Tom Womack

Ah, this is the life. I am sitting in a perfect glass-and-white-steel cafe on the Belem seafront, sipping lemonade, eating what appears to be seaweed soup, and looking out at the green hills across the Teju. I've just visited the Geronimo Monastery, whose carved-marble cloisters are of more than Mughal absurd intricacy, and whose upper room contains a marvellous polycultural timeline of the world, the monastery and Portugal.

Lisbon is a city built on hills, and therefore a city of panoramas: I'll have several dozen megabytes of photos to feed to Hugin when I get home.

If only I were better at convincing my friends to accompany me to far cities ...

Suppose, lunatic that I am, that I wish to leave the comfortable safety of FCSC-insured cash ISAs and head, rather than to the flaming whirlpool that is the UK equity market, to the choppy waters of index-linked UK gilts, where my money is at least wrapped in Her Majesty's third-best ermine mantle against the unknown possibilities of inflation.

( A neophyte attempts to figure out what information sources are telling him )

I found, lying around in a pile in my study, a wallet which I must have picked up at a trade show in a past life. It's got the Ministry of Defence logo on the front: eagle in front of crossed swords in front of anchor. I wonder how many committee meetings it took to agree on that order, and how senior the attending major-generals, air vice-marshals and rear-admirals were.

It is commendably thin and light, and has a convenient coin purse. However, it is capable of holding precisely one bank card.

I am in south-west Paris. My wallet isn't. At least I still have my phone, which would be much more tedious to lose.

I've cancelled four bank cards and wonder why I habitually carry four bank cards. Will live off the company credit card until Friday.

It may well be that this data release was not thoroughly announced because the population of amateur asteroseismologists is zero, but

http://idc-corotn2-public.ias.u-psud.fr/invoquerSva.do?sva=browseGraph

has light-curve data from several chunks of the Corot planet-hunting and asteroseismology mission.

This is one of those annoying missions which is looking for exciting objects, and has many probable detections, each of which requires half a dozen observations on well-spaced nights from incredibly oversubscribed large telescopes to confirm; the Corot team has only announced confirmed discoveries, but there are probably a fair number of unannounced planets sitting in the dataset.

Yes, the big data set is 14GB long compressed, but there must be somebody who'd prefer the potential of fifty undiscovered planets to six downloaded HDTV movies.

BOGGLE! at the fabled Marmite and Cheese Pancake

QUAIL! at the Pancake With Creamy Mushroom

CONSUME! the Tomato and Bacon Pancake

IGNITE! the Sugar and Flaming Calvados Pancake (bring your own calvados; works with most strong spirits, slivovitz might be fantastic, whisky probably not)

HELP! fivemack make even more pancakes

TELL! me if you'd like to come (mail tom@womack.net or comment here), so that I avoid either running out of eggs or being obliged to have six-egg omelettes for breakfast for the next week.

I don't know dairy-free pancake recipes, but if they can be made with ingredients available at the Nasreen Dar, tell me what's needed and I'll pick it up on Monday.

At my house (mail me if you don't know the address and can't read my friends-locked post http://fivemack.livejournal.com/146799.html with it in), starting 6:30pm, on Shrove Tuesday which is 24 February. There will be pancakes both savoury and sweet (so don't eat first!) and there will be an open fire.

Here we have a report demonstrating quite how capable the stealth coatings on contemporary missile-carrying submarines are. Despite both vehicles being equipped with (different models of) the finest sonars that THALES can offer, the lead ships of the British and French deterrent fleets, Vanguard and Le Triomphant, collided in the Atlantic on 3rd February.

Nobody killed or injured, both submarines still watertight, though much expensive metal was bent.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7863290.stm says

'A 2007 commission report said the rate of [birth] defects [in Shanxi province, the centre of China's coal-mining industry] had risen 40% since 2001, from 104.9 per 10,000 births to 145.5 in 2006.'

This figure seemed to need some context, so I wandered over to google, and found

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-wellbeing/health-news/mediterranean-diet-reduces-birth-defects-525272.html

which says

'The French rate of 39.7 babies born with birth defects per 1,000 live births is less than half that in the Sudan, which has the highest rate in the world, at 82 per 1,000 live births. The UK ranks ninth in the table, behind Spain and Italy, with 43.8 affected babies per 1,000 live births'

and cites the March of Dimes, who provide me with

http://www.marchofdimes.com/MOD-Report-PF.pdf

which has a graph across the bottom of pages 9-10 which matches those figures, and has 51.2 defects per 1000 live births for China.

Is it more likely that the Shanxi figure should be per 1000 births, in which case Shanxi is a complete disaster area - sixty thousand babies born with defects a year - or that the Shanxi figures count only the really obvious immediately-visible birth defects and the March of Dimes figures count minor heart problems which require some work to discover?

"a child was born with physical defects every 30 seconds" => 1M per year; China's birth rate is 13.7 / 1000 people / year = 18.2 million per year, which gives a 5.5% figure that matches the March of Dimes.

I've written to the BBC about this and will be interested to hear what they say.

I'm running for TAFF, and I really ought to have mentioned this here already since this is my main point of contact with the world. TAFF is a tradition dating back to a time when the Atlantic was much wider, in which the collected science-fiction fandoms of Europe and America vote for a representative of one to be sent to the other; the voting is at Easter, and the winner is being sent to Canada for the Worldcon this summer. There are two candidates, stevegreen and myself.

Now, science fiction books. For it is Hugo-nominating season, when everyone planning to go to the Worldcon ought to figure out what the five best SF novels published this year that they've read have been, and the three people* who read new short fiction also get to nominate short fiction at three different lengths. Doing this with any competence as all is a habit costly in both coin and bookcase space, since the 'published' is overwhelmingly 'published in US hardback'.

The pair of books which absolutely jumped out at me this year, and which I've been proselytising enthusastically, is Catherynne Valente's In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice. It's absolutely marvellous in its post-modern tangling and intertwining of beautifully-written plot, stories of monsters told by story-telling monsters, a travelogue to beat all travelogues, a work of imagination comparable to (if obviously strongly inspired by) the Arabian Nights, everyone should read it as soon as they can, and it's published in 2006 so irrelevant for this year's Hugo.

SF is a literature of series; it's a lot of work to invent a world, you might as well set several books there, and for a literature read significantly by people capable of reading at ridiculous pace, eighteen-month publication gaps may be the only way to assure pacing. Which means there are a lot of excellent novels which it doesn't make great sense to nominate as a 'best novel'.

There's also the ubiquitous problem that a book prize should award a book rather than an author. When I look at books that are eligible, I find an annoying number of perfectly competent works by authors with vast reputations to trade on. Iain Banks deserves a prize for Use of Weapons, but he didn't even make the Hugo ballot that year; Ken Macleod deserves a prize for his amazing Fall Revolution quartet, but that's eight years old now. Matter and The Night Sessions are Banks' and Macleod's offerings for this year, and neither really sticks in my brain.

Terry Pratchett's Nation clearly gets a vote - the standard must be 'would get a vote even if by an unknown author', though likely I'd not have read it were it by an unknown author. It's a beautifully humane story; it made me cry, which very little does.

Brandon Sanderson completed his Mistborn trilogy this year. It's beautifully extruded fantasy product, pushed with a golden ram by a master craftsman through dies of polished diamond, the second and third books managing to be complete in themselves and to extend a complicated story and an equally complicated magic system in new and exciting directions; The Hero of Ages probably deserves a vote even as the third in a series.

There's Anathem, of course. Nine hundred pages of Platonic philosophy with monks, space aliens and ruminations on the nature of causality, but given an unquantifiable boost by that 'by the author of Snow Crash'.

Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains does good things with the grimness of warriors, and has a single paragraph that clinches a nomination by reminding the reader how lucky he is to live in a world where swords are to be found in cases in museums rather than kept from finding scabbards in his vitals.

I've got a month to get hold of and read books that I've missed and that ought to be nominated: any recommendations? Jo Walton's Half a Crown and Charlie Stross's Saturn's Children came out this year though I read them while they were being written, and so have strong and carefully considered two-year-old opinions of a version that isn't the one published; I'm not sure I can read the published versions of books I've read in beta in a way that means I could sensibly nominate.

* I know there are more than three people who read new short SF fiction reading this post. Shush.

The path from the back gate of the garden to the back door of my house is a single line of trampled grass and mud. Mostly mud, this time of year.

Having dug a very large hole in one of the beds and half-way across the path to remove a tree-stump obviously doesn't help, the packed earth is converted into loose earth which turns rapidly into the finest grade of mud.

Is there any good way of keeping this from happening? It's a rented house so I'm not willing to spend very much on things like gravel; are there decent matting materials that I could get at reasonable price and just unroll across the garden, or would that be expensive, ugly and ineffective? The grass is already pretty ruined so I wouldn't mind too much about matting killing the grass under it, but I'd want matting that would survive a couple of years unloved outdoors.

With about half a cubic yard of builder's sand, a couple of square metres of paving stones and a quantity of plastic liner, which looks like about a hundred pounds in cost, plus a large amount of healthy shovelling and rolling, I could actually build a proper path of paving stones laid on sand; maybe this is something to discuss with the landlord.