Reading at Mass

Jeffrey Tucker, How to Read Liturgically.

The problem is the manner in which people read the scripture in liturgy. The instruction books that are published by the major houses warn against reading plainly and solemnly with a steady tone. These manual urge them to bring some personality to the task, to elevate the voice on the important parts, make the reading more life-like and vibrant, and even to make eye contact with the people in the pews. They want long pauses between sentences and for every sentence to come across like a major declaration that sears itself into the ears and minds of the listeners. They try to make the text reach us in a new way.

I hope he does not want the text to reach us in the same old way.

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MUSTARD in space

In 1957 Arthur C. Clarke published a collection of loosely related stories in Tales from the White Hart. From the blurb to a recent edition:
Although written, as the author informs us in his Introduction to the 1969 edition, in such diverse locations as New York, Miami, Columbo and Sydney there is something inherently English about these stories. London's famed Fleet Street district has changed dramatically in the five decades since the collection's first appearance as a Ballantine paperback original… and, of course, many of the regulars of the White Hart (based on the White Horse pub on Fetter Lane) are no longer with us. But the White Hart's most prominent raconteur  Harry Purvis can still be found propping up the bar and regaling us all once again with tales of quirky and often downright eccentric scientists and inventors.
Some sense of the atmosphere of Clarke's stories – and the real life organisations on which they were based – can be got from Poking fun at Britain's Moon Men at Tor.com.

All this came back to me when I read the obituary of Tom Smith, one of the designers of the British Space Shuttle.
The idea of the Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device, or MUSTARD as it was known, arose out of an Air Ministry contract for BAC to study “hypersonic” speed (five times the speed of sound and above). A team was formed under Smith’s leadership at BAC’s Warton airbase, near Preston, Lancashire. … MUSTARD was regarded as a suitable project for joint development by European aerospace companies, with a cost estimated to be around “20 to 30 times cheaper” than that of the expendable rocket launch systems of the time. Unfortunately, as with so many other British inventions, the government of the day decided not to proceed. About three years after MUSTARD was cancelled, the Americans became interested in a reusable aircraft.

Apparently Star Wars got something wrong

The London Daily Telegraph today has a story illustrated by a picture with the following caption: "The "hyperdrive" featured in Star Wars enables Han Solo's Millennium Falcon spaceship to take short cuts between stars through a higher dimension of space."  I am sorry to say that I know that of all the space ships in the picture, none of them are the Millennium Falcon.

That said I was shocked, shocked, I tells you, to discover that the stretched stars from many scenes in those films are total fantasy.

Racing through hyperspace at near light speed [past light speed I think, but never mind], the ship's crew sees the stars appear to radiate out from a central point and stretch past them [actually this happens as they enter hyperspace, but, again, never mind]. But in reality, the view through the Millennium Falcon's cockpit window would probably consist of a fuzzy luminous fog surrounding a bright central disc. There would be no sign of stars because the wavelength of their light would be shortened to the invisible X-ray range, say the team of four young scientists from the University of Leicester. … The luminous disc would be due to Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation being shifted into the visible part of the light spectrum. The CMB is radiation left behind by the Big Bang that gave birth to the universe. … One of the students, Riley Connors, 21, from Milton Keynes, said: ''If the Millennium Falcon existed and really could travel that fast, sunglasses would certainly be advisable. On top of this, the ship would need something to protect the crew from harmful X-ray radiation.'' 

So instead of this

it would be more like the artist's impression here:

Traveling at Light Speed Does Not Look Like Star Wars.

Back to the future of space exploration

In a dozen juvenile novels (that's novels for young people, not novels written when he was young), Robert Heinlein laid out a manifesto for the exploration and colonisation of the solar system. Arthur C. Clarke supposedly remarked that the Moon landings justified all science fiction to that date. Everyone expected colonies on Mars, generation ships etc. by 1985. But, for various reasons, the exploration of space has been left to unmanned vehicles, while human activity has stopped at the low earth orbit of the International Space Station.

(Speaking of unmanned vehicles, there is some blogger buzz – but no confirmation from NASA – that Voyager 1 has in fact finally left the solar system).

Reading NASA's press releases sometimes it does indeed seem that they just want to discover the effects of weightlessness on little tiny screws:

(Look! A legitimate Simpsons clip on YouTube!)

It may quiet the shades of Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov to learn that NASA is looking into the possibility of building a Gateway to the Moon at L-2 (one of the five Lagrangian points where the gravity of the Earth and the gravity of the Moon cancel each other out). And, as if that is not enough, they are also looking at the possibility of mining in the asteroid belt. All we need now is Delos D. Harriman telling us we have got to be believers.

Makes Lord of the Rings look like Dora the Explorer

In 2010 I started reading George R. R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire. It's a calque (as T. A. Shippey would say) on the Wars of the Roses, extremely complicated and highly addictive. I read the whole published series and then re-read them again last year in preparation for volume 5. Like many others, the only reason I haven't finished it is because the author hasn't either.

For some people this is a problem. Others write a song about it.