I got this for one of my kids, who was young, and wanted to know why it was difficult to make rockets.

For this purpose, the book is great. It shows you several aspects of the design problems. You can see this from the table of contents - it tries very hard to cover as much ground as is sensible.

The diffculty for European readers is that the units are all imperial, that is, Gallons, Pounds, feet, inches, and so forth. This makes the numerical details - a sense of scale for what is being discussed - quite inaccesible for most of us over here. It's worth noting that also lead to the downfall of at least one recent space mision to Mars.

Remarks like "its not rocket science" can certainly be shown as having a truthful sort of origin by looking at this. To "do" anything with this book, you would absolutely have to develop further and deeply in the following disciplines;

1. Chemistry
2. Metallurgy
3. Thermodynamics
4. Mechanics
5. Experience with CAD, esp. simulation with solid and liquid state systems.
6. Maths
7. Electronics,
8. Reliability...
9. ???

I wonder if any single mind could get round all of these, possibly, but you would be pretty lucky to get the chance nowadays. Education isn't cheap.

I don't think, though that there is any harm in wanting to get as close to this as you like. The book is truly wonderful, almost a work of art, and even if jobs in this area are scarce, this has got to be worthwhile. Read this, do the background study, get a degree or two, and you may eventually get into industrial plant design, maybe even medical electronics, aerospace, or something. Why not? The world would be a better place if more people would dream a bit and aspire to do the hard stuff. I am full of admiration for people who did better than I did and are working in these kinds of fields.

I'm going to get a few more books in this series, though I have to say, I'm a bit nervous about ordering books with titles including the words "missile propulsion". We live in troubled times.

Before I say anything else, I must say this. Acappella singing, which is what a lot of this is, is very hard indeed. Very few people can do this at all, it takes a lot of training, and if you havn't got absolute pitch, it's even harder, and this is the reason why bands such as the beach boys are so very unusual. OK.
The first time I heard this, oddly enough, was in the USA, strange for an English 15 year old. We were staying in a very tiny place, called Gig Harbor, near Seattle. It was odd because while now it's built up and expensive, back then it was a collection of tiny shacks near a river. We were staying with our aunt, and I made friends with a guy next door, also 15, called Don. He had a record player (lucky bloke), and a cat who had a huge fat tummy (strange how you remember these things), he wanted to join the Marines when he got older... and he played me Pet Sounds. Never heard it before, although it was familiar enough in parts. We stayed there in the area a few weeks, made friends with folks who ran the Pentecostal church over the other side of the river. Wonderful. They were like the Waltons, only there were more of them. We were very lucky to see all of this - very lucky. We had stayed in a tiny house in a small town in Lancashire up until that point, and that was our view of a much larger world. I have always loved America after that time.

What I am trying to say is that the Beach Boys for me was always associated with that place, those wonderful people, and sadly.... the impossibility of getting back. My Aunt died before we could go back, I don't have the mailing address of those guys anymore... and it was three whole decades ago.

To witness - the Beach boys have this quality to nearly everyone of expressing the very essence, if it were feasible, of yearning for the impossible. In fact, this may be the closest one ever gets to this in a civilisation. They paint a picture that cannot HELP but move your heart towards some kind of sweet inaccessible place that we all know about, and everyone must surely know that that sensation is certainly seems real for practically everyone but... nearly always slips away, like a dream that just isn't possible.

I'm too old; it's too far away; it couldn't really be. And yet it is. Brian Wilson surely conjures up some amazing stuff here that is magic, longing without becoming, whistful, impossible, wonderful. Some of my friends in England finally got hold of this and a few (five or so) of us sat round and listened to it. It was odd because we were smelly, scruffy and untidy and dumb and we listened to it after something else by Emerson Lake and Palmer and after that, I mean everybody went dead quiet, almost like we had been in church, or something.

It's so easy to go the USA now, lots of people do it, but still, you might even go to California now and only see or feel this stuff as though it was the shiny patches in the distance on a hot road, real, but distant, testifying to the real but illusive, catch me if you can, and we all feel old, kind of sad, but immensely grateful somehow. That's all I can say really, it's great stuff, but somehow I wish...

I think that the word hard could only be applied to the technique and skill required to play the pieces.

I had a recording of the Schoenberg by Maurizio Pollini, and although it was good, this recording by Peter Hill is very clear and was done with a great deal of care. There is no distortion and no over loading at all, which is a hazard for these pieces.

I have been aware of all of these compositions by reputation for years, but only started playing bits of them recently. This material are for many people too hard, but this complexity has almost certainly percolated into the conciousness of most people watching films of any sort - I would be prepared to stick my neck out, and say that there is a strong overlap between the intentions of say, Carla Bley and Dave Brubeck as regards the suspension of tonality, or at least, it's possible abolition.

In particular, Dave Brubeck's publishers issued a collection of Nocturns a while ago. It took me a couple of years picking a few of these and trying to get a feel for what they were really supposed to sound like. In the end, I had to cheat, and resort to a few rather obscure recordings of the pieces played in a quartet setting, quite a different context from solo piano, to get a feel for them at all. I suspect that Op11 is a lot less ambiguous than that, and as I've been slowly trying to get a grip on some of this, it's been very rewarding and become very clear.

I do wonder now what we all mean when we say the word "atonal". I suspect that there's precious little chance of perceiving any such thing, as our apparatus for picking up relationships, harmonic and structural, are so powerful that in fact all we can do is to play games with these kinds of pieces, avoiding settling down like a bird fluttering around a while before finally settling down on a branch.

Some folks would say that this is all tosh and what you think was intention was accident. That may posibly be the case with Xenakis and Babbit, where at least Xenakis is practically using the laws of chance to construct everything. But if you were really honest, that has nothing to do with this material, and is a much later development.

Ignore the Berg at your peril, it's brilliant, and incisive and the fact that it is theoretically atonal is irrelevant, it's just marvellous. Op11 and especially Op33 is just whistful jazz, the sort of thing that you would hear mid way in a Barbara Thompson concert...

I'm still learning about this. This is definitely music from the heart, and excellent. Anyone who can play this stuff, please get in touch!

I'm embarrassed. I wrote some stuff about physics and said (or implied) that there were some redeeming features about it.

I'm a liar. There aren't ANY. This film honks totaly, and I think it's about time that I grew up, stopped all the useless verbal and told it how it is. This film is just rubbish, and maybe a sign that the hollywood moguls think even less of teenagers than I do. In fact, they just see them as dumbed down walking cash, and why not not make a movie like this, after all, they are to stooopid to know what happens when you bang the rocks together, or whatever.

I don't think so. At least teenagers have arms and legs, mostly, and can (in principle) think for themselves. Unlike certain film directors, who do exactly as they're told, for fear of the fat IDIOTS. Go and read a book. Go for a run or do some situps and work on your abs. Go and do anything in fact, it's better than this junk.

If you were tempted in the beginning season of TNG as many were, to compare the personalities of Kirk and Picard, I think that by the time you got to this production, actually the final one of all, you would have long given up. As a character in a fiction, Picard in no way is even an analogue of Kirk. This virtual tour de force is confirmation of this, if it were needed at all.

My sons and I actually saw Patrick Stuart in the flesh in Leeds on my sisters birthday (I should really have gone there instead, but there you go), watching his signposted one man performance about Shylock - Shakespeares alien. It was quite famous over here, and very well attended. I wish I could relate this to you, but I would go WAY over the 1000 word limit and not even begin to scratch the surface. Sufficient to say, that Stuart's vocabulary as an actor is enormous, and he brought so much intelligence to bear on this very rich and complex play (the merchant of Venice) and interwove it most perspicaciously with recent events - terrorism, racism, and his own fascinating recollections of performances, character interpretations, and so many other things. It was like being on board a ship in a gale, exhilarating and wonderful, and no-one wanted it to end.

It's a fact that when we had the opportunity to ask questions, and also at other times during the show, Patrick mentioned his relationship with Paramount in several ways. I don't want to quote these comments, but sufficient to say that all the cast members felt that things were not always on an even keel. In fact, there was evidence of a really complicated and not always simple state of play at many times. Fortunately, during the last season, there was relatively little in the way of compromise, largely due to the continuous diplomacy of Spiner and Stewart. The result of this diplomacy in the case of this episode pair is just about as good as it gets, and is a truly magnificent way to conclude the series.

Picard, in this episode, has to deal with the final and inevitable onset of the final enemy - age, and mortality. In this he plays beautifuly an far older man than the younger commander seen at Farpoint, though the story is ingeniously composed in such a way that this ending episode is wrapped in an inescable embrace with this very first episode. I doubt whether this could ever have been pulled off by anyone else so well. But what is so well done is to (within the confines of the show format) to produce a strange sense of the timeless and the memorable. This is an astonishing effect. The whole thing seems... haunted by a strange atmosphere which would have been impossible to script in if you were aiming for it intentionally.

I think there is a remote chance that this may just happened anyway, by accident. Perhaps, this is may have been due to the time paradoxes and folding in of the plot. But this atmosphere is surely due in greater part to the unconscious realisation by all participants that this was, in fact, the last time that all the cast would be gathered together in precisely that time and place and circumstance, a sort of breaking of the fellowship.

After the gymnastics of a complicated plot, which gradually reaches a rather dramatic climax, the final stroke of genius is that the ending is positioned somewhere and sometime, but where exactly... Who knows? I suspect in a future which is that strange ambiguity that we know as happily ever after - no irony intended - in fact, you can truly imagine that the ending never actually happens at all,at least not one witnessed, but trails off into memory forever, into the furthest of distance. And it is there that we bid good bye.

Of course, it's not really over, but here the story TELLING naturally ends, and most satisfyingly so. My gosh, what a way to go...

I want to say something right away. That lady who plays Uhura would be my favorite pin up girl right now if I wasn't a happily married man, so whoever thinks she couldn't have done that great Arabian dance and look beautiful is gonna have to answer to me!

No, seriously, I have seen this movie for years and somehow ended up thinking that, odds up, it really is quite a gem. There's quite a few reasons.

All my memories of actually serving in the forces (which are few, but they're there) are about this tension that must surely exist between the functionalities which must be brought to bear in the life you have while doing it all. You are a soldier, but a lot of the time you are a drinking buddy, or an officer, or a football star, or the squad comedian. This goes on and on, and is the real evidence that you are, indeed, a live item. What of course happens occasionally is that sometimes this juggling act goes a little out of wack. Something weird happens,and the people in there say, ho, so who was this guy really? So it is here. Spock turns out to have had a troubled past. And we really do get to see this affect EVERTHING, as it would in real life. What is so interesting is how the disruptive element - Spock's brother - who has the potential to really cause a huge war - is eventually involved both with the characters's essential weaknesses, and finally, and ironically, his own.

I find this study so interesting, combined with the ongoing saga of "what happened after" The Voyage Home, that the errors or shortcomings matter not at all.

This isn't unreasonable, given that there is actually much to be admired in the photography and directing. It may be uneven, but it is very good very often.

I'm 43 now, and I would say that if I ever do a film of some 20's or 30's SF, which I would do if I ever was going to try that kind of thing, and it ended up half as good as this, I would be VERY pleased.

This film, I think, does really open up a lot of important and serious philosophical questions. You can trivialize these, but you would do so at your peril.

The film in many ways rightly ends without a great sunburst finish, and I think that the mysterious ending around a camp fire, singing "life is but a dream" is actually one of the most radical and daring things that these feature films have ever done. What is, indeed the nature of the events that have unfolded? What does it mean to loose a brother, and to face an angry god? (small "g")

And all the trekkies say poo, but I say that that's sometimes just the way it is, and Shatner had this film, in the end, dead right.

Good on you, bill!

I loved this when I was a student, and having had three copies of Bored of the Rings in little bits all over the house, having been read to death, this was amazing. What was REALLY amazing is that this is (if that was possible) even more deranged, witty and addictive. By addictive, imagine recalling the part about the kid chanting the secret recipe ".. Rigeliian fish with Antipas sauce! She CANNOT know it! ... She is an ABOMINATION!" and falling into uncontrollable giggles during class. *

WHEN IS THIS GOING TO BE REPRINTED?

*[That was, of course, when there were grants and we could live like normal people, not the improverished skeletons that students seem to be now...

Good grief, I'm getting so damn old...]

I have a problem with this book, in that I practically wet myself reading it... or was it another one? Time I got it again, anyway. After a year or two I had to get another copy because it literally fell apart from too much reading (which is, honestly, very possible).

A long, long while ago, in easier days, I had a bunch of friends who were very educated and knew British political history betwen them from the beginning of the 20th century through to the seventies, but that was a long while ago, and I sure miss these guys. There was enough conspiracy material in there to fuel a bonfire! My point is, that beside British Political history, they also knew about philosophy pretty well, Heidigger, Kant, Popper, the works. Also Joni Mitchell, Ralph McTell, Wishbone Ash, etc, etc. Where are you now, brave lads?

I have a feeling that they may never have seen this book, and this brings me to my real problems - is it all really true? is the secular world so very confused in this way?

I know that RAW is uniquely gifted, and we all love him over here, but the one thing that makes me secretly unsure is the consistency between the writing style ...and the content of the fictional world of the Illuminatus books and this documentary book. Is this the ultimate joke, a complex work of partial fiction?

My problem is that RAW obviously knows a huge amount of real history and could run circles round nearly anyone I know at the moment, so who on earth do I ask this time? Or am I going to have to do another MSc in something or other to find out?

I bought this two years ago for my youngest son's Christmas. I also got him Akira. This was watched immediately, and this, occasionally. Fast pan foward. Akira basically appreciated, but left aside for dad. This piece, Wings of Honneamise, gets watched at the moment twice a DAY.

The reasons are manifold. I mean, at the moment, it's the MUSIC of all things. I've been picking through the main themes and trying to identify the basic structure of the close to pentatonic melodies,and finding that they are a lot more complex than the traditional (and expected) Japanese forms. The harmony took us all by surprise. Getting very technical, after a lot of work, I've found some very emotive chords here. They are, to my knowledge, very rare augmented sixth structures which give the music a very moving (for that, read box-of-tissues-if-you're-sensitive-enough) feeling. I suppose I should say that they are very physiologically active, or something.

I've written that lot and feel faintly foolish. But let's be real. Almost everything about WOH has the feeling of being the result of a lifetime achievement - ideas that may have been in one persons mind for ..certainly more than a decade. This makes the apparent youth of the authors even more remarkable. Just look, and look again at this construct of a parallel world. No careless stuff, everything brilliantly constructed and offered as a rational alternative to our own world. Every time you see it, you see something that you missed before. And this has been happening on and of for two years now...

Even the theology of the lady evangelist is very close parallel to the Christian account of the fall (C.S. Lewis documented such analogous myths as "good dreams" long ago in Mere Christianity). What is notable is that this lady is definitely preaching a gospel of ..repentance... not any sort of animistic or over heated touchy feely stuff. The things she says have a powerful MORAL content, and the subject of the whole movie is to some extent the effect of this on Shirotsugu. This is neither blown out of the water by an unrealistic "conversion" (how easy that would have been), but instead he is slowly convinced, not by some emotional experience, but by the moral imperative itself.

He certainly doesn't get there easily. He starts to help the girl overcome her very serious problems with poverty and a cruel landlord and electricity company. In another scene, he clumsily tries to rape the girl, but is even more astonished to find himself forgiven almost as a matter of course (which is one strong indicator that the real God is involved in the girls theology).

I was most amused by the close similarities of the Army life depicted here to that I actually experienced several years ago, and this is a very strong element for the contention that WOH gets much of its brilliance from its attemts at accuracy. Yes, I'm including the fight in this, I remember stories of something very similar in Perth some time back!

But apart from these easily enumerated attributes, there is something about this whole thing that grips and won't let go. There musyt have been something like that,or else there is no way it would have, if anything, been more compulsively viewed this week than two years ago. There's something there, but what? I have struggled to define it several times,and fallen flat in the attempt. The closest I can come is that it exudes a whistfulness, and an odd feeling of ... sadness at leaving? Nostalgia? What can you say? Someting that seeps from the cracks and holds you very tight. It's a sort of strange sorcery, and I don't know how, if it ever was, planned,or contrived, or anything. I think for someone,maybe like me, who always was a physics and engineering freak, there is an irresistable feelings of magnetism about witnessing the stumbling steps towards space flight. That comes frombeing a boy and wanting... well, you know. The technical detail is really so good that you can imagine it all, and honest, it reallyis largely like that (we have a lot of journals on aerospace here).

But apart from that part,which is explainable, the movie has its own unique way of drawing you in. It's very powerful and I repeat, to those with ears to hear, VERY moving. I'm likely to try to get in touch with the authors of this, if there's any way to do so.

Basically, get this and don't be too surprised if IT gets YOU!

No, he didn't kill himself, dress in scarlet robes, shout curses at the lightning. My friend, that is. What he did was worse. he just faded away.

There were a few like him. Not any sort of spectacular demise, but a gradual erosion of a life that may have been better than mine in some parts by far. I remember these sessions while we had something on the slow cooker, tired, hungry, sort of student like for what seemed endless years. D&D was sort of a minor part of it.

When everything becomes amplified and hyped up as it sometimes is in the good old USA, you can imagine that it really does get to the part where the scarlet robes indeed come out, and it goes a bit weird. I think though, that this is the exception.

I eschew this stuff because I (a) am in the wrong place at the wrong time (b) am getting too old anyway.

I'm dreading these reunion things (I realise that if I don't do anything I'll never go to one anyway) because these days I'm so boring.

Note well the absence of grand theological objections. I know the devil would dearly like to get you down there, but as we all know, people are quite capable of doing that themselves by having quite a normal life and giving God the finger. No-one would notice the difference!

So I would say, take it easy and don't worry too much. But really and truly, if you have a room with a cupboard full of little cast metal characters, books of spells, and weird clothes, NOW is the time to get either an Amplified Bible or a gym membership, and if you are really smart, BOTH.