Observations from a Hill

I was just watching an interesting YouTube about the now long-retired British low-level strike aircraft, the Blackburn [later Hawker-Siddeley] Buccaneer, and its remarkable ability to fly at over 500 knots at sea level, as low as twenty feet. The video was a mixture of ancient film footage larded with AI slop [including the inevitable accompanying piss-poor machine-generated narration that infests just about everything online these days]. I won't mention the 'content' creator, but would simply point you to this video instead for a taster of what this aircraft could do. Obviously, as this was flown in domestic airspace in peacetime, it's not at a particularly high airspeed; but under the combat conditions it was designed for, it could routinely fly under ground radar and fighter cover at high speed, riding its own shockwave, which gave it an unusually high degree of natural stability in such a dangerous flight mode. I once had the privilege of seeing one of these things...

  I misnamed the Jeff Bezos space project in last night's post as Blue Horizon [since corrected], rather than Blue Origin. I think that at the back of my mind when writing last night's scribble I had the old Blue Horizon record label, which was dear to my heart in the late sixties, as it featured some of my favourite artists at the time - and ever since. It opened its doors to business in 1965 and featured a roster of mainly - the clue's in the name - blues-based music in relatively small release numbers, but had closed those doors completely by 1972. Pictured is my original copy of the first Fleetwood Mac album from 1968. I actually picked up this copy in the early seventies for about 20p from a bin of secondhand records in some cheap shop on Cape Hill, Smethwick. Copies of the record - weirdly, considering how relatively small its original distribution was and the short life span of the label itself - can still be got for around twenty-five quid online; less than the pri...

The casual observer from the past might be forgiven for thinking that the above blurry photograph was taken of the decisive moment of one of those tragically misguided thermonuclear tests in the forties and fifties that ushered in the Cold War and divided East from West. But no, this is a Jeff Bezos Blue Horizon Origin  [Freudian Slip: Blue Horizon was a now defunct record label] rocket ship exploding on its launchpad during what should have been a routine operation. This behemoth of a launch vehicle, alongside Elon Musk's similar efforts in this field is meant to usher in a 'new age' of space exploration by offering us mere humans the opportunity to colonise our one and only planetary moon; a place visited by a very few of our species in one very specific era of our history. But the question one has to ask is: Why? to what ultimate end is this frontiersman-ship directed at such huge expense, when our terrestrial, humanitarian issues are so pressing and in need of such eno...

Some days it's so difficult to come up with a single idea for a post on this blog: sometimes a single-themed channel seems like it might have been a better idea to commit to, but there we are. I opted for this open-ended format out of choice and I'm committed thereto, for better or for worse; for good. So tonight is ramble territory; a stroll through the byways of the day, my thoughts, and unfortunately, the bloody news. First off, of course, is that hardy perennial of British conversational gambits: the weather. What on earth transpired today? We had been told of a gradual turndown of the heat of the last few days in the coming week or so, and it was so unseasonably hot yesterday at 32 Celsius, which predictably precipitated much atmospheric electrical theatricality last night; but today? From a warm, hazy start to the morning, the temperature reached a still pretty warm high of 26 Celsius by the middle of the afternoon; but by around seven-thirty this evening, the wind having...

Well it's been even hotter here in Fairview Heights today, with the mercury substitute hitting thirty-two Celsius late afternoon. We did some more kebabs on the barbecue: this afternoon's fire being lit in a jury-rigged affair built of otherwise redundant storage heater bricks atop my old Black and Decker Workmate, as the easy-to-light charcoal bag was too big for the the little kettle barbecue I used for yesterday's meal. I've used these bricks many times before for building temporary cooking structures: they are ideally suited for the purpose, as they hold heat wonderfully. I fully intend to build a permanent pizza oven with them sometime, now my collection has grown sufficiently so to do. My motto, like my dad's is not to chuck out anything that can possibly be of use in the future: it's a philosophy that works more often than not. After we'd eaten al fresco in the baking heat and cleared the patio table of our stuff, I decided to sit out there and read f...

  I was of a mind to pen something today about an article on Medium that I've been reading over the last few hours, about 'Euler's Identity', the celebrated 'Most Beautiful Mathematical Equation'. I've come across this before, but not until I chanced upon this particular piece about it did so much start to fall into place about the mysteries, as they seemed to me, of mathematics. I wish I'd had the person who penned the article as my maths teacher back in school; I think I might have made a much better fist of the subject than I did. However, I'll leave that topic for later as I'm knackered, it's hot, and I'm full of barbecued food, viz, the above kebabs in progress, served in a soft tortilla wrap with fresh salad, and in my case, Encona California Reaper pepper sauce. Yummy. Must stop now as I feel like a nap...