Other Travellers

So we were driving along in Norfolk, when we found this in a little village.

There was no sign of The Doctor, just a little note on the door saying that photos were fine in exchange for a charity donation. What a good idea!

Luckily there were no darleks around.

Unless, of course, The Doctor had to wipe our memories for our own good, like he did with Donna Noble.

Going on holiday tomorrow

Well I did nearly all of it.

The cat is safely installed in a new cattery since the old one wasn't available.  Both the yearly and quarterly tax returns have been done. My son has a new passport.  We have B&Bs booked for the beginning and end of the holiday. I have told people who employ tour guides that I won't be on the island. I have interviewed Pedro Álvarez, the director of Grantecan, although I haven't written that up.  But I can do that on the laptop and all the rest of the second edition is in Dropbox for layout.  I've posted a book to a customer. I've researched prices
for minibuses and excursions down lava tubes for a group of geologists who are coming later, but needed the prices now. I have booked tentative dates for two groups for private guides immediately after we
get back. I've sorted out the kerfuffle over my son's school books. I've even managed to get to Puerto Naos with more books for a couple of shops which sold out, and to get paid for some sales in Santa Cruz.  Oh and I packed 
my suitcase.

Now that I write it all down, I'm not surprised that I'm tired.

Updates will be sporadic while I'm on holiday.  The laptop doesn't run blogger and wordpress too well, and Facebook is slower than an arthritic snail trying to charge through treacle.

"The Mammoth book of Time Travel SF"

The cover of "The Mammoth book of Time Travel SF"

I came home from delivering copies of "A Breathtaking Window on the Universe" to the other side of the island, and found my contributor's copies of "The Mammoth book of Time Travel SF" waiting outside the house. The last I'd heard about it was in December 2012, so I'd forgotten all about it. Obviously, this was a lovely surprise. And seeing the other authors in there was even nicer: Kage Baker, Michael Swanwick, Christopher Priest, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Robert Silverberg and Liz Williams. Oh my. I'm going to have great fun reading this! You can pre-order it here:

General Relativity

After reading what Conservapedia had to say about E=mc2, I got curious as to what they'd say about general relativity

The theory of relativity has been repeatedly contradicted by experiments [snip] 
It is unlikely tenure or a Ph.D would be awarded to any critic of the theory.

Well the second sentence is true, at least for physics departments.  But according to Wikipedia,

The predictions of general relativity have been confirmed in all observations and experiments to date. 

And if that's not enough for you, consider this: the GPS system has to apply a correction to it's atomic clocks.  These clocks run slower by 7 microseconds per day (because they're moving fast) and faster by 45 microseconds per day (because they're farther from the Earth's gravity).  So the   GPS clocks are tweaked to compensate - if they were on the ground, they'd run 38 microseconds per day slow. (45-7=38)

38 microseconds doesn't sound like much, but without the relativistic tweak, GPS positions would drift off by about 10 km per day.

E=mc2

Have you heard of Conservapedia? It's like Wikipedia for US right-wingers, guaranteed to be their version of politically correct. The article on Einsein's famous formula, E=mc2, is interesting. It says,

In fact, no theory has successfully unified the laws governing mass (i.e., gravity) with the laws governing light (i.e., electromagnetism), and numerous attempts to derive E=mc² in general from first principles have failed. Political pressure,[2] however, has since made it impossible for anyone pursuing an academic career in science to even question the validity of this nonsensical equation. Simply put, E=mc² is liberal claptrap.

As I said, interesting. Are they saying that atomic bombs go BANG by some completely different mechanism, and it's pure coincidence that they produce the exact amount of energy predicted by E=mc2? Or are they saying that atomic bombs don't go BANG at all?

Personally, I think it would be rather difficult to produce a working atomic bomb by relying on "claptrap".