While listening...

I am slowly coming to the realization that, unless I somehow sharpen my information retention skills, it really doesn't make sense to listen to nonfiction audio books.

Fiction, I can listen to. I enjoyed Robert B. Parker's Spare Change for some of the road between Houston and New York, all the more so since there really isn't anything in the text that I might want to revisit (apart from a few neat turns of the phrase, which I always seem to find in Parker's books, that are incidental to the entertainment value of the text).

Nonfiction is another story. It's not possible to conveniently bookmark an audio book (at least not listening to an Audible title on a Sansa e260). I say "conveniently," because one could, I suppose, sit with pen and paper at hand and note the times at which something interesting has been said, but if you're going to do that, you may as well have a real book in front of you.

During the campaign, I've been listening to Reid Buckley's Speaking in Public which took me in a direction entirely different from that of the public speaking instruction I received from Jerry Weissman back when I worked at Borland. Buckley's book - at least the part of it I've listened to thus far - seems not so much about public speaking than about marshaling one's arguments for, literally, a debate venue. Amazon indicates that copies of this book are available for a song; I might just buy one the next time the Amazon bug bites me.

Lately, at odd moments I've been listening to Ayn Rand's The Art of Fiction, and while the first few minutes seemed to hint at 6 hours plus of turgid exposition, I've found it quite "listenable," though in truth, I find myself also noting - for future reference - that this is a "go buy one and read it on paper" kind of book. My favorite line, laboriously transcribed with much fuss and bother, at about 47 minutes into the reading:

That something happened to you is of no importance to anyone, not even to you, and you're now hearing that from the arch-apostle of selfishness.

---

It's L-13 and apparently, there's another barbecue planned for tonight. When I asked one of the staff what the occasion might be, I was met with a shrug. I figure it's either because it's Friday, or because the satellite will have been cocooned in its fairing, or because there's too much grillable stuff that needs to be cooked soon. <grin>

I've just been informed that I should take my hat, sunscreen, and water to the office, as I'll be part of the group that'll be going to the pad and the so-called "debris recovery" facility afterward. I've done all of this on previous campaigns, so there are no mysteries to my day, at least from the point of view of work.

Time to get ready.

Cheers...

Un-eclipsed...

Which describes us here in Baikonur, some 1000 or so miles from the track of today's total solar eclipse, as it passes over (among other places) Novosibirsk and Barnaul, and shown in the animation below:


According to other data I've been able to dig up on the Internet - with difficulty because (a) there are other things to do and (b) data transfer rates are glacially slow - the time of greatest eclipse here will be at about 4:50 pm local time (which just happens to be when my assigned work time is over today).

At that time, from our vantage point, about 70% of the sun's disk will be covered. If memory serves, that will exceed the almost 60% coverage we experienced in Pagosa Springs during the total eclipse of July 11, 1991.

Stay tuned for more details.

Cheers...

"Live-blogging" the eclipse...

At least once.

This shot was taken about 17 minutes ago, using a "camera obscura" consisting of a pinhole in the side of a corrugated cardboard carton with a white sheet of paper mounted on the opposite side of the box.


The moon began to "cover" the sun here at about 3:45 pm.

Cheers...

More eclipse...

Soon after I went out to board the van to the hotel at 4:30 pm, a bunch of people from the French team emerged from the door of the полтинник with the expectation of seeing something of the eclipse, so I jumped out, showed them how to use my "camera," and left it with them, figuring I'd be able to improvise something when I got back to the hotel.

Upon returning to the hotel, I sought the interior of the grape arbor where I had successfully taken pictures of the transit of Venus a few campaigns ago, in June 2004. Unfortunately, the position of the sun in the sky precluded the use of any of the small nail holes in the tin roof as a "lens" through which to project the image of the sun.

On the other hand, I found - to my utter, childlike delight - that the sun, shining through numerous small gaps in the grape leaves on the vines that enclose the arbor, was throwing as many images of the eclipse onto the floor and the bench inside the arbor.


I propped a piece of white paper on the bench, with the surface oriented more or less perpendicular to the sun's rays, and managed to get a shot of multiple, fairly round images of the partially eclipsed sun at about 4:33 pm, which was about 15 minutes before maximum coverage here in Baikonur.


For comparison, here's a similar shot taken 11 minutes later, at or about maximum.


This image is darker because of deliberate underexposure, not because the ambient light had faded. In fact, I showed this last picture to a member of the prop team about two minutes after I shot it and he asked "When was the eclipse?"

This jives with my recollection of the eclipse of July 1991. If you didn't know there was an eclipse going on, and that the moon was obscuring 70% or so of the sun's disk, you probably wouldn't realize there was anything amiss. I personally thought the normally bright, squinty light of mid-afternoon seemed a bit mellower; we are talking about two celestial f-stops, after all.

Got to go put my laundry in the dryer.

Cheers...

UPDATE: Apparently, the first image above was deemed worthy of inclusion in a round-up post at the Wired Science Blog.