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WEEK 46 2009

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First Post, 17 March 2002

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One Year Ago, This Week, 2008

Saturday 14 November 2009

Saturday - just a slow day at home, no calls, no visits.

I looked at my copy of The Skylark of Space. This is a paperback copy that I bought from a supermarket rack, new, so it's probably circa 1970, that being the date of this Pyramid seventh edition. There is no hint of a co-author, though it does mention that "The Pyramid edition of THE SKYLARK OF SPACE was specially revised by the author."

skylark of space, pyramid edition title page

Book #70 was (surprise surprise) Skylark Three, by E. E. Smith. This is the sequel to The Skylark of Space, the name being that of a new spaceship constructed during the course of the book (Skylark Two was a reconstruction of the first Skylark midway through the first book with Osnomian arenak replacing steel). Skylark Three is built on Norlamin, out of inoson, which is even stronger than the arenak, and is two miles long, rather than the 40 foot diameter of the original Skylark.

Skylark Two hovering over the peaceful solar energy collectors of the aquatic planet Dasor.

Book #71 is (in an even bigger surprise) Skylark of Valeron, by E. E. Smith. This is the sequel to Skylark Three, the name being that of a new new spaceship constructed during the course of the book, after poor old Skylark Three, still with that new car smell, is destroyed by the Intellectuals, creatures of pure mental energy. Our hero's only escape by rotating the original Skylark into the fourth dimension. Upon returning to normal space, after defeating the evil Hypers, they save the Valeronian's from the evil Chlorans, and build the Skylark of Valeron (our hero's wife objecting to the name Skylark Four). Skylark of Valeron is a sphere again, but now a thousand miles in diameter.

This is either the evil Intellectuals or the evil Chlorans attacking poor Skylark Three.

Friday 13 November 2009

Friday - not a lot to say. Worked in the office on some work estimates, then headed up to Lancaster. There was a chance of some field stuff in the afternoon, a walk through the construction project of the last couple of weeks, but it apparently fell through.

Book #69 was The Skylark of Space, by E. E. Smith & Lee Hawkins Garby. This was actually a Project Gutenberg free etext, and the text seemed very similar to the paperback copy I used to own. I don't recall there being a co-author however, I'll have to check on that. The PG book and the Amazon both have this Lee Hawkins Garby down as a co-author. (Hmmm: there is a Wikipedia page on this, and it has Garby as a female co-author, the wife of a neighbor. Weird.)

The old fashioned magazine cover is neat, from Amazing Stories in 1928. It's a fairly accurate rendering of a scene in the early in the book where our fearless hero straps on a suit that contains the rudiments of a space drive using element "X".

Wikipedia Common's original cover of The Skylark of Space

Via Wikipedia, the original cover to Skylark of Space

Anyway, this is straight forward space opera, with really good good guys and really bad bad guys. For it's date of publication it is a well written and not too antiquated book. Jarring to a modern reader would be the genocide and attempted genocide continually going on (by both sides) - it's 1928 and Hitler is still in the future, though Stalin is busy already...

No hint of ITAR either - it apparently never occurs to anyone that the US goverment has the power or right to restrict technology and travel to other planets ;-)

A very fat and very happy lapcat - Phoebe, a couple of weeks ago, after my two week absence.

Thursday 12 November 2009

Thursday - a long day, but we are making progress on the inventory, finalizing the present worth estimates. But I wish I had all the time spent on construction management back.

There is a game going on at the high school, down the street. From the cheers it sounds like the home team is winning...

Wednesday 11 November 2009

Wednesday - Veteran's Day.

Dad's gone, Grandpa's gone, Uncle Bud's gone. Not too many left now, that served then.

They all served, and came home alive. But Dad's best friend, Johnny Frye, was killed on Okinawa. I posted the note Dad wrote to me about it on this blog, way back in 2003.

What I didn't add at the time was this: his body was sent back to the States, where, insanely, somebody let his mother open the casket. She was never the same after that, Dad said. Another casualty.

So, remember them. Hard as it may be.

Dad at the Diamond Head Signal Light, WWII

Dad, at Diamond Head with a Signal Lamp, sometime in WWII

Cassidy, Dad, Hock

This was titled: Cas, Me, Hock '45. Cas would be Cassidy, Hock doesn't ring a bell.
They look to be standing in front of his fathers' house, in Walnut Creek near the lake.

Tuesday 10 November 2009

Tuesday - the keyboard on the Ventura computer had sticky keys, so I brought up another keyboard on Monday. It's got a cool look, with blue backlights behind the keys. I also brought up a couple small speakers. Generally I don't use the computer for music, but once in a while it's nice.

Back to the boring moon/island photo prediction stuff.

Another issue that occurs to me was the relative sizes of Arch Rock and the Moon. The Moon is, of course, about a half degree. It varies a bit, but that's close. Arch Rock looks to be about 100m long in Google Earth, give or take. Port Hueneme is about 20km from Arch Rock. Using the small angle approximation, we get 100/20000 = 1/200 = 0.005 Radians = 0.28 Degrees. So the Moon would be about twice the size of Arch Rock, which would be OK. Depending on the distance to the coast it'll be bigger or smaller, relative to the rock.

The other problem is: can I see the arch? 20 kilometers is about 12 miles - a long way at turbulent hazy sea level. And, after all, the earth is spherical. There is an equation for the 'distance to the horizon' based on eye height, spelled out in some detail.

There is another online calculator for this over at Boat Safe, and it says 80' high, to see the base of the arch at 12 miles. There really aren't that many 80' high observation platforms on the beach. Certainly the hills above Mugu & south are that high, but that means a lot of trekking through the coastal brush. A 20' high post would give you a horizon of 6 miles, and so cut off the lower 20' at Anacapa, which might work - the arch seems to be about 50' high.

Refraction, as mentioned in the article, might give some of that back.

Monday 9 November 2009

Monday - back at work, a 12 hour day after a two hour early morning commute.

I was working on a spreadsheet for some cost estimations, and the numbers kept changing, much to the program managers' chagrin. It turned out, in the end, that I had put the wrong quantity cost in one place, but correct in another, so depending on how things were summed there was a $20K difference. I think it's OK now, but my ineptitude with simple arithmetic has been on display a lot lately, it's a bit humiliating.

Book #68 was Andre Norton's Galactic Derelict, mentioned last week. As I suspected, no beautiful women in furs, bearing rayguns, were mentioned in the book. But it moved right along, a classic in it's own right. Our hero's go back in time about 15,000 years, find a small deserted alien spaceship, bring it forward in time, where it's automated systems start up and carries them - against their will - to it's home world, now long deserted (except for the mutants) & decrepit. Eventually they figure out how to reprogram some of the systems - the course is programmed on a wire tape recorder (remember, this was written in the early 1960's) and they thread it in reverse - and they manage to return home.

Next, of course, is The Defiant Agents, third in the series, from Project Gutenberg. Following that should be Key out of Time, the fourth book in the series. I believe there are more now, that Norton wrote several more sequels with co-authors, many years later.

While looking for the original cover art I ran across The Cover Browser site, which claims to have 450,000 scanned covers of books and magazines. I believe them, it's amazing.

The art for Galactic Derelict is here. That's not a sandworm in the distance, but rather an automated refueling hose, coming to refuel the spaceship. Unlike the other cover, the artist read the book, or at was given some direction by the writer and/or editor.

I should mention that their search engine at Cover Browser is a bit funky - a search for Andre Norton brings up a set of images, but a search for Galactic Derelict and Time Traders brings up other pics.

Sunday 8 November_2009

Sunday - last night we went to a performance by Penn & Teller at the LPAC. It was a lot of fun - they do "magic", but they tell and show the audience how it's done. They are big debunkers of psychics and such, and showing the audience a 'cold reading' and then telling how it's done was very interesting. There is also a lot of fun and interaction with audience members. Recommended, worth the big $$ to see.

A friend's boy had a crash of the hard disk on his laptop. Dell kindly sent a new drive, but we wanted to see if we could get the data off the old drive - mostly music, but a few files for his college classes. Windows Vista tools couldn't bring it back - a bad 'superblock error' but I had hopes that Linux could. Booting from a LiveCD of Ubuntu 9.04 went well, but the partition on the hard drive just couldn't be read, mounted, or fixed. I tried a LiveCD of Suse 11, again to no effect. Eventually we had to give up - if we had more time there are fancy tools out there, but he had to send the old drive back to Dell this week.

Well, the silver lining is that it's a good lesson in saving your important data - I tell people, and I tell people: "Back UP, BACK UP, BACK UP!", but it's like hollering down a well. Nobody gets it, until it happens to them.

I had tried out the LiveCD in my new laptop beforehand. It worked well, amazingly well, in fact. Here was new hardware, and a laptop, which are traditionally the most difficult to write drivers and s/w for. Yet it all worked flawlessly, right down to recognizing the built in wifi and allowing me to set the WPA key and connect to the internet. Ubuntu 9.04 looks pretty snazzy - better than the v8 I'm running. Maybe I'll update...

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Excavator in Channel, 2009

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