Observations from a Hill

Mission critical. First define your mission, then define the points of criticality where failure would be potentially or actually mission catastrophic. Outline those breakpoints and define failsafe exit strategies to escape any potentially catastrophic error in the execution of your mission. These sorts of checkpoints are second nature to the kinds of human activity and exploration such as space travel, where the margins for error, particularly in cases such as the current mission to and from the moon, are vanishingly small; and where there is an almost total reliance on computers and software to achieve the safe passage of machine and crew there and back. Nasa and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory know this utterly: their standards of software control are second to none. They operate under conditions of multiply redundant software systems that fail safe and delegate to the next tier of machine control by default. In the days of the Apollo missions, software was small in scale and largely ...

  I've expressed doubts about modern space exploration programs and the underlying motivation behind most of them in these pages probably many times, now; but the Artemis mission has rekindled in me some of the wonder that I first experienced when the first astronauts made it to the Moon back in my early adulthood back in the late sixties. From the start of this mission, there has been a real sense of voyage to it, not mere remote, robotic interference, but exploration in the truest, most human sense of the word. And the key here is the word human, with all its manifest and manifold semantic depths laid out in the form of one actually quite simple quest. The complexity of science and technicality underpinning that quest cannot be ignored, but the goal of the enterprise, ultimately, is still simple and visceral: '... to seek to find and not to yield...' . Which is so unlike the billionaire tech bros and their dick-waving contests and colonial instincts: this mission is foun...

We went over to Nantlle today for a wander around the old slate quarries there. We hadn't been for I guess a good thirty years, although I wrote about the place in these pages last year . It seems that at long last, there is some public admission that there is a major contamination problem in one of the upper quarries of the group, something we two were aware of some forty years ago. It is also the reason why no-one who buys the Nantlle quarries can ever get past first base in developing the place for leisure use for the general public: the cost of cleaning up the quarry in question would simply be prohibitive and could not attract any serious finance so to do. Pictured is an example of signage on the site that never existed before, in the days when the unitary authority simply glossed over the serial failures to complete any sale of the site to commercial third parties, all of whom ran a mile when the truth of the contamination and its scale became manifest at each successive surv...

I'm no more a believer in divination than the next rational human being; at least not in the sense that there are divine or otherwise forces at work behind any particular mechanical modus operandi of such practices. Tarot, i Ching, throwing bones, reading palms, crystal balls &etc., what have you. All carry a freight of superstition and arcane 'magickal-ness' akin to faith and/or religion: the unprovable 'proving' the improbable to the satisfaction of the naive. What I do believe, however, is the power of association of ideas, both the rational and the symbolic or rather, the concrete known, set in apposition to abstract ideas. What I mean by this, is that as a species, we construct our world from fragments of our immediate sensory inputs, memories of previous sensory inputs, and abstract constructs created from the combination of both plus the recorded history of our collective thought as humans; all mediated through our personal imagination: our own, personal ...

I came across a word new to me, today, in the FT Weekend Magazine's 'Departments' sidebar: ' RETCON/ rɛtkɒn / (verb or noun), a contraction of 'retroactive continuity', for when an existing narrative and the established facts within that narrative are overwritten, as in the [cited] Patrick Duffy shower resurrection in the TV show 'Dallas'. Having been killed off in the previous season of the show, it was decided that Duffy that should stay with the show, and returned, as if from the dead, with the entire previous season being written off as a dream. How so 'now' this seems, with The Trump Show performing this feat of narrative gymnastics on an almost daily basis, now that the scene has expanded into the catastrophic war we are witnessing in the Middle East. A man not overly familiar with or given to the telling of the truth, Trump not only mangles the English language on a sentence by sentence basis, but flips narratives to suit the expediency of...

I was reading a book this afternoon that I've mentioned before in these pages: "Cataloguing The World" by Alex Wright, and came across a reference to Esperanto, which immediately made me think of my old mate Phil, whose dad was a member of the Esperanto community, speaking and writing the synthetic language invented in the late nineteenth century by a Jewish opthalmologist from Bialystok [now in Poland]: one L.L. Zamenhof; in an attempt to create an international second and common language through which international relations could be built. The name derives from the Spanish for 'hope' or 'expectation', essentially the motivation behind the creation of the language: through commonality of thought and communication, the hope of a better and less divided world. No wonder that the Nazis characterised it negatively as a 'Jewish conspiracy', echoes of which mindset are still resounding at present in the divisive world of human affairs today. Quite tang...