackets, no built-in constants apart from pi (and e), no persistent history or memories…
Speaking of memories…
My dad bought our family’s first pocket calculator in the 1970s – also a Casio, also with a green LED. I bought Casio calculators until the late 1980s, at which time TI and HP…
…so anyway, this, the new-to-me fx-102, is from 1976.
