J-Dog And The Webb

I Made That One Up Myself

Aptly enough, whilst walking - more accurately, paddling - Edna this morning.  Of course - obviously! - even in such dismal weather there were lots of inconsiderate dog owners walking their beasts.  Conrad is musing over taking a constitutional down into Lesser Sodom this afternoon, as it's market day and I could do with some raw beetroots - got a Borshcht recipe copied down, doncha know.

     You may, if you are as ancient as Conrad, have your memory bestirred by today's title, wondering where you'd heard it before.  Art!

     Briefly put, the series was about a band of talking dogs (REFUGEES FROM NARNIA!) - er- quite - who run a garage ('auto-shop' for our South Canadian readers) and are continually on the lookout for the city dog-catcher and Seymour, an evil cat.  Which is kind of baked into cats.  Art!

     ANYWAY of course this is nothing to do with the James Webb Space Telescope - I've already Remote Nuclear Detonated those who were accusing me of a spelling mistake - which is the subject of today's Intro.

     We have mentioned this remarkable piece of kit before, though not for a while, so I shall explicate a little further.  JWST came in well behind schedule and over budget, for it was a fearfully complex piece of machinery.  The intent was to put into cis-lunar orbit a telescope far larger and more sophisticated than the humble Hubble.  Art!

     As you can see, Hubble's primary mirror was actually quite small; what made a difference was being out of the Earth's atmosphere.  Moreover, Hubbs was in such a low orbit that it could be maintained and updated by Shuttle.  The monstrous JWST was far further out in terms of orbit and there was no prospect of being able to fix anything.  It had to work first time, and 'work' involved a long series of activation and deployment routines.

     SPOILER: it worked.  Art!

     I've already put up photos taken by both telescopes to highlight how much better those of J-Dog are.  Why resurrect this device?  

James Webb telescope detects dust storm on distant world

     Behold an artist's impression of VHS 1256b.  Art!

40 light years distant

     This is a type of gas-giant known as a 'Super-Jupiter', being about 15 times larger than Jupiter, which means it's pretty colossal.  The star it orbits is a binary, which our artist has managed quite subtly in the above picture, and VHS is in a very distant orbit - 15 billion miles from the twin suns.  That brown colouration is not guesswork or licence; thanks to J-Dogs ability to break down and analyse the composition of the atmosphere, we know it to be made up of silicates in that shade.  The upper reaches are where the very finest particles ascend to, and there will be layers of gradually increasing size down towards the planet's core.  The presence of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane implies that the lower depths are explosively dynamic, hence the storms.

     Given this acuity, it's quite possible J-Dog will one day analyse an atmosphere and find both liquid water and oxygen, two of the pre-requisites for life.  Art!

Full-scale model with puny humans for scale

     There's J-Dog, surrounded by a crowd of adoring dweebs.

Manglement, Delicious Manglement

You should surely recall 'Sally', the malicious and incompetent manager from yesteryon's tale of woe, who cost her parent company £2,000,000 thanks to her ignorance*.

     One of the commenters had another 'Sally' tale of woe.  He knew a programmer at a business that required biannual reports made to various government agencies, which The Programmer did.  Sally in this case simply had no idea what TP did nor how he did it, thus deeming him surplus to requirements.

     Ooops.  Art!

     Six months later the biannual report was due.  Turns out nobody in the business knew how to do the report, because there were very, very specific criteria from the government agencies involved about what info they needed and in what format.  Panicking, the business were offering £150,000 for anyone willing to generate and certify the data required, with just one catch: they had to do it in less than 10 days.

     Ooops again.

     Given this ridiculously tight schedule and potential liability, unsurprisingly, nobody took them up.  TP at this point is probably laughing his head off whilst consuming buckets of popcorn.

     The report never got submitted.

     60% of their business immediately vanished.

     Company went bust shortly thereafter.

     No mention of what happened to Sally though I don't think she could ever put that business down as a reference.  Was killing the business for the sake of saving £40,000 worth it?  Art!

1) Don't employ Sally's  2)  Don't employ Sally's  3)   Don't employ Sally's

More-a Of 'Tora!'

Yes, there's more to come, you lucky things!  Okay, one thing the producers were was canny with footage, because this was a verrrrry expensive film for it's day: £15,000,000.  Thus if you can exploit footage, all the better.

     So, they had five flying B-17s hired for the production, who were due to fly in and then scatter as the Japanese attacked Pearl.  Art!

     Those are real, full-sized B-17s, not radio-controlled models.

     Inevitably, for aircraft over 25 years old, the gremlins struck and a bomber was stuck with only one of the two main landing gear coming down.  Art!

Again, a real aircraft

     It made a crash-landing, and the cameras kept a-rolling.  Art!

     Conrad wondered if the producers had spliced in film of a real, wartime crash but no: this was done on location for real.  Art!

     The pilot did an exceptional job.  Not only was nobody injured, the plane wasn't that badly damaged.  Crew probably needed a change of underwear.

"The Sea Of Sand"

Things are looking a bit grim for Sarah and the chaps at Mersa Martuba.

‘That particular vehicle, however, has been constructed with layers of metal mesh underneath the surface, interleaved in the glass.  Our opponents learn quickly.  At a guess, I would say that the recycled Sahariana’s are now being used to armour these things.’  Seeing a lack of comprehension, Roger carried on.  ‘They use metal to strengthen the glass that makes up their main construction material.’

‘What are you implying?’ asked the Professor.

‘That they’ll be back, and ready to attack us.  That mortar weapon firing glass shrapnel – I think that’s how they killed the Lysander pilot.  I bet there are other weapons come through from their arsenals, too.’

Sarah remained silent.  Her worry focussed on the Doctor, who had been gone far too long for comfort.  He might very well have to creep around secretly, avoiding bio-vores, but he’d been gone far too long.  Despite the heat, she shivered.

‘Somebody walk over your grave?’ asked Albert, with all the tact of a tank.  Professor Templeman scowled at the graduate, who blushed after realising what he’d said.

‘I want us to get ready to leave the depot, and move back to the wadi.  Use the Bedford – oh, the clutch has gone.  Stow food and water in the Bedford, then tow it with a Sahariana.  We take one of the Vickers guns in the emplacement, for protection.’

     You should have put it forward as a 'tactical retreat', old chap.

You What?

You learn something new every day.  Today Conrad learned that Columbian drug cartel boss Pablo Escobar imported some hippos to frolic around his estate back in the 1980s.

     Thanks to neglect after his death, several escaped and bred in the wild.  Art!

     There are now 150 of them, and they are bad for the environment, and also any Columbians who come across them in the water.  They may look fat and jolly, but they kill an awful lot of Africans every year, thanks to being surprisingly quick in and out of the water and having very large tusks.  Art!

     So Columbia is looking to send 70 of them to sanctuaries overseas, which will cost circa £2.5 million.  Thank you Pablo Escobarmy.

Finally -

The monsoon rains have paused, at least for a while.  Time for a scrape and a scrap (i.e. lunch) and a possible amble into Lesser Sodom.  What ho!

*  Yes she was fired.