Our regular contributor, the writer and planetary modeller David Angus, has some good news.
The art director of Star Trek: The Next Generation told me at a Zoom meeting of the International Association of Astronomical Artists that he’d seen one of my planets or one like it at NASA Ames Research or Visitor Center, I can’t remember which. He thought it looked like Terraformed Mars and was 24 inches across. Some time ago we worked on Jupiter’s moons together.
That’s interesting because in 2022 I tried to track down a 2-foot diameter model of Terraformed Mars I made for the Chicago Planetarium in the closing months of the last millennium. I’d seen it there in 2009 but couldn’t find it in 13 years later.
Otherwise the model-making version of the Battle of the Somme goes on. I’m so close to the end of the dust creating drilling operations to create the fine detail that I have to do outside on one of Jupiter’s big Galilean moons, Callisto; but the no man’s land-style terrain of craters should have been finished well before now and, like a World War I trench battle fizzling out in bad weather, the combination of shorter days and wet weather are narrowing down time for the outside work necessary to finish this, while gains are minimal.
I blame computer related technology for delaying this.
In summer I was hit with a glut of courses I was obliged to complete. The glut was probably due to understaffing which may also have had something to do with the computer websites handling this being no good. A lot of time was wasted trying to deal with the details of booking courses on badly designed websites while the weather was sunny outside.
There was a similar effect with the new smartphone I’d bought with a good camera for a hiking trip in the Dolomites. I was unprepared for the labyrinthine hassle of transferring the images to the main computer. So were the support staff. ‘It’s the blind leading the blind,’ declared one expert, his fingers lethargically plodding through smartphone intricacies. The expert I’d seen before was away on holiday.
During half term when the weather and day length still gave me a chance I should have had an increased chance of more time on Callisto but…
A weekend sci-fi convention I wanted to attend would only take earlier cheaper payments by Paypal. Beware of organisations with pally wally names! They seem to assume friendship to disguise an obstructive performance. Paypal’s requirements frustrated and cancelled the early payment and I found it all so tiring.
As soon as I got home from that convention I found that that bloody course website was still insisting that I hadn’t done one of the courses. It turned out to be the first one I tackled. I did it again and the website from hell remained adamant I hadn’t! I printed out the certificate as proof. Then I found the certificate I’d printed out for the same course back in June. One infuriating trait of computers is to faithfully and steadfastly hang on at all costs to some piece of shit you’re dying to see the end of.
Another arrogant business organisation made yet another demand for verification. I hit back by resigning from being a director of a local residents group, after being obliged to waste more time failing to grasp the technology required – as usual. It wasn’t such a loss since I became one of their directors more out of a sense of duty during a crisis than anything. A fellow director who persevered found himself going round in circles. I’ve grown to hate that word ‘verification’.
Last but not least, I’ve had to change over to Windows 11 with all the upheaval that entails, such as opportunities to repeat the kind of complications I’ve described and all the opportunities you never wanted to spend more money. I only managed that with a friend who’s in the know, resulting in more compulsory investment of time while the weather, yet again, happened to be good outside.
I’ve achieved a lot this year in spite of this computer crap. It was easier to fly a 1940s Spitfire – on zero flying experience – than it was to deal with some modern computers! There might just be a sound reason for that in the sense of it being a matter of life and death in 1940 as to whether World War II technology was intuitive, relatively easy to understand. Call me a Luddite but I can’t help feeling if we’d have had to cope with today’s technology in 1940 we might have lost the war.
It’s not that I think computers and associated technology are rubbish. They have transformed civilisation often for the better; enabling one to do so much more in theory at least and I’d be wrong if I said one can live without them. So there is a case for me being ungrateful and unreasonable. But along with this there does seem to be a policy of introducing processes that complicate or waste as much time as possible, often when there was an adequate alternative beforehand.
One example is a card key versus a previous card key or an old fashioned real hotel room key. If you’re 75 and manage to climb a mountain while hiking from one hotel to another what you really don’t deserve is to experience the latest technological sales wanker’s wheeze of a new card key system that – after trekking through most of the hotel with the last of your strength – enables you – by not working – to lose an argument with a door! Then be told on your return that they’ve been having problems with the new card key. This happened to me in the Dolomites at a luxury hotel.
It can be really irritating to have to relearn something one used to do without thinking. It can make one feel mentally disabled. Plus if one has some conception of how tiny the human lifespan is compared to the immense span of geological time – as I do – one really resents what remains of ones time at 75 being whittled down by this kind of thing. I’ve been known to give crash courses on the nature of geological time to bank staff among others.
Maybe it’s the fault of scammers necessitating an obstacle course of security requirements. Don’t get me started on scammers because my thoughts towards people who’ve ruined many and caused the rest of us to be blighted with a nit picking paranoic culture are, well, ..evil.
Also a culture of ever increasing security tends to play into the hands of those who would diminish freedom of speech and freedom generally.
A close second to scammers are large commercial concerns controlling the technologies who seem to be making life easier for themselves by farming out niggling little time consuming tasks for us, while we’re not being paid to complete them. I’ve heard a comedian say ‘everything takes longer these days.’
Enough of the blues! I’m ending this the way I started it: on a positive note on a different subject. Recently I attended a very enjoyable conference at the Royal Geographical Society partially because a few years ago the insurance industry ruled out an ascent I had in mind of the legendary ‘Lost World’ in Venezuela and if there was a way to outflank that it would be found at this conference.
There was. Contacts there led to 2 partial insurance offers. I can hardly believe it but this looks like the green light to a real challenge of an adventure!
And I’ve finally, at long last, finished drilling operations on Callisto!
Picture ‘COMPUTER LABS’ reproduced under a CCO.1 Universal licence.
