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When you learn to fly an airplane on instruments you take one of the biggest leaps of faith that you can possibly imagine. You are suddenly thrown into a world where you are totally dependent on what a panel of gauges is telling you with no visual aids to reassure you. In practice you nearly always have some visual stimulus at the most critical moments in flight – such as the let-down (landing) – but during training, with a hood on your head, you are not permitted that little luxury. I always felt worse for my extraordinarily patient instructor, however. He had the non-enviable task of sitting in the right-hand seat and knowing not only what I was doing but was also able to see outside as well to understand what I should have been doing. Allowing that to happen without grabbing the controls is a level of self-restraint that I doubt I would be capable of. Transfer that feeling of insecurity, which you suffer for the first few hundred hours of instrument flying in the air, to the increasingly poss...

We are told that the Phobos-Grunt space probe, which was launched on November 9, 2011, crashed into the Pacific Ocean last Sunday, January 15. The ambitious journey of the probe was intended to grab some of the soil from Phobos, one of the moons of Mars, and bring it back to Earth. Its daring made it one of the most watched launches from Russia in decades, where failures in Mars expeditions have been the norm in the last twenty years. The name of the probe was one of those make-you-laugh-in-English titles that we have come to expect more from Japanese t-shirts, but Фобос-Грунт, Phobos-Grunt, simply translates as Phobos-ground. As always there was concern that the doomed mission – which failed when the probe refused to respond to commands to fire its main engines while in low-Earth orbit – would result in large pieces of the craft falling on a populated area when it dropped, which was inevitable because the power provided by its limited ...

We have embarked on another leap year. After that extra day in February 2012 we will see the two solstices and equinoxes jump backwards from their errors of the twenty-second/twenty-third of their respective months in 2011 to be early on the days where we expect them – on the twentieth and twenty-first. It’s a pattern that has been in place for two millennia after Julius Caesar himself is said to have invented the 365 day calendar in 45 BC and put the leap day in place, as opposed to the 355 day calendar that existed before. The so-called Julian Calendar existed until 1582 when the 11 minute 14 second error in the calendar (the solar year is actually 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds – give or take a few seconds of opinions from different astronomers) got too much as seasons and feasts were pushed further and further out with the accumulative error over 1600 years pushing 12 days. The farmers, and the movement of their planting/harvesting cycles, were the least of the Catholic Chur...

So much sound and fury over the Higgs Boson, signifying what? A complete understanding of the fundamental constituents of the world in which we live? Of the universe of which we are an integral part? No … and yes. High-energy physicists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, announced this week they are closer than ever to detecting the apparently hallowed boson: or possibly it is called God Particle merely for mass consumption. Its quantification would at once provide breathtaking insights into the infinitesimal domain affecting Earthly life and to the composition of the entire universe, a broad range, indeed. This is basic science at its best, the unraveling of the underpinnings of the thing, matter, in this case. The payoff is understanding the whys and wherefores of how particles come to be endowed with mass. And when mass teams up with gravity, watch out, literally. An apple falls to Earth because gravity, a force centrally directed toward the Earth’s core, acts on mass, and on...

I was driving downtown Victoria (BC) the other night, on the way to Christ Church Cathedral – where my daughter was the haunting unaccompanied soloist lead of Once In Royal David’s City for the processional at her school’s annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols – when I was pulled up at a set of red lights. Alongside me another car pulled past and made a left turn on the red light without even a hint at stopping. Wow, I thought! Five seconds later the car behind him did exactly the same… Where on earth are the police when they are needed? It made me think that I must be in a West African city, because not even in Rome do they make that kind of turn on a red light. But, hey, it’s Christmas and you have no option but to assume that all the other vehicles on the road are being driven by people who have just left an office party or after-work confab and probably shouldn’t be behind the wheel. There was a period when I lived in California when it was quite normal fo...

The news media is very difficult to identify these days. We all probably have one or two favorite web sites that still appear as a conventional print publication alongside the electronic version. The latter usually has the advantage of spontaneity, but also, increasingly, carries with it a subscription model that few of us are willing to fork out money for. Those ‘private’ sites are beaten by the likes of Google, of course, and most of them lack sophistication in hiding their content from most of us. But what of the millions of blogs that are around? Can they justify themselves as being described as news sites? Certainly the likes of the Huffington Post, which grew on the backs of free blog contributions by the public, has been able to cash in on its content with its recent sale to AOL for $315 million. Yet, when you look at the Huffington site, they break all the journalistic rules of things like layout: having a ‘front page’ that is about ten scroll lengths offers the reader an impo...

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (a little night music) is one of the most popular of all of Mozart’s compositions. Although it was apparently written as a commission, it does not appear to have been performed until after his death, when his widow sold a huge bundle of his works in the battle against starvation. While it is far from being my favorite work of classical music it does have the benefit of being a reliable piece of test music, in particular the last movement: an allegro rondo in G major. So last weekend, when I had the house to myself for a couple of days, I let rip with audio while also working on accounts. With the benefit of having no neighbors directly adjacent to the house walls the volume could be turned up in a series of comparison tests with my laptop as the source. It would have been nice to have had a full laboratory with recording and measurement facilities but what I was after was much more in the form of an aural exploration. With Mozart and some pop music I hoped to solve the annoyance...

My godmother was an unmarried aunt who was extraordinarily smart – with a first class honours degree in English and the scary ability to learn a new language every year – and reached a high level in the British Civil Service. But she was also an argumentative, selfish woman who thought, for example, that Christmas for her godson involved the purchase, every year, of a new pair of slippers. She would spitefully use the tip of her umbrella to create space on her standing-room only commuter train and accused one of my brothers of poisoning (with alcohol) her pet budgerigar (not an impossible theory, at all), and put herself in a pit of gloom when her last conversation with her mother – my paternal grandmother – was actually a full-face verbal fight. But she was also a delightful woman in some respects; she regularly took me to Gilbert and Sullivan performances of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company at the Savoy with a dinner treat either before or after. How grown up I felt eating a gam...

I met my first patent pirate about fifteen years ago. He was a lawyer who specialized in buying patents in the electronics sphere that were close to expiry. He then used them to whelp companies into financial submission with the threat of court actions. The first of those patents concerned the storage of video line information that could then be read out at a different or more stable rate than the input. It was not a very solid patent and could be – and actually was – successfully contested with the patent office because of an incredible amount of prior art. But that was not before a number of manufacturers paid the man off so that the problem would go away: a great deal cheaper than fighting it through the courts. The patent was broken by a friend of mine who didn’t allow his company (Japanese) to be blackmailed into submission and fought it for a couple of years. I got involved by foolishly trying to broker a settlement. It did not happen until the man went away empty-handed. Patents we...

There can be little argument in our modern world that bad science is prevalent. Climate scientists, for example, have to endure the rantings of pseudo-scientific pundits who will postulate that because it snowed somewhere, then global warming is a lie. Whatever their reasons for the strange positions they take, these people would like nothing better than for the scientists to come on their shows and engage with them. That, however, is one way of giving some credence to the idiocy; the best minds out there will have no part of it and decline such invitations. The same thing may be true for the news item (would someone define ‘news’ for me?) in the New York Times wherein a computer scientist (another term that surely is a non sequitur) has decided that a device such as a Kindle gets heavier when you load more data into it. “Although the total number of electrons in the memory does not change as the stored data changes, the trapped ones have a higher energy level than the untrapped ones&hellip...