A Son of the Rock

Astronomy Picture of the Day for 15/1/12, this is the Large Magellanic Cloud seen in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

It looks like a burning gas.

At the time of writing Wikipedia is blacked out as a protest at the impending legislation in the US about online piracy and intellectual property protection.

It seems the only link up on Wiki is to their article on this.

Many people seem to be of the opinion that these bills could infringe unacceptably on free expression and lead to even such a humble website as mine being targeted for closure due to a perhaps unintended or even unwitting infringement of the proposed acts.

Not being a US citizen I have no direct input into this but add my sympathy for the action Wiki has taken.

The picture is from the Scottish Cinemas website.

This building’s main claim to fame is that the Beatles once played there. I think it was when they were just on the cusp of fame. I wasn’t around at the time. (Not in Fife anyway.)

Like many cinemas it failed to survive the changing times and is now demolished.

Shame it’s gone, though.

I’m sure you’ll all have heard that Tesco’s shares recently fell in value after a profits warning.

Yet Tesco’s seems still to be on course to make £3.5bn of pre-tax profit. (See para 2 in the link.)

What?

A company is going to make £3.5bn profit and the its share price falls?

Isn’t this a prime example of how our values as a society have gone seriously askew?

£3.5bn a year is approximately £10 million a day.* And the people who buy and sell shares think that’s too little?

Do they think profits can keep going up for ever and ever?

Get real. If that were the case then eventually everything on the planet would be Tesco’s, and nothing but Tesco’s. It’s simply not sustainable.

And how can any enterprise possibly make £10 million a day? It’s obscene.

That level of profit means either – or both – of two things.

1. Tesco’s is paying its suppliers and/or employees too little.

Or 2. It is charging its customers too much.

(I bet they don’t pay all that much in tax either.)

*Edited from original – see comments.

Astronony Picture of the Day has been great viewing this past week.

This is Iapetus, from 13/1/12.

Iapetus is one of Saturn’s moons. It is famous for having a “bright” side and a “dark” side – in technical terms, its albedo varies. Its discoverer, Cassini, for whom both the large obvious space between Saturn’s rings (the Cassini Division) and the spacecraft sent to Saturn to photograph the system are named, correctly deduced this when he couldn’t see it on one side of Saturn a few months after it being clearly visible on the other, then it reappeared on the other side: an improved telescope showed it as two magnitudes dimmer when its “dark” side faced the Sun (and Earth.)

In this view you can see some of the dark material on the right as well as a huge impact crater, superimposed on another seemingly as large.

Iapetus also has an equatorial ridge – see this picture from 1/2/2005 – which makes the moon look like a walnut!

Angry Robot, 2010, 349 p

(Plus 4 pages of acknowledgements, 1 page “about the author” and 24 pages containing three short stories from winners of a competition to set a story in the milieu of Beukes’s previous novel Moxyland, an unnecessary addition to my mind.)

I have previously lamented the fact that the general run of fantasy novels seem to be set in a default mediævality and that no-one is trying to write fantasy in a contemporary setting. Well Zoo City is taken by some to be SF – it was on the BSFA Award shortlist for best novel last year – but to my mind fantasy would be a better description. In particular magic is an essential component of the setting and plot. Yet the novel takes place in the present day! (Albeit a present day thoroughly transmogrified.)

Zinzi December is an aposymbiont – who are derogatorily termed as animalled. Aposymbionts are individuals who, as a result of committing a serious crime, have gained an animal companion with whom they have a psychic link, in the process acquiring an attribute. This is not quite the same as in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which Beukes does refer to in the text, as in his universe the animals begin attachment at birth. Zinzi’s companion is a sloth and her attribute is sensing lost objects. She can follow psychic threads to recover things. This is her apparent job but to pay her debts she moonlights as an email scammer. She is engaged by two rather unsavoury individuals (both animalled) to find a lost pop star and is drawn into a world of intrigue, backstabbing and murder.

Narrated in an urgent present tense, apart from the interpolations of cod press articles and psychological papers fleshing out the background, the novel is of a piece with the thriller feel of much near future SF. But Beukes is good at this – very good indeed – the gritty realism makes her scenario entirely believable while you’re immersed in it. That the novel takes place in South Africa may be one factor in its appeal. African phrases and words are utilised frequently but not so as to obfuscate or confuse. The acceptance of magic is a given (as it may be in “our” South Africa.)

Where the story veers away from thriller SF into fantasy is that the transformation of the world to one where animals can become “familiars” is not given much of a rational explanation.

Zinzi and her boyfriend Benoît, whose animal is a mongoose, are well drawn, nuanced characters with full backstories which mercifully emerge from the story as it is told rather than being dumped on the reader. Others are equally believable.

This was fun, sharp and (the misuse of pre-empt aside) well written stuff.

Astronomy Picture of the Day for 9/1/12, this is spiral galaxy NGC 6946 face on.

The yellow colours are old stars, younger star clusters are blue and the reddish ones are stars that are forming in the spiral arms. The galaxy is 40,000 light years across. That’s an astonishing 40,000,000,000,000,000 kilometres (give or take.)

NGC 6946 is known as the Fireworks Galaxy and it does have the aspect of a catherine wheel.

Medicine Head was a duo made up of guitarist John Fiddler who I think wrote the songs and Peter Hope-Evans who unusually played only mouth based instruments. They had a few hits in the early 1970s, mostly blues-based.

I couldn’t choose between them, so here are all four.

The above image is from Scotland’s Places where there are four more pictures of the former cinema.

I just missed photographing this one for myself. By the time I started blogging it had been demolished. It’s a pity they couldn’t find a way to retain the facade.

A photo of the cinema in its heyday (taken from Burntisland.Net) is below.

Also in that Burntisland.Net link is a photo of the single remaining stained glass window which was removed before demolition plus two pictures relating to its post-cinema use.

More photos can be seen on the Scottish Cinemas website, including 65 of the interior prior to demolition.

A few years there was a proposal to fill the gap with a shop and flats. I’ve not been to Burntisland recently so don’t know if anything came of it.

Snuck?

I heard this on TV recently. On British TV, I might add.

This is a word that does not exist in British English. The past participle of to sneak is “sneaked.” (How does anyone get from “sneak” to “snuck”?)

I can only refer you to this web page – where it implies snuck is not even “proper” US English.