Woohoo! 3,200 Posts!

And Some Of Them Even Make Sense

If you define "Sense" quite broadly.  Some do not - I give you the dreaded Weaselnana for one item, clearly the world is not under threat from a mutant weasel-banana combination*.

Proof I am not raving.  Not this time.

     Even if it were, what harm could they do in the space of a couple of days, by which time they would have become a soggy brown mess, hmmm?  Unless they were radioactive zombie Weaselnanas, whose glowing irradiated bodies resist the decay of mortal bananas yet which would also double as a handy lantern in case of powercuts -

     But I digress (get used to it, I do that a lot) because I wanted to mention a news item seen today on the BBC's website, about the potential for life on -

     Venus.  Art?

Pictures courtesy the Sinisters

     That this is even a possibility is surprising, given what we know of conditions on Venus.   Yes yes yes, from the Twenties to the Sixties all the pulp writers thought it would be incredibly wet and soggy thanks to the extremely deep cloud cover, kind of like a Summer Bank Holiday in This Sceptred Isle.

     Not a bit of it!  Venus has a surface temperature of 4000C, has an atmosphere that it mostly carbon dioxide, and at ground level you are subject to 100 times the pressure of Earth.  This is why the Sinister probes that landed only functioned for a few minutes, before they were crushed, corroded and melted, despite being made from railway sleepers and concrete.  Art?

     However - you just knew that word was coming, didn't you? - recent telescopic studies of the atmosphere about 30 miles up have shown very large quantities of a gas called "Phosphine", and there are currently no models that can explain this gas in such quantities except as a byproduct of living things.  The temperature at that height has diminished to bearably-hot instead of instantly-melt, except the 'clouds' are made up of sulphuric acid.
     Of course the journalists are all now clamouring for Jarvis Cocker to write a sequel to "Life On Mars"; the scientists are being more cautious because there may be a natural mechanism that we haven't considered yet, one native to Venus and not Earth.  This one will run, Vulnavia, possibly for a decade until NASA takes time off from plotting to blow up Jupiter with nukes (a real conspiracy theory, by the way) to sending a mission to Venus.

With balloons and drones.  Drones.  Those are drones, NOT birds.

     Of course - obviously! - we cannot risk getting Venusian microbes back to Earth, as they would multiply beyond count in our mild and benign atmosphere - the consequences are too terrible to contemplate <contemplates and screams>.
     Motley!  Get the rhyming dictionary, we need to work on some lyrics that are SFW.

Awwwww!

Hmmm, perhaps not the best response, given the circumstances.

     Anyway, Conrad noticed a curious sidebar last week on Facebook, concerning Forgotten Weapons, which featured a machine gun in .22 calibre.

     For the uninitiated (that is, 99.99% of This Sceptred Isle), perhaps a comparison with rounds is valuable.  Art?

.22 to port, 5.56 rifle round to starboard

     Your Humble Scribe's interest was piqued, as a weapon using .22 rounds would, whilst technically be lethal, be utterly ineffective on the battlefield.  What was going on?  Enter Ian "Gun Jesus" McCollom.  Art?

NO HE IS NOT A GIANT.

     The gun is a 1/2 scale replica of a Browning M1917 machine gun, which uses .22 bullets.  The manufacturer, Tippman, decided that people would want these because they were so much lighter and handier than the full-scale model, and the ammunition was so much cheaper.  Art?

     This is one being "tested" by a gun shop owner who had come into possession of one.  "Testing" my hairy white hindquarters!  He described it as 'the ultimate toy for men' and he was playing with his new toy.


Drama Rama

By such awful puns ye shall know that Conrad has finished "Rama II", after a determined application of reading power.  One of the more interesting parts is not the novel itself, but Arthur C. Clarke's 'Afterword', where he details how the thing got written.  It turned out to be a meeting between his associate Peter Guber, whom introduced his friend Gentry Lee to Ol' Art.  Mr. Lee, it seems, had quite the scientific pedigree.  Art?

     He is a big cheese at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was one of the chiefs in charge of the Galileo mission, as well as a couple of the Mars rovers, and Ol' Art asserts that he's also an expert on French and English literature - given the amount of Shakespeare present in the novel Conrad can well believe**.

     It was Ol' Gen who put forward the proposal for a sequel to "Rendezvous With Rama", which has come out in 1972 and which Ol' Art had never intended to write about again.  He did, however, come up with a last line that had enormous significance, though it was written as a throw-away means of finishing the book: "Everything comes in threes".  Not these novels, as there are now four of them.

     Conrad does not usually eat Brie for breakfast, O no.  Cheese toastie, bowl of porridge and a pot of Darjeeling are usually enough.  Today, though, I opened the cupboard and immediately saw the Brie I'd taken out of the fridge to reach room temperature.  Yesterday.  It has certainly reached room temperature now***.

Finally -

Conrad idly posted the question of "How did flying snakes evolve?" yesterday, and you've got to admit it's an interesting question.   Looking at it a little more deeply, let me illustrate a flying snake.  Art?

     There will be some people out there for whom this is nightmare fuel; do not faint in fear, phobic folk!  For these snakes only glide from trees in order to travel relatively long distances, and even if they do learn to become Death From Above, they aren't dangerous to humans as their venom lacks bite (do you see what - O you do) and is awkward for them to deliver.  Mind you, the sudden shock of wearing a boa that's a real boa might give anyone a myocardial infarction.  Art?

     Their ability to glide is a function of being able to flatten their ribs and assume an aerodynamic shape, helped by the way they wriggle in mid-air.
     All very good, but when did a snake accidentally wriggle up a tree, along a branch, fall off and survive?  And repeat the process to get the gliding bit right?  This would only work at low level to begin with, surely, as falling from height before you're aware you can glide is a terminally fatal process.  And -

     Too many questions! with no definite answers.  The scale is offputting.

     And with that, we are done!

*  Yet.  Yet.

**  I just need to rinse my mouth out with some gin after typing the Barf of Avon's name.

***  Bin it?  Are you demented!  Waste £0.98 worth of food?