Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in fivemack's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
11:39 am	Two-level dream Last night, I dreamt that I'd rescued three small black kittens. I then kept dreaming of waking up because a small black kitten was crawling on my head; I reminded myself, in the top-level dream, that the kittens were bought in a lower-level dream, and then dreamt of falling back to sleep, and dreaming of the potential pungency of a house filled with unrestrained small kittens. I suspect I need to buy a fan, though since the CPU fan in the Mac Mini on the other side of the room is enough to make getting to sleep harder, the fan would have to be implausibly silent. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
11:41 pm	... and a decree went out from Fivemack, that all books were to be counted Hmm. I've noticed a few gaps in my bookcase, and I can't quite remember to whom I've lent what. cartesiandaemon has my copies of "The Well of Ascension" and "The Hero of Ages" ceb has the two Cat Valente books pseudomonas has quite a lot of books and I didn't keep a record of exactly which; certainly includes "Red Seas Under Red Skies" and "Snake Agent". Somebody must have my Sarah Monette books, but I'm not sure who. I ought to lend hilarityallen "Dragonfly Falling", the second volume of "Empire in Black and Gold" In the other direction, I have and have read naath's "Glorifying Terrorism" and despotliz's "The Graveyard Book" and "The Gone-Away World"; I have and have not read Jon Amery's "The Twilight Watch" and Liz's "The Fortress of Solitude". If you have borrowed books from me, or have lent me books which aren't on my list, would you mind leaving a comment? (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
10:47 pm	Intimidated by the to-read pile Poll #1422973 I have started, should I finish? Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All I should at once (finish) reading View Answers Jon's copy of The Twilight Watch 3 (20.0%) Possession 4 (26.7%) In Conquest Born 2 (13.3%) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles 2 (13.3%) Liz's copy of The Fortress of Solitude 4 (26.7%) Microcosm, a magisterial history of Wroclaw 4 (26.7%) The Jagged Orbit 1 (6.7%) The Enchantress of Florence 0 (0.0%) The Child Garden 5 (33.3%) I should at the first available opportunity take to Oxfam View Answers The Jagged Orbit 0 (0.0%) Possession 1 (33.3%) In Conquest Born 0 (0.0%) The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles 2 (66.7%) Microcosm, a magisterial history of Wroclaw 0 (0.0%) The Jagged Orbit 0 (0.0%) The Enchantress of Florence 0 (0.0%) The Child Garden 0 (0.0%) (15 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 14th, 2009
9:08 am	Expedition Yesterday, finally finding a time that fitted after my brother Ben had suggested this several times, we cycled to the source of the Cam at Ashwell Springs. It's a nice bike ride, about twenty miles each way over countryside that gets a little rolling as you pass Haslingfield: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=2913585 is the route. There's an unexpected war memorial with a P-51 propeller sticking out of it just off the road into Steeple Morden: there was a USAAF air base there in 1942-1945 The source of the Cam is a shallow gravel-bottomed pond with two springs flowing into it; the water that nourished Newton, Darwin, Rutherford and Wittgenstein tastes very much like water, and the pond is chilly and pebbly enough that your feet feel tingly and warm after you've stopped paddling. Cycling back via the road that passes Wimpole, you get a rather nice view of the vista that the builders of Wimpole Hall arranged, to capture which something better than a telephone might have been good: With my hair as it is now, I really need to wear a wide-brimmed hat when cycling six hours in the sun: ran out of steam badly on the way back - I had to lie down at the top of Chapel Hill for a few minutes until my heart stopped pounding and the grampus in my lungs stopped puffing - and ended up with quite a headache in the evening despite carefully rehydrating with tea and ginger ale at the Orchard in Grantchester. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 8th, 2009
12:09 am	I don't think potato leather will catch on as a side dish Jean Brillat-Savarin, Harold McGee and Heston Blumenthal have pointed out repeatedly over the last century or so that slow-cooking joints of meat is the way to go. So I bought from Tesco a pound and a bit of silverside, some potatoes and a parsnip, peeled and chopped up such things as need peeling up and chopping, stuck the whole in a 120C oven at 11am, and ate it at six. There are plus points: the house is filled with the smell of cooking beef for seven hours, and, under a crunchy brownish-black outside, the beef falls apart into strands as the collagen has disintegrated, and the strands are of an enjoyable texture. However, potatoes, and particularly parsnips, don't have collagen. If you roast a parsnip for seven hours, it turns into something with the dimensions of a chip and a taste somewhere between parsnip-infused shoe-leather and parsnip-inspired charcoal. The potatoes shrunk enormously and developed a leathery outer coating, but were at least edible. So, if doing this again for company, I should put the beef on at 11am and the vegetables on at, say, 4:30. Also, make by some means a prodigious quantity of gravy. At least I have a chunk of lovely tender beef sufficient for several sandwiches, and I think mango chutney would moisten it nicely. Or maybe pesto. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
8:51 pm	On not being in two places at the same time I have a membership at Constitution (this year's Unicon, held at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge on 31 July - 2 August; Sean Punch, Steph Swainston, Harry Gee and Sib Machat as guests of honour), and a membership at Satellite 2 (a convention to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, to be held in Glasgow on 25 - 26 July; Iain Banks is guest of honour). However, in both cases I will be in Canada at the time. So, the memberships are for sale. The Constitution one has gone, but the Satellite 2 one is still available for 40 pounds. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
11:56 pm	A more cheerful meme, from my amazingly erudite brother James Copy the questions into your own note, answer the questions, and tag any friends who would appreciate the quiz, including the person who sent you this I'd like to tag j4, rysmiel and ceb, though if anyone else wants to steal the meme ... ( Thirty-two questions for the excessively literate ) (Comment on this)
10:04 pm	And, following up on that terrifying note Poll #1406125 Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All I would rather be View Answers red 30 (100.0%) dead 0 (0.0%) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
7:39 pm	A fact, all but the important part of which has embedded itself indelibly in my brain "Of men born in the Soviet Union in 1921, one in _____ lived to see the age of thirty". I can't remember the number and have not figured out how to look it up. I have a strong feeling that it's more than five. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
3:59 pm	Things to do in Canada in the summer. The American Crystallographic Association have their annual conference in Toronto 25-30 July; Worldcon is 6-10 August; flights are cheaper at weekends, Canada is a nice country and my boss is generous with holiday allowance, so I'll be flying to Toronto on 24 July and flying back from Montreal on 15 August. Which gives me most of two weeks at liberty in Canada. Inspired by Stan Rogers, I was planning after Worldcon to get on a train and head to Halifax, rent a bicycle and spend a few days cycling along bits of the Nova Scotian coast before heading back to Montreal airport; is this sensible, or are the small roads of Nova Scotia built (like the small roads of eastern coastal Norfolk) carefully out of sight of anything scenic, and used only by bears and badly-driven eighty-ton coal trucks ? I assume I can amuse myself happily for a week in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and intermediate parts, travelling on trains and sleeping in youth hostels; what should I be sure not to miss in that region? I had a short but intense trip to Toronto a few years back which took in Niagara Falls, Casa Loma and such parts of the Royal Ontario Museum as weren't being rebuilt; I've spent some time in Montreal but only in the deep mid-winter. Also, are there likely to be useful things I can do if I turn up at the Worldcon venue a day or so early? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 16th, 2009
9:48 pm	Eurovision Can I vote for the Latvian pirates from last year instead? (Sweden's was my favorite this year, but nothing stood out) (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 11th, 2009
11:44 pm	Support your neighbourhood elaborate restaurant Alimentum, opposite the cinema just after the perpetually-roadworked bridge on Hills Road, have a pudding made out of marshmallows, honeycomb, toffee, banana icecream and caramel mousse, served in a smoke-filled preserving jar. It tastes of bonfire night with bananas. I convinced the Geek Pizza People to be Geek Elaborate-Restaurant People this week, and a good time and fantastic food seems to have been had by all. Maybe leave a few weeks to recover from the shock of the new, then propose sushi. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
4:54 pm	Other peoples' money, your back, everybody's carbon Poll #1398090 So, you're going on a business trip somewhere, on expenses Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All Is it reasonable to: View Answers Fly instead of taking a cheaper train, because it's quicker 20 (71.4%) Fly instead of taking a cheaper train, because you like the view from aircraft 6 (21.4%) Fly on Monday for a Tuesday conference even if the flights were cheaper if you went on Saturday 23 (82.1%) Fly on Saturday for a Tuesday conference because yay three more days in Toronto 24 (85.7%) Fly a national carrier on a route Easyjet serves more cheaply 19 (67.9%) Fly non-Ryanair on a route Ryanair serves more cheaply 22 (78.6%) Fly other than economy class London to Delhi 17 (60.7%) Fly other than economy class London to Los Angeles 19 (67.9%) Fly other than economy class London to Auckland 19 (67.9%) Is it reasonable to: View Answers Take a train instead of a cheaper flight, for environmental reasons 32 (97.0%) Take a train instead of a cheaper flight, because you love that view from Newcastle to Berwick upon Tweed from the East Coast Main Line 20 (60.6%) Take an expensive fast train instead of a cheaper overnight one 29 (87.9%) Over-book a sleeper to get a room of your own 14 (42.4%) Travel with a long evening stop-over in Paris in the spring, when the stop-free route is cheaper 20 (60.6%) Travel with a long evening stop-over in Katowice in late November, when the stop-free route is more expensive 20 (60.6%) I would allow economy to override comfort if the money I was spending were: View Answers Mine 20 (71.4%) Grandma's 24 (85.7%) The British government's 15 (53.6%) Some foreign government's 13 (46.4%) Harvard University's (or some other of comparably fabled wealth) 12 (42.9%) From central funds at a university of noted poverty 22 (78.6%) Greenpeace's 21 (75.0%) Amnesty International's 22 (78.6%) Google's 6 (21.4%) Microsoft's 4 (14.3%) Vestas' (the Danish wind-turbine company) 11 (39.3%) Drax Power Generation's 4 (14.3%) Exxon's 3 (10.7%) British American Tobacco's 3 (10.7%) (51 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
1:43 pm	Quietest 'yay' ever After two hours and ten minutes on this bus from Cambridge, we have finally reached Milton Keynes temporary coach stop. (it's the Cambridge to Oxford bus and was enormously delayed in St Neots; even running to time it takes an hour and three quarters to get to MK, which is forty-five miles by a direct route) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
12:23 am	Stars continue starry This is Collinder 399, on the border between Vulpecula and Sagitta, unsurprisingly called the Coathanger Cluster. 200mm f/2.8, ISO 3200, 2-second exposure; sky-glow removed and brighter stars made more visibly prominent by the protocol used in http://fivemack.livejournal.com/179278.html . Scale in the large version is about five pixels per arc-minute, in the smaller version about 80 pixels per degree. Limiting magnitude is about 9.5 (if anyone has access to a better star catalogue than mine - YourSky only goes down to magnitude nine - and can make a better estimate of how bright the faintest visible star in the big image is, please tell me), so twenty times fainter than the naked eye can see from a perfect site, and about 250 times fainter than I can see from central Cambridge. Below is the Beehive Cluster in Cancer, setting over a neighbour's roof, taken with roughly the same setup (ISO 1000, 2 seconds, 150mm f/2.8, contrast stretched in gimp): If you looked at the Hubble picture of M57 as suggested in my last post, you may be amused by the image that the same setup produces of that object: (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, May 4th, 2009
11:29 am	My current favorite Web site http://hla.stsci.edu is the Hubble Space Telescope archive. Type in a target name (M57 is a pretty one; planetary nebulae work very well, the big Messier galaxies and globular clusters are a bit too big for the Hubble field of view), click on 'footprints' to get a picture of the sky with little boxes showing where the photo was taken, click on a footprint and go to 'images' to get a set of little pictures with the ones under the footprint highlighted in green, click on 'view online' to get a Google Maps-type zoomable view of the image. This is more science data than it is pretty pictures, though it's not the rawest level - most of the images have been made from three exposures by a process that takes out the cosmic-ray hits, and (as you'll see in M57) some script has noticed that images have been taken of the same field in several filters and made a colour-combined version of that. Selecting something like Cygnus A and seeing that the best pictures from the best instrument ever orbited still look like a slightly dirty orange blob, or looking at an ACS picture of a star-cluster in M33 (870,000 parsecs away) which looks rather like the photo I took of the Perseus double cluster (2300 parsecs away) with a 30mm wide-field lens last Saturday gives me a much stronger feeling that the universe is a very big place of which we know little than usual awe-driven articles about Hubble provide. The image-browser also makes it very clear that WFPC is a 2.4-megapixel camera; WFC3, being launched in about a fortnight, will be 16 megapixels and produce rather less noisy pictures. I know HST time is insanely competed for, but I am a little surprised that people are so confident that galaxies are radially symmetric that they'll publish a paper on the distribution of star clusters in M33 having taken pictures of a dozen random non-overlapping fields covering maybe 15% of the galaxy. There's clearly sensible science behind 'we will take pictures of this elliptical galaxy in three UV bands to see if anything unexpectedly energetic is happening', but the UV detector is rather noisy and the galaxy doesn't emit much in the UV, so NGC4627 (picked as a random small galaxy from Saturday's APoD) is rather disappointing. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
12:22 am	Six Madrid residents (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
9:16 pm	Lisbon remains a city of panoramas (if you want a large panorama, it's here. You can count battlements on the castle and see tiles on roofs in the middle distance, but it is 7MB long) Here's sunset, viewed from the Miradour da Gloria in the west. The castle is at the right-hand edge, the square right in front is the Praca dos Restauradores and the little patch of trees behind it is the Miradour da Graca on the other side of the city. Avenida Liberdade is the first set of trees above the railings, and on the far left you see some of the big modern buildings around Parque Eduardo VII. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 19th, 2009
7:03 pm	TAFF results I would like, given this entry and a very nice call from bugshaw at lunchtime, to thank everybody for a heavily-voted (and therefore generous to the Fan Fund coffers) race, my small but loyal following for voting for me, and the discerning multitudes of assembled fandom for picking the right man. stevegreen will be sent to Anticipation in Montreal and to other forn parts as a delegate by the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund this summer; I'll be there too. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 11th, 2009
8:36 pm	Any more TAFF questions? Hello all. I answered a few questions on the live teleconference link this afternoon, but afterwards I was quickly abducted by Tobes and offered cider that I couldn't refuse. I'm accessing the web from my phone and I can't use Flash so I can't use the ustream chat. If you have any more questions, please ask them here. (Comment on this)