Voyager 1 has to be one of the most inspirational of human achievements. It was built for a five-year project to collect data about the two gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn. It was launched in 1977, and, with less processing power than a contemporary mobile phone, it has been sending data back to NASA for the past 47 years. It crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, and is currently about 15 billion miles away from Earth.
In November of last year, it had begun to return gibberish, and scientists naturally assumed that the spacecraft was simply feeling its age. But enquiring minds still needed to know, so the flight team kept working at the problem, and sent a poke command (which accesses and modifies a specific memory cell) that prompted Voyager to send back a reading, apparently in the wrong format, that an engineer was able to decode.
From there, the flight team was able to resolve Voyager’s problem, and three days ago, they received an intelligible response from V1 about the system’s state of health. Now, that is remote working.
enthean
I came across this in Philip Hobsbaum’s Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form; it is ‘a rare word’ and means ‘inspired by an indwelling god’, according to Hobsbaum. Of course I will find an everyday use for it.
In November 1930, the Indiana Bell building was moved 90 degrees, while all 600 employees continued to work uninterrupted and undisturbed, by Kurt Vonnegut’s father. I mean, he was supposed to, he didn’t just sneak in and do it on the sly. He was an architect working with his grandfather’s company (Vonnegut, Bohn, and Mueller) who had built the telephone exchange in 1907.
When a larger building was required, Vonnegut proposed that instead of demolishing the existing building, it be jacked up, put onto rollers, and rolled to a new position. The building weighed about 11,000 tonnes, and it took 34 days to shift it around. There was no interruption to supplies of gas or electricity, nor to sewage disposal, and members of the public as well as employees still had access to the building.
The British Fantasy Society runs regular on-line events on all sorts of topics to do with fantasy, including workshops, panels, interviews, and readings. I attended their recent event The Book Journey on 13th April. It was lively and informative, with an excellent mix of panellists (see the event page for details).
There were panels on editing, marketing, and artwork, an interview with an agent, and some very interesting readings of their own work by various authors, all very ably chaired by PS Livingstone (herself an author).
A massive hot ball of plasma, powered by nuclear fusion reactions at its core, 8 light-seconds from Earth, and though always present, rarely seen in Ireland without its filters of dense cloud or rain.
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