— but others didn’t. The lovely shot at the right comes from a photographer who was at Cape Wrath in Scotland for annular totality. Lots of other shots can be seen at the eclipse gallery page at Spaceweather.com.
Very large. I suspect I had some memory of Vance’s “Big Planet” in the back of my mind (waaaay in the back: it must be twenty-five or thirty years since I read it).
I wanted a big, low-metal world. I did the “rough” calculations first and then sat down with the Planet Designer at http://www.cix.co.uk/~vicarage/planets/ to check my math (which is dodgy at the best of times) and make sure the world was possible. The trick is to keep the gravity roughly the same while still keeping an atmosphere on the thing. The interesting part, from Nita’s and Kit’s point of view, is the 120-hour day. (The year is 1421 days and change; axial tilt is 1.6 degrees.)
Alaalu’s radius is almost exactly 34,000 km. This makes the equatorial diameter 64,000 km (polar is less: the planet is moderately oblate), and the circumference (by pi times D) a little over 201,000 km. (Yes, the “four times the size of Earth” line will need correcting: I think that may have survived from an earlier draft. Thanks for catching it.)
— the latest excerpt from Wizard’s Holiday is up now at the YW site.
Oh well. First of all, it was cloudy. Secondly, I slept in. We were out last night with friends Pádraig and Deirdre and James, having sushi at Aya, and 
while showing Pádraig a short story I was working on, I accidentally dumped about half a small cup of sake into Ryoh-ohki’s keyboard.
And perhaps understandably, she went dead. So we turned her upside down and thumped her and shook her and mopped out the liquid, and when I got her home I laid her, open and upside down, near the water heater in the upstairs closet. And this morning she’s just fine. Booted up first time, no trouble.
That is one robust little laptop…
(Or maybe, considering her provenance, she just has a taste for sake.)
Here’s the local eclipse path, for those who may be interested.
Specific circumstances for the UK and Ireland are here on Fred Espenak’s eclipse page for NASA.
And a slightly weird one. The best details (as usual) are on Fred Espenak’s Eclipse Page at NASA. (But see also Mr.Eclipse.com for other useful info.)
(The image to the right obviously isn’t of an annular eclipse, but a total one. It was taken by Fred Espenak during the 1999 total eclipse, which we shared, soaking wet and under 100% overcast, with many others in the beautiful city of Stuttgart. [Best moment during this eclipse: explaining to six-year-old Gavin, who’d been brought all the way from England to see this wonder, that the darkness was caused by the Moon going in front of the Sun. His expression of polite but total skepticism on hearing this, plainly yet another of the endless dumb and patently impossible things that adults try to get you to believe when you’re a kid, was memorable.])
…Ireland is not best positioned for this annular — looks like Iceland wins in that regard — but dawn will look interestingly strange and dark anyway. The weather is shifting a little, so that we may get a decent view: probably it’s worth asking Peter to get the 35 mm cameras ready for a shot at it.
I desperately hope there’s something i’m missing about this.
“[Nicholas] Cage will play an archaeologist-historian who is the eighth generation of his family to believe the country’s founding fathers drew a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence.”
…Uh huh. So let’s set this up.
You’re Ben Franklin or one of the other original signers. You sign your name to what, at that moment, is arguably the most important piece of parchment (or paper?) on the North American continent. And what do you do with it then? You draw a treasure map on the back of it.
Of course you do.
(argh)
(Looking around a little bit on the Web, I now find various references to the “Beale Treasure”, all of which make my head hurt. No, I’m not going to link to them. Argh again.)
I like these: Bad, web-generated fortune cookies.
My first one said, “If you do something right the first time, no one will appreciate how hard it was.”
Wizard’s Holiday has gone to the publisher (and not before time). It’s not perfect yet, not by a long shot, but that’ll be sorted out (insofar as perfection is possible in anything..) when we go to copyedit, any minute now.
Meanwhile, now I can have my birthday. Ten days late is better than never….
These folks have cuddly cold viruses (see the rhinovirus at right), cuddly flu viruses, fluffy Streptococci, fuzzy Shigellae…
Gotta catch ’em all. 🙂
Here’s something amusing: do-it-yourself custom quizzes a la “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. One of the users on the “Young Wizards” discussion forums forums built a quiz for the “Young Wizards” series (Thanks, marniebrown1!)