On this day in 1970

An oxygen tank ruptured aboard the Service Module of the Apollo 13 spacecraft, the third mission intended to land on the moon.

The accident occurred almost exactly 200,000 miles from the earth, and resulted in an almost complete loss of electrical power in the module.

This event produced one of the most misquoted lines of all time, what Jack Swigert actually said in reporting the event was “Houston we’ve had a problem”.

During the next four days the only objective of the mission was “get home safe” and became an exercise in creative use of a very limited set of resources. Just about everything possible was used in some way to ensure the survival of the three crew members.

A recent interview with Jim Lovell the mission commander (now 82 years old) revealed a man as calm and laconic as he was in 1970 when faced with what appeared to be an unpleasant lingering death. Asked if he ever thought they would not make it safely back to earth he replied “No, but we were not waiting around for a miracle to occur, if we had been, we would still be up there”

Murder and Queensland University

Patrick Mayne

Patrick Mayne was born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, in about 1824. Patrick left his native Ireland and arrived in Australia in 1841. By 1846 he was in Moreton Bay, Queensland, working as a butcher at the boiling down works, Kangaroo Point. Moreton Bay is about 45 km north of Brisbane, and in 1841 was still a penal colony and a pretty rough place.

In 1848 a group of men, including Mayne and a sawyer called Robert Cox, were drinking in a hotel called the Bush Inn. Cox had just been paid £350 for a load of cedar and everyone knew that he had that money.  Patrick and a few of his friends returned to the inn after mid-night to find Cox and were told that he was drunk and had left.
The next morning, a man rowing up the river at 7 a.m. saw the legs and loins of a man floating in the water. It took another hour to find the upper part of the body in long grass. Eventually the head was found, propped up so it would look at whoever found it – and then, horror upon horrors, the entrails were found draped over the well behind the hotel. It probably was Brisbane’s most bizarre murder. The cook from the hotel was arrested for the theft of the money and the murder, tried, convicted and hung.

Tea time politics

What party to vote for is of huge interest to our under age son. He’s 16, and really pretty clued up. He really wishes he could have the vote this May. At present I feel he is better informed than me about the differences in the policies. Just now after a tea-time discussion he sent me the following link  so I can clarify my thoughts.

http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/

How do you fare on this?

scifi

Because I’m a physicist, people automatically assume I must like science fiction. I’m not really sure how they worked that one out but I’m pretty sure there is a bit of stereotyping going on. I never really got sci-fi, as a kid I read the occasional story, but no more so that other kinds of fiction. It was more a case of whether a story appealed to my imagination; I wasn’t interested in the carefully thought out science or engineering concepts. It wasn’t the faster than light gear that excited me, so much as the automatic doors and in ship communication system on the Enterprise. I think it was because it didn’t seem to require quite the same leap of logic as the transporter system.
Continue reading “scifi”

Mind versus body

It strikes me that Sipu’s Richard Dawkins blog is a kind of corollary to his blog “Why do I bother etc”. What struck me about the earlier blog was the idea that you couldn’t “know” someone unless you had some kind of physical or sensory contact with them. Likewise, the argument about god versus evolution is another exploration of the question of mind versus physical realities.

Granted, the shifting identities behind the multiple IDs of My Telegraph confused the issue. It’s impossible to “know” these shape shifters, but it isn’t impossible to know personalities—people—in cyberspace.

And on the other side, I think it’s an illusion to attach our understanding of others to their physical presence, even though we are aided in that understanding by how well we can “read” the language of physical presence or movement. Isn’t our knowledge of others always filtered through the various lenses of our perceptions? Isn’t how we understand someone at best approximate?

For those who are writers—and that means the contributors to this blog—there is a lot of “chemistry” in the written word.

Anyway, I’m back in England for a week or so and happy to be so. And, hot dog, the weather is pretty wonderful. Glad you’re all here too.

Sunday evening

Wind blowing like billy-o. Not sure of the spelling. I’ve never written it before. Quite a surprise anyway, because it has been another spectacularly gorgeous day.

After an early start – Cat alerted me to littertray cleaning duties at 6am, and again at 6.30 so the bin bag was fairly full – breakfast was not the Sunday morning late lie-in styly I had envisaged. I drove off to Halfords and got the bike cleaning stuff janh1 advised. Also something to help a rusty chain. And some bolts. Only little ones, but it would be nice not to have to leave heavy objects in front of cupboards to stop Cat opening them and risking him accessing the murky depths below deck. Also nice not to have the heavy objects as trip hazards for me.

Nice lunch. Pitta with salad and lots of olives. The into DIY Isobel mode. I restuck the drawer but this time used v strong glue, so am hoping it will hold. Lacking a hammer, I bashed the various bits together with my (deck) shoe. I tightened up the childproof, or in my case catproof, catches on the galley cupboards and fixed the bolts to the wardrobe and big cupboard, or ‘hold’ under the foredeck. Also attached two lights so I can see what is in the same two cupboards.

A couple of other people were cleaning their boats and that inspired me to remove some of the cat fur that has accumulated shockingly quickly. I just hope the local birds are grateful for the extra warmth in their nests.

This evening I’ve grappled with technology once more. There are now pix on my post (my page) for Saturday. Some appear more than once. I’ll edit. I promise. But not til I get home to technology I trust.