Bad Dog

 

... and the View from the Pratchett Estate...

 From The Guardian 27/1/2022

Terry Pratchett’s estate has authorised Jack Monroe to use the “Vimes Boots Index” as the name of her new price index, which is intended to document the “insidiously creeping prices” of basic food products.

The author’s daughter, writer Rhianna Pratchett, said her father would have been proud to see his work used in this way by the anti-poverty campaigner. Monroe was prompted to create her index after inflation jumped to 5.4% last week, and she found herself “infuriate[d]” that the index (the consumer price index or CPI) used for this calculation “grossly underestimates the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least”. She laid out how the prices of “value” product ranges in supermarkets had soared over the last decade – rice in her local supermarket had increased in price from 45p for a kilogram bag last year, to £1 for 500g, a 344% increase – and how the number of value products has shrunk. She was soon working with economists, charities and analysts to compile her own index.

“One,” she wrote in the Observer, “that will document the disappearance of the budget lines and the insidiously creeping prices of the most basic versions of essential items at the supermarket” and “serve as an irrefutable snapshot of the reality experienced by millions of people”.

In a tweet on Wednesday, Monroe announced that the index is already starting to make a difference, as the Office for National Statistics has admitted that “one inflation rate doesn’t fit all”. She wrote: “Delighted to be able to tell you that the @ONS have just announced that they are going to be changing the way they collect and report on the cost of food prices and inflation to take into consideration a wider range of income levels and household circumstances”, using the hashtag #VimesBootsIndex.

The index, Monroe said, is named in honour of Pratchett’s creation Sam Vimes, who in the Discworld novel Men at Arms lays out the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness”.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,” wrote Pratchett. “Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

The Pratchett estate has authorised the use of the name, tweeting its own Pratchett quote in support of Monroe’s campaign. “Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness,” wrote the late Discworld author in Men at Arms.

Rhianna Pratchett said: “My father used his anger about inequality, classism, xenophobia and bigotry to help power the moral core of his work. One of his most famous lightning-rods for this was Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch - a cynical, but likable, man who attempts to better himself whilst railing against the injustices around him. Some of which he’s had a hand in perpetrating in the past.

Boots Redux

 

Kapcha the Party

 

The CPI versus the Vimes Boot Index

 

In today's news, the UK's unofficial arbiter of all things statistical, 'More or Less' on BBCR4, has had a look at Jack Monroe's strong criticism of the Consumer Prices Index (CPI). For those who've missed this, they argue that it massively underestimates the inflation felt by the poorest consumers, because the cheapest essentials rise in price by a greater percentage.

Short answer: They're right, and the Office of National Statistics admit it.

The programme also mentions their proposed new measure, the Vimes Boot Index.

The whole programme is worth a listen. It includes the usual calling out of pernicious Covid myths, as well as a debunking of the 'five second rule' for dropped food.

A Moving Target

 

Plum Wordl

 

This Morning's Nunrise...

 

Not Larkin About

They fuck you up, your mum and dad,

But not as much as Tories do,

Who lie about high jinks they had,

And break the rules they place on you.

A party? Held at Downing Street?

They can’t remember when or where,

With wine to drink and food to eat,

And journos from the Sun were there —

The treachery of this foul clan

Goes deeper than the Spanish Main.

Kick the sods out, soon as you can,

And never vote for them again.

(Sandra Bond, After Philip Larkin) 

Graphic Communication

 

Arrival of Wordl...

Lovely Weather

 

Into the Third Dimension

 We have acquired a new dimension to our printing...

Space: Webb Fully Deployed

 James Web Fully Deployed!

BBC

Guardian

Space Probes I

A few months ago, the regular email I get from New Scientist magazine mentioned the then-upcoming launch of the Lucy space probe.  This mission is designed to explore the Trojan asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter.

I thought this interesting, and watched the launch online in October, on NASA TV,  which itself a very strange channel: there’s a sense that people who just want to geek out about space and engineering are perpetually holding themselves back, probably to stick to the corporate messages. 

The Lucy mission has a complex trajectory – this is what the NASA site said in late November:

The spacecraft is traveling at roughly 67,000 mph (108,000 kph) on a trajectory that will orbit the Sun and bring it back toward Earth in October 2022 for the spacecraft’s first gravity assist. That manoeuvre will accelerate and direct Lucy’s trajectory beyond the orbit of Mars. The spacecraft will then swing back toward Earth for another gravity assist in 2024, which will propel Lucy toward the Donaldjohanson asteroid – located within the solar system’s main asteroid belt – in 2025.

Lucy will then journey toward its first Trojan asteroid encounter in the swarm ahead of Jupiter for a 2027 arrival. After completing its first four targeted flybys, the spacecraft will travel back to Earth for a third gravity boost in 2031, which will catapult it to the trailing swarm of Trojans for a 2033 encounter.[1]

It’s a complicated series of manoeuvres, and I suspect the looping curves shown on the site don’t really do it justice.  Lucy will carry a number of instruments, including an infrared imaging spectrometer, a thermal emission spectrometer and a range of cameras. 

This mission captured my imagination, in part because of the number of science fiction stories I’ve read set on the asteroids.  Admittedly, these were more often about mining the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but still there were stories set among the Trojans. 

Later, there was if anything a more SFNal mission launch: Dart, which will attempt to nudge a large space rock, as part of experiments of planetary defence systems.  The ‘Double Asteroid Redirection Test’:

 is a planetary defence-driven test of technologies for preventing an impact of Earth by a hazardous asteroid. DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique to change the motion of an asteroid in space.[2]

This is more than a little worrying, given the number of stories there are out there, where such a mission goes wrong and wreaks catastrophe on the Earth.  Still, I’m sure they’ve though of all that?

Following the launch of Dart, on Christmas Eve, came the much-delayed launch of the James Webb Telescope is due.  Webb, once deployed, will primarily look in the infrared spectrum, and if successful will tell us a lot more about the earliest era of the Universe.

Which got me thinking: given this triumvirate of interesting launches in the last three months of 2021, what is already up there, and still working?

 Staying in the same vein as the James Webb launch, there’s the Hubble Telescope, of course, which is still in operation, capturing ravishing images, in the visible and ultraviolet wavelengths.

There are many other space-borne telescopes, such as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, launched in 1999 and still contributing to research on black holes, dark matter and dark energy. Chandra has four mirrors focusing X-rays.  Images and spectra can be captured. 

Operating well beyond its expected lifetime, NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE), launched in 1997, still sits at the Earth-Sun L1 point to collect and analyse particles of solar, interplanetary, interstellar and galactic origins.  ACE continues to provide space weather reports and warnings of geomagnetic storms that can disrupt communications on Earth and harm astronauts in space.

 More recently, again just last December, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) satellite. The IXPE is the first satellite capable of measuring the polarization of X-rays that come from cosmic sources, such as black holes and neutron stars.  The satellite has three telescopes that can track and measure the direction, arrival time, energy, and polarization of light.

There’s also the Parker Solar Probe, which in November completed its 10th close approach to the Sun, coming within 5.3 million miles of the solar surface.

It isn’t all about NASA.  BepiColombo is Europe's first mission to Mercury. Launched on 20 October 2018, it is on a seven-year journey and should arrive at Mercury in late 2025.  It has already had a close flyby of the planet, at 199 km in early October 2021, when it began sampling the magnetic and particle environment around the planet.   The mission comprises two spacecraft: the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (Mio). BepiColombo is a joint mission between ESA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

More to follow

---

[1] See https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/lucy/in-depth/

[2] See https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart

First Nunset of 2022

 (And a Belated Happy New Year)