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a very good day
May. 15th, 2011 02:22 amGot three-quarters of the way around the new quilt binding (it's a smallish one) while watching Doctor Who and the Eurovision Song Contest tonight. Doctor Who was excellent. Eurovision was entertaining. I am astonished but not displeased that we actually got some points this time round, and even made it into the top half of the contestants. (Yes, guys, this is what happens when you actually submit a halfway good and crowd-pleasing entry. Well, all right, a crowd-pleasing entry. Block voting was not the cause of all our previous losses when we just happened to submit totally crap songs.)
Have also got the second Aaronovitch book, Moon over Soho, which is also being very good. Now I'm wanting the third. Which looks like it's not going to be out till November. Ah well.
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The sons of Musa ibn Shakir were bright and bold, and if they hadn't been Muslims would probably have gone on to be the patron saints of techno-geeks. They're famous for their ninth-century Baghdad bestseller, a compendium of ingenious mechanical devices which they imaginatively titled Kitab al-Hiyal or The Book of Ingenious Devices. In it they describe what is possibly the first practical device for measuring differential pressure, and that's where the problem really starts. In 1593, Galileo Galilei took time off from astronomy and promoting heresy to invent a thermoscope for measuring heat. In 1833, Carl Friedrich Gauss invented a device to measure the strength of a magnetic field, and in 1908 Hans Geiger made a detector for ionising radiation. At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wibble, and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop. The story of how we measure the physical universe is the history of science itself.
-- Moon over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
Have also got the second Aaronovitch book, Moon over Soho, which is also being very good. Now I'm wanting the third. Which looks like it's not going to be out till November. Ah well.
---
The sons of Musa ibn Shakir were bright and bold, and if they hadn't been Muslims would probably have gone on to be the patron saints of techno-geeks. They're famous for their ninth-century Baghdad bestseller, a compendium of ingenious mechanical devices which they imaginatively titled Kitab al-Hiyal or The Book of Ingenious Devices. In it they describe what is possibly the first practical device for measuring differential pressure, and that's where the problem really starts. In 1593, Galileo Galilei took time off from astronomy and promoting heresy to invent a thermoscope for measuring heat. In 1833, Carl Friedrich Gauss invented a device to measure the strength of a magnetic field, and in 1908 Hans Geiger made a detector for ionising radiation. At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wibble, and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop. The story of how we measure the physical universe is the history of science itself.
-- Moon over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch
