Tom Womack

I've not written anything here for quite a while because I've been running around at work like a mad thing; I've had a lovely conversation over dinner with rezendi in Cambridge as he headed from Djibouti to Delhi by way of Paris, eaten macarons and cucumber-and-salmon sandwiches with the crusts cut off at crazyscot's splendid leaving do last weekend, and played two ceilidhs, but aside from that mostly I've worked ... got the final presentation finished at midnight on Sunday.

The customers came on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week, and they seem to have left pretty much satisfied; we've given them things that they didn't quite know to ask for, but managed to get two rounds of cheers in two days of presentations.

I now have a very long to-do list, but the next deadline is the end of August, and it's my colleague rather than I who'll be presenting at the meeting in Madrid then. Moreover, the to-do list does, at least from here, appear to consist mostly of things that are possible and that I'm reasonably confident I know how to do: this has not always been the case, and life is improved when it is.

This evening I will read Bloggers of the Zombie Apocalypse 2 (aka Deadline by Mira Grant)

The Middle Levels Main Drain, between Wiggenhall St Mary Magdalen and Tilney St Lawrence.

This is one of the great arable-farming regions of England.

I doubt I'll be cooking anything from it, at least not any of the recipes that take two double-page spreads to describe and include 'titrate with malic acid to reach pH 3.4', or instructions as to which four single-malts to blend to get exactly the right taste of nostalgic whisky, or take three kilograms of crabs to produce an ounce and a quarter of crab reduction. But it's a marvellous artefact in itself, and filled with pictures to enthuse the palate even when I'm somewhat laid up with a cold and planning nothing but cheese on toast and Sainsbury's chicken soup.

And given the existence of the Myhrvold Modernist Cuisine set, this £40 cookbook is scarcely extravagant at all.

Peter Seibel's Coders at Work, which is a set of interviews with luminaries of the computing world. Mostly writers of languages, because that's the major kind of large-scale computer work still carried out essentially by a single person. It's striking how similar their life-patterns are; they encountered computers at an early age and were at once smitten.

Peter Watson's German Genius, a thousand pages of German intellectual history, though the writer is much more fascinated by early twentieth-century philosophers and much less by early-twentieth-century scientists and engineers than I would have been.

Daniel Yergin's The Prize, a really detailed telling of the first 130 years of the oil industry; household names - Getty, Rockefeller, Gulbenkian - and an understanding that I didn't previously have of how completely oil-drenched all Western interactions with the Middle East have been since well before World War Two, and of how recent the oil wealth of places like Libya is.

Hans Fallada's fantastic Alone in Berlin, a lesson in the paranoia and the complete institutional sickness of the Third Reich; on a much fluffier note, Paul Torday's Salmon-fishing in the Yemen, which is a Blairite political satire cheering to read in that it reminds you of a time when the worst feature of Blair was his PR-run and cheer-driven politics.

I can't recommend Thomas Levenson's Newton and the counterfeiter, it's a dry telling of some bits of history which were much improved when Neal Stephenson used them as the backdrop for his Baroque Trilogy.

As for SF, I've already enthused about Kirill Eskov's The Last Ringbearer a few articles ago. John Scalzi's The God Engines didn't do much for me (in particular, it didn't do much for me that Warhammer 40,000 hadn't done when I was fourteen). Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl, which reminded me of Neuromancer as much as anything else - a tale of corruption and societal collapse set in a drowning Bangkok. Adrian Tchaikovsky's The Sea Watch which at least answered the question of what was left to write about in his thoroughly-explored world, and had some marvellous underwater set-pieces. Jo Walton's Among Others - a tale of self-discovery in the hostile world of a 70s girl's boarding school, with ambiguous magic, fairies and Wales.

And I re-read Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind, amazed at how much of it I'd forgotten in the four years since I read it last - it was definitely a book that I sat and read until 3am the first time, and it turns out that in reading at 3am I managed not to embed into my brain the entire two-hundred-page sequence with the forest of opium trees and the maddened dragon-lizard.

Thankfully, this is precisely what's on offer at the Vue cinema at 6:30 on Saturday 26th March. I'll be there; would anyone like to join me?

[Poll #1715686]

On the page here, you will find a link to an English translation of Kirill Eskov's Последний кольценосец 'The Last Ringbearer'.

I've read very little Russian fantasy - four volumes of the Night Watch and Monday Begins on Saturday - but I'd say from almost-infinite ignorance that this definitely belongs in that vein. It's set in Middle Earth, but a Middle Earth that has very broad sweeps of the Soviet Union in its geography (orcs portrayed as nomads from something not unlike the Kazakh desert, the incompetent irrigation of Mordor 'in a sincere belief that the quality of irrigation is determined by the number of cubic furlongs of earth moved'), and something in the attitudes of its characters that I recognise fondly from Red Plenty. I've spent three hours reading it when I could have been finishing German Genius (a rather good, though large enough to require special architecture of pillows and blankets for reading in bed, thousand-page history of German thought from Frederick II to the end of Weimar), and regret not a moment.

In 1999, the US National Academy published a survey of what big astronomical projects ought to be done in 2000-2010 (you may have to go to http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070317 and register to download).

They brought out an equivalent for 2010-2020 recently, so I thought I might as well look back and see what got done of the 2000-2010 one.

Ongoing program (IE recommendations of the 1990-2000 process)

• Space Infra-Red Telescope Facility: yes, Spitzer was launched in August 2003 and has done pretty fantastic things
  
• Millimetre Array: project merged with others to give the Atacama Large Millimetre Array, and that's on track to produce the first science observations in the second half of this year. So: success, but a bit late
  
• Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy: this one's been perennially delayed, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory that it replaces had last flown fifteen years before SOFIA finally managed first light at the start of December 2010. I wonder slightly what the Herschel equivalent of the mid-infrared frame in the first-light shot of M42 would look like; I don't know enough about fields of view to see if that would be feasible.
  
• Astrometric Interferometry Mission: no sign of it yet, and the SIM that it turned into was fairly formally cancelled in 2010. It's been through several changes of name and goal, and increased precision of (much cheaper) ground-based radial-velocity and (somewhat cheaper) space-based transit searches for planets mean that its raison d'être is rather eroded. ESA's Gaia, which will do astrometry but not interferometrically, does seem to be underway; SIM may make more sense after Gaia.
  
• Microwave anisotropy probes: NASA's WMAP and ESA's Planck both launched and produced interesting if not unexpected results.
  

Major New Initiatives

• Next Generation Space Telescope. Well, the program is carrying on, it's enormously over its rather optimistic budget and looks to be about five years behind schedule, but I suspect that if I do this again in 2021 everyone will immediately know of some impressive NGST images.
  
• Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope - a 30-metre ground-based telescope. This is now called the Thirty Metre Telescope, after a merger with Canadian and Californian projects to do the same thing; they've picked a site on Mauna Kea and plan first light in 2018, though no segments have been procured yet and the devices for keeping the segments aligned aren't fully developed.
  
• Constellation-X space-based X-ray telescope. Like the Millimetre Array, this ended up merged with equivalent projects by Europe and Japan to give the International X-Ray Observatory, which seems to be in contention to be awarded funding in 2013.
  
• Expanded Very Large Array - receiver upgrade for the VLA; currently underway, should be ready in 2012.
  
• Large-Aperture Synoptic Survey Telescope. This project ended up with a lot of funding from Google, it's now at the stage of casting the mirror, but apparently there's a bit of a delay because the grinding machine ground the first mirror rather too enthusiastically.
  
• Terrestrial Planet Finder - essentially a successor to SIM, this would be a big space-based interferometer capable of imaging Earth-sized planets. Cancelled 2010 along with SIM.
  
• Single Aperture Far Infrared Observatory - successor to NGST, this was supposed to be an eight-metre monolithic-mirror telescope. Since the only proposed launch vehicle that it could fit in was cancelled a couple of years ago, I imagine the project is dead.
  

Things In Space

• Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope: yes, it's now called Fermi, it launched June 11 2008 and has been surveying the gamma-ray sky ever since.
  
• Laser Interferometer Space Antenna: this is a rather optimistic project (it requires three telescopes to fly in formation ten million kilometres apart), it's been taken over by ESA and is another of the competitors for 2013.
  
• Solar Dynamics Observer: yes, launched February 11 2010, working successfully, I even know one of the people (ellarien) analysing data from it
  
• Energetic X-Ray Imaging Survey Telescope: the idea was to survey the whole hard-X-ray sky several times a day. Nothing really came of this, and it wasn't mentioned in the 2010 survey.
  
• Advanced Radio Interferometry between Space and Earth: launch a largish radio telescope into a far Earth orbit. Nothing seems to have come of this, though there are vague Russian and well-developed Japanese projects to do this.
  

On New Year's Day, the world conspires to remind you that the month is over, and there's nothing to distract me from writing the books-read list. It looks as if I've read almost exactly a hundred books in 2010, though I've only got round to writing up January and August.

( One-paragraph reviews follow )

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