Table of Contents
I'm a novelist and have an interest in space science and physics. I've been a programmer for more than 40 years and I like reviewing new and up-and-coming authors.
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Dragonfly to Explore Titan
Few worlds excite exoplanetary chemists like Titan, Saturn's enigmatic and largest moon. It is the second-largest moon in the solar system, and the only one known to have a dense atmosphere. As such, it is seen as an analogue to the early Earth, and therefore important in understanding how life might have evolved on our homeworld.
Dragonfly will launch in 2026 and arrive at its destination in 2034. What makes Dragonfly different speaks loudly of what makes Titan different. By taking advantage of the thick, dense atmosphere, Dragonfly will fly to dozens of different locations. Yup, fly. It's a rotorcraft, basically a kind of drone.
Beyond Falcon's Reach
Beyond Falcon's Reach by Jay Northearn, is a mish-mash of high fantasy, gothic-horror, steampunk and electropunk, with a dash of semi-intelligent machine-learning AI's thrown-in to boot. Yet for all of this, the world Northearn has created is homogenous and holistic - two watchwords I'll bang on about until the cows come home, to anyone who'll listen. Giving everything in your world a place and a reason for being there is something that every writer should always keep in mind. You could learn a thing or two about this from Northearn.
There is magic, but it's subtle. This is not a Harry Potter world. There are god-like creatures, but they interact with the world in etheric ways. There are strange creatures aplenty.
Many of the characters wouldn't feel out of place in a Titus Groan novel, and there is a large cast to play with - large but not too large. Each of them is beautifully unique, wonderfully realised and exquisitely portrayed. They don't just come to life, they fairly leap off the page. The humour hits the right spot every time, and when it's time for a bit of gravitas or action, Northearn knows how to handle that too.
If we ignore the 'plot' of the story and concentrate on the plots the characters themselves are involved with, involved in, or weaving, it doesn't take us long to see there is plenty of grist to this story. Plots within plots. Devious plots. Machiavellian plots. Everyone has a role to play, and not everyone you thought you'd labelled as a black-hat or a white-hat made that label stick.
NASA Got it Wrong - Oops!
It's not every day you get the chance to tell NASA they screwed up.
I was reviewing the data I'd collected from NASA's Mars Weather page, and I noticed that the graphs they generated didn't match the summary data.
DLCounter Plugin Bugtracker
If you have any issues with the plugin, leave a comment here.
DLCounter Plugin
| Last updated | 2024-07-27 |
|---|---|
| Provides | Syntax, Admin, Action |
| Author | Phil Ide |
This download-counter plugin for DokuWiki enables you to keep track of the number of downloads of media files such as zip, gzip, tarballs and pdf's (your choice of media formats). This plugin has been developed and tested on “Greebo”, it may not work with older versions of DokuWiki. It has worked on all versions since, up to and including “Kaos”.
This page is the documentation for this plugin, describing configuration, the syntax for displaying the data (or parts of it) and the on-disk format of the data-store and how to access it from your own (possibly inline) code should you need to.