FEBRUARY 2024 One of the more trivial consequences of the pandemic and the various lockdowns and ongoingrestrictions was that it thwarted my plan to join the local astronomy society, Astrocantabria, in early2020. I had been poised to fill in the form and was already looking forward to my first monthly talk when everything was shut …
JANUARY 2024 Sometimes it’s hard not to see life as a series of deadlines looming up ahead like a many-headed hydra. Every time you come face to face with one you discover that the beast STILL isn’t quite as deadly as you had feared, and you chop off its head just as its big, goggling …
NOVEMBER 2023 Exciting though it was, watching the latest Starship launch and ‘rapid unscheduled disassembly’ of the Super Heavy first-stage the other day reminded me yet again how little space flight seems to have changed since the Apollo missions well over fifty years ago, apart from the fact that NASA wouldn’t have been quite so …
SEPTEMBER 2023 If you don’t have much time right now, I recommend skipping straight to the video below, although I should point out that it’s not a TikTok, blink-and-you-miss-it sort of thing or a YouTube ‘short’, so you’ll actually need to have around ten minutes if you want to watch it all (and I only …
AUGUST 2023 Finding myself back from Marbella in the middle of August, reluctant to get back into any kind of routine and with my hard-working reviewers working their way through the latest draft of the Callisto novel, I sought escape in the story of what happened to Rebecca – ‘Red’ to her friends – after …
JULY 2023 During my years in software development, I had a reputation for trying to avoid getting involved in sales and for not liking the reps. It wasn’t entirely true. I occasionally tried to explain that, for me and my team, new customers only meant an impossible workload that came with no extra money. And …
May 2023 I get the impression that most people have either forgotten or never heard about Bill Gates’ bold assertion that the Internet wouldn’t come to anything. I guess he’s remembered for other stuff he did (and does!) – more astute business decisions, addressing the issues of the moment. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, thought …
“Creating something that is to us as we are to a frog!” Read More »
APRIL 2023 Okay, why am I so interested in the European Space Agency’s “Juice” (“Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer”) mission, which launched a day late on 14 April? It’s going to take eight years and four gravity assists to get to the Jupiter system! How could that be exciting? Well, for me there are two main reasons: first, …
March 2023 So, I ignored my own advice in the January ramble about not sending people to Mars and created a small settlement on the Red Planet called Karima-Napata. (I know it sounds like the famous Swahili catchphrase from the Lion King, but might that also make it easier to remember?) In Anything But Accidental, …
Martian Shuffle is waiting for you to go and grab it for free! Read More »
February 2023 I had already started cobbling together something for this month inspired by a very good article about ChatGPT (my favourite bit being a funny story about photocopier software) which has been in the mainstream news, hasn’t it? Everyone seems to be asking if, from now on, teachers will ever know if their students have really written …
