If only it had been Blair…

War on Iraq
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Silvio Berlusconi is a man who always enjoyed playing the pantomine villain, revelling in the loathing and hatred of his opponents, viscerally enjoying his thriumphs over them. He must have thought he was untouchable, with every attempt to bring him to account for his shady business dealings and politics having failed so far and the Italian electorate once again having made him prime minister. And then that happened. If you watch the video you can see the shock and horror creep in his face, not just from the physical shock of the assault, but also from the dawning realisation that he isn’t invulnerable, that people do hate him enough to want to hurt or kill him and might just succeed in doing so.

Tony Blair on the other hand has always been the kind of smarmy asshole who wants you to understand that what he’s doing to you is all for your own good, if unpleasant. So convinced of his own moral righteousness that even meeting the family of British soldiers killed in Iraq doesn’t shake his convictions:

Asked if the anger of parents like Mr Brierley was “the cross you will always have to bear”, Mr Blair said: “Let’s be clear, it’s worse for them. They have lost their child and it’s very sad. If you have lost your loved one but you think you have lost them in a cause that’s not worth it, that makes it worse.”

Being held responsible for soldiers’ deaths is “the responsibility you carry” as Prime Minister. “But you have got to carry it, I’m afraid, because there is no point in going into a situation of conflict and not understanding there is going to be a price paid.

“Now, it’s also important to understand that many of those who are in the Armed Forces, including those who have lost their loved ones in Afghanistan or in Iraq, also are very often proud of what their child has done and proud of the cause they fought in…. You know, there are parents who feel very, very deeply angry and resentful and believe that the war was not worth it, but there are also those others who don’t want to feel that their view is ignored.”

You do wonder what would puncture this smug certainty of his; whether even what happened to Berlusconi would be enough.

The Hubble Wars – Eric J. Chaisson

books and books review, Science
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Cover of The Hubble Wars


The Hubble Wars
Eric J. Chaisson
386 pages including index
published in 1994/1998

Having worked on a somewhat troubled project for the past few years, it’s a great comfort to know that even big science projects like the Hubble Space Telescope can suffer from similar problems. In Hubble’s case, bad project management and quality control meant it was only discovered after the space telescope had been launched that its main mirror had a serious flaw in its grinding which meant that it couldn’t focus properly. But that was only the most *ahem* visible of the Hubble project’s problems, as Eric J. Chaisson explains. And he should know, as he was a senior staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute when these problems occurred and hence had a first rank seat for them.

The Hubble Wars was originally published in 1994 and based on notes Chaisson made during Hubble’s commisioning period after launch, when the problems with the lens, as well as several others first cropped up. This then was largely written in the heat of the moment, without the benefit of hindsight, even if the edition I got out of the library was the updated 1998 one. This update was largely confined to a new foreword, an attempt to correct some of the misconceptions and hyberbole in the news coverage of Hubble discoveries. The rest of the book was largely left unchanged, though every now and then new developments are alluded to — and they’re not always well integrated. But that’s just a minor quibble. What remains is an important insight in how a big science project can go wrong, as it happened.

Read more.

Yesterday fandom turned eighty

science fiction
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As noted on Tor.com. And did you know that

“I’ve always been fascinated that the first president of that first US fan group—indeed, the world’s first fan group—was a black guy, Warren Fitzgerald, and that they held their early meetings at his home in Harlem. I’m amazed this doesn’t seem to be widely known.”

One of the subthemes running through the RaceFail debacle in the early months of this year was the “invisiblity” of people of colour within fandom. White fans were noting the lack of fans of colour, while they in turn were annoyed by the often well intended, widespread idea among white fans that science fiction just wasn’t attractive enough to people of colour. Quite a few heated threats revolved around this dichotomy, with fans of colour trying to convince their white counterparts that the appeal of science fiction wasn’t the issue, that there were actually quite a few of them around, but they just weren’t noticed… That the first president of the world’s first fan group was Black and nobody knew this fits perfectly.

We apologise for the inconvenience

Meta
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So yeah, this blog and all others in the mighty Wisse empire were down for much of the past couple of days, after my provider took my site offline after some fucker hammered it into a small grease spot by overloading my booklog with invalid requests that basically crashed the database. Incidently if somebody can give me a way to block access to /books/index.php?flav=rss through .htaccess I would be greatly pleased — I can’t seem to manage myself. That was just one annoyance during a cast iron bastard of a week. Work has been buay with tying up the ends of the current project in a vain effort to pretend it’s finished, I lost a filling and need to go back to the dentist for it next week, the buses consistently ran late and most importantly, the results of the last bloody test before the operation in two weeks were delayed. But fortunately when they came, they were negative, so positive.

Operation? Yes, not mentioned here before because until now it’s all been tentative and I hate making a fuzz about things that I have to take back later (and I don’t often mentioned real personal stuff here anyway). To make a long story short: S. is on dialysis and has been for almost a year now after her kidneys packed in, I’m going to donate one, and we went through the whole circus of compagtibility tests and other medical exams to make sure we could actually go through with it (we could) and were in a good enough medical condition (in my case, not too fat). Getting into shape took most of the year but we finally got a tentative green light a month ago, only to have to wait on yet more tests. This is all done now and barring major accidents between now and the 22nd, we’ll be having the op. Which means being in hospital at Christmas, which at least removes the pressure of the season…

So, ummm, yeah. How was your week?