This Is Often How We Start The Blog
OR AT LEAST YOU THINK IT IS. Note the word used is "Sway", not "Say". Then there's an ambiguous word or phrase tacked on to the end, and Hay Pesto! another Intro is created.
Well, today's Intro comes from a Codeword solution, believe it or not as you gasp in surprise at how unusual this would be, etcetera etcetera.
That was irony, lest ye be unaware. Art!
We'll let this Lee chap do the honours for swaying, he's undoubtedly a whole lot more graceful than Conrad, who would be grateful if he really had two left feet. Ungainly, thy name is Your Humble Scribe.
The joke here, and forgive me for taking so long getting to it, is the pronunciation of "Swayed". Because - and here we have to prod Art into life -
You won't believe how Dog Buns frustrating it was, working out a solution knowing which letters were "U" and "E". The actual 'in' that helped break the deadlock where 4 might be "I" or "A" came with realising "HAIKU" was a solution. Upper port.
Well then, now we have to look up SUEDE in the Collins Concise to determine it's origins, because Conrad is kind of peculiar that way. "A leather with a fine velvet-like nap on the flesh side, produced by abrasive action. From the French 'Gants de Suède', literally 'Gloves from Sweden'.
Hmmm. Art!
Well well Newport Pagnell, Conrad guessed that the French had their imprint on the word, yet never once did I realise it was all down to NATO's newest member. Art!
No, this is not a Swedish art-rock band, it's a British group. They came to prominence in the Nineties as one of the biggest Britpop bands, although they themselves eschewed the term. Conrad's sure he's got one of their CDs knocking around in the stacks somewhere. They're pretty good, to be honest, and have come back onto the scene after a long hiatus to commercial and critical acclaim, which is always a tricky double to pull off.
This might be a good place to end the Intro, except it would be rather short, and Conrad was desperately searching for other illustrations of 'Swayed', because the leather iteration has little depth. Art!
Behold the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, erected NO SNIGGERING AT THE BACK in 1940, and which rapidly earned the name 'Galloping Gertie'. You see, the engineers who constructed it took no notice of things like wind, resonance, aerodynamics and they probably passed their port to starboard, the cads. In strong winds, the bridge deck would oscillate both vertically and axially, which is not what bridges are designed to do. Art!
SWAY, BABY, SWAY!
There's an elastic limit beyond which construction materials will suffer terminal collapse if exceeded, and that's what happened to GG, on November 7th 1940. You can see the extreme sway of the bridge deck above. Art!
Ooops.
When you see the extreme angles the bridge deck went through, and consider that it had been doing this since July at least, it's a wonder that the whole thing hadn't collapsed way earlier. Art!
Just think, all this from a five-letter word about Sweden.
A Bit More Background
We've put up a picture and an annotated picture of two designs that came out of 'Project Icarus', which came about 15 years ago as an updated and modernised version of the old 'Project Daedalus' that the British Interplanetary Society had put forward back in the Seventies. We have featured PD in the past: the designing of an interstellar unmanned probe that would journey to the Barnard's Star system and report back. Art!
This craft would be fusion-powered, and comes in two stages; the enormous first stage that boosts the vehicle up to an appreciable fraction of c, and the much smaller probe unit that will slingshot around the target star. Given the huge acceleration, they will only ever pass by, and cannot pause to linger longer lab-like.
Enter the 'Resolution' design. Art!
This monster is a single-stage vehicle that is capable of manoeuvring to decelerate when nearing destination, meaning it can linger longer and look lengthily. The article mentions that it's boost phase would last 15 years. Yes, it's a long time, but you're not accelerating to 60 miles per hour, more like 60 million miles per hour (if 0.1 c).
We will come back to this because it's a fascinating look at how real designs and technology may be applied to a theoretical concept.
"City In The Sky"
The Lithoi 'squatters' out in the Nullarbor Plain have suffered a significant setback, with their missile launch platform blasted to a scattering of steel slag. Meanwhile, the Doctor ponders.
None of that was now possible.
The balloons were all gone. Yes,
he could go and get the materials to create more, but the Lithoi knew about
them now and wouldn’t be fooled a second time.
Dart Three had been expended and there wasn’t anything else up here to
be thrown around with such precision.
Pangolin might have suited but would take an age to repair and jury-rig
for such an operation. There wasn’t an
age left before the sphere began to de-orbit – the figures on the monitor
representing total readiness had flicked to “66.7%”, and the MEV would be
bringing in the last five hundred tonnes of regolith in it’s next run. There were hours left, and it would take days
to convert Pangolin.
As decoys went, he knew of a persuasive one. Thankfully Ace wasn’t present to put up any
objection, as she so surely would. He
sat and brooded for a while longer, which turned out to be a mistake: Ace might
not be present on Arc One but there were other, more terrestrial equivalents
able and willing to stand in for her.
Terry had been a seven day wonder aboard Arcology One, regaling the occupants with tales of walking along beaches, fishing for perch or bass, avoiding the funnel web spider in dunnies, keeping pet rats, enduring sand storms and dust devils – all very well, novel to the Arc’s occupants whilst being utterly prosaic to him.
Hmmm, one wonders if this is a case of "Checkhov's Gun" in human terms.
A Sleazebag, But An Amusing One
Unless you have been living in Arcology One or a Submarine Environment in the Eastern Med, you cannot have failed to have heard of Michael Cohen. He was the self-declared 'fixer' for Donald Judas Trump, nominally a lawyer, more a kind of dirty-handed general factotum. Art!
Well, serving as a peon in Pumpkinhead's personal staff always comes with a price, and Ol' Mike served three years in prison for committing offences related to the trial he is now a witness in. Not only that, he's been disbarred, meaning he can no longer practice law.
He does have, however, a wonderful Noo Yawk accent, and a way with words that often strays into language we here at BOOJUM! cannot reproduce. He is putting the former not the latter to work in The Modern Babylon this very day. We won't see anything of his performance inside the court, and he should have enough sense to keep out of the spotlight until the case ends, yet I am sitting here with a bucket of popcorn waiting waiting waiting. Art!
Proof that Mike's face did not melt off
That court artist needs to lay off the sherry during lunchtime.
A Revanchism Schism
As proof that UK academics can split hairs whilst dancing on the head of a pin, I attach the following. Art!
There inevitably will be some people in this discourse who go back to the creation of the Solar System, who will be roundly condemned by those who insist that the pico-seconds after the Big Bang are ultimately responsible -
Finally -
Nuked Fish-stick Butty or Pseudo-Korean Noodle Soup? Only I can tell!
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