Barry Eisler + John Rain + Ben Treven = Awesome!

Barry Eisler

Been working my way, in order, through +Barry Eisler books, starting with the amazing John Rain series and then it had a break to follow a new character, Ben Treven.

I have been listening to them all on audio books, using +Audible, read by the man himself, +Barry Eisler, who does a cracking job, putting lots of character and drama into the readings. Some audio books are dull and monotone but Barry's are amazing. Check out Barry's books on Audible. 

Other formats are obviously available, I just find Audible really easy to use on my phone. Now I have a 4G connected phone, I can just download a new book when I am on the move, which I did the other day as I finished one book and was only half way through a long drive and couldn't wait! 

If you like your secret agent/ex special forces/assassin/martial arts/clandestine/violent/political/deniable ops/gritty/tense/action filled/passionate dramas then I highly recommend you give them a try.

I would say start at the beginning of the John Rain series, although not essential, but there are many references to previous storylines.

I just finished Inside Out which is Ben Treven book 2 and was so excited at the end when Dox and Rain were mentioned and Ben is to go find them in the next book, The Detachment! Cannot wait (until Monday)!

Check out Barry's website and blog.

Europa Report and National Space Centre

Bit of a space filled weekend. Watched Europa Report on Friday night, which I really enjoyed and went to the National Space Centre

Europa Report

My sort of film and I thought it was a pretty good portrayal of how a trip to some place far away might pan out in the early days. Briefly, its about a space mission to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, which is a top candidate at the moment for being a potential host to life. It is a moon completely covered in ice with a suspected ocean underneath all the ice. This liquid water environment could be a host to life and has led to Europa being one of the Solar System's most interesting body in terms of the search for extra-terrestrial life. Here is a great infographic about the structure of Europa from space.com.

This movie is about a mission to Europa to search for life. I think, sending people rather than just robotic missions was justified by the need to boost human space travel...to put something (or someone) out there and just do it! Just doing it would pave the way and encourage others to do it (compete?). Plus having people on site is always going to be more productive in terms of science accomplished, as humans can change the plan, make on the spot decisions which robots may not be able to do.

Pirate Cakes!

My wife (Lisa) enjoys making cakes (much to my pleasure as chief taster) and has done it again! She has been asked a few times to do cakes for kids parties and she has spent most of yesterday pretty much preparing these lovely little cakes.

Its obviously a pirate themed party and I think the kids (and the adults) are going to love them! Brilliant stuff!

Some more from a previous occasion:

Trip to Portland, Dorset, UK

This last weekend (03 January 2014), my wife and I managed to get away for a small 2 night break in a hotel she found on Wowcher. The hotel was the Venue Hotel which is located high up on top of Portland, which is situated on a small piece of land that juts out from the mainland, connected to Weymouth by a very thin strip of land (literally just a road).

We were set to go just when bad storms were hitting the south coast of England (great timing), but we had rearranged the date several times already so did not want to put it off again. We didn't have the kids with us so we wouldn't have to worry about entertaining them in the rain. Being on our own we could just do something to suit ourselves...for a change! I think it was the first time we had both been away from the kids (currently 3 and 5) for two nights.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas! Here's a warm HDR photo of our Christmas tree; 3 exposures taken with my Canon 600D, merged in Photomatix and processed with Lightroom and Nik software.

Found a Fairy Ring

I've been keeping my eye out for one of these for a while. I go for a walk around the perimeter of where I work most days and there is a very wide variety of fungi of all shapes and sizes. I spotted a good potential Fairy Ring once and thought I'd come back the next day and take a photo, but the grass had been cut the next day!

So finally spotted the best one I have seen so far:

Its not very clear, as the mushrooms can get a bit mixed up with the dead leaves on the ground, but they were definitely making a complete ring.

Here is the same photo but I have circled the mushrooms to highlight the ring:

Not as good as the one in the Wikipedia entry but a ring nevertheless.

Cranfield Astronomical Society

I have started attending an astronomy class at Cranfield University, which is just a short evening class for 8 weeks run by Cranfield Astronomical Society. They give some short talks each week and then if the weather is good, are eager to get outside and get some kit out to look upwards.

Last night was the first night we went outside (only my second week to be fair - last week was thunder storms!). It was cold and really clear. They have a small observatory with the main bit of kit being a Celestron C11. I didn't get a chance to look through the C11 as there were quite a few others lining up for a go and to be honest I was more interested at that point seeing what was going on outside.

They also set up a 80mm refractor, a 100mm refector and a 10" Dobsonian.

I cannot remember the guy's name, but he was setting up his personal kit, which consisted of a hefty go-to motorised mount, I can't remember exactly, but it was some Newtonian reflector ~11" telescope (big bugger), with a really cool auto-tracking system, which uses a smaller telescope mounted on the side with a webcam, which is connected to a computer and watches the stars and drives the mount accordingly. Onto this he could then mount a modified Canon D500 DSLR to do some deep sky object photography.

The mount can auto-track itself, but when trying to photograph long exposures of deep sky objects, even the slightest mis-track would result in a blurry image.

Last night he was photographing M31, the Andromeda galaxy, a favourite galaxy of many as it is one of the closest galaxies to us. It is the closest spiral galaxy, but the closest overall galaxy. It is 'only' approximately 2.5 million lightyears (not 200 million as unfortunately 2 astronomers at the class said it was, which I knew was wrong, but I wasn't about to start correcting people) from us. Small-ish in universe scales, but to us humans, so very, very far (23,668,200,000,000,000 km). Very far but also it means that as we look at it (possible with the unaided eye on a good night), we are seeing it as it appeared about 2.5 million years ago. So even as a close neighbour, we can only see what it was up to 2.5 million years ago. That could start a whole other discussion about why this buggers up ideas of making contact with 'things' in other galaxies (with current technology).

But, anyway, this guy was taking 2 minutes exposures (ISO 800) and every photo was just mind blowing. You could zoom in and see the dust trails already, just in the raw, unprocessed image. It really brings it home that these things are real and there as this guy just pointed a camera at it and took its picture. I think so many people think astronomy is just pretty colourful pictures just like abstract paintings, failing to see that they are images of real things, just like if I took a photo of my cat or the clouds in the sky.

It is hard to perceive depth and 3D in these images as they are so far away, but that's what's good about M31, it is kind of side on, so you get a sense of it being a 'disc' in space, with the front dust trails getting in the way of the rest of it.

He is going to stack up several of these images (to improve the the signal to noise ratio), so I can't wait to see the final result.

To make things more interesting, Jupiter rose whilst we were out, so the two refractors were pointed at that and through the 100mm you could clearly make out two main bands around Jupiter...and of course the Galilean moons. I can just about make out the moons through my 15x70 binoculars.

I look forward to seeing more, hopefully through the C11 next time.