I spent yesterday afternoon at the COROT launch event at the Kuffner Sternwarte. Great small scale event – due to the apparent non-popularity of astronomy, only very few “outside people” showed up, meaning even non-assertive me got to have a chat with two actual mission scientists, hear lots of interesting astronomy and spaceflight chat and eat delicious tiramisu prepared by astronomer Günther Wuchterl‘s SO.

Great fun. Surprising launch factoids: Apparently, the people running the mission got the launch for free because it was a test of a new version of the Fregat upper stage. To add insult to injury in an industry where everyone is crying about launch costs, they apparently launched multiple tons of lead ballast because the COROT satellite was way too light for the launch vehicle and these things aren’t designed to operate under anything but full load.

Related stuff: Nick Szabo muses on metrics for bootstrapping space industry.

Lecture-free time is upon us, and so I am suddenly left with surprising amounts of disposable time. Of course, I’ve got plenty of work to do, but for now the lack of compelling reasons to get up early has resulted in a kind of inverted sleep pattern where I stay up until 5 AM to work on the lab protocols I don’t need to finish anytime soon and then sleep it off until the early afternoon.

Joy is provided by Against the Day with its inexhaustible supply of interconnected story lines, science allusions and Pynchonesque weirdness. 500 pages done, almost 600 to go. I can’t believe I found double refraction boring when it came up in my optics course, after this book I need to get myself a piece of Iceland spar. Also, I got myself The Economist’s Christmas double issue, which contains a rather interesting article linking postmodernism and modern marketing. Untypically, the article is even available online for free. I guess I finally need to read the Dialectic of Enlightenment, now that I can qualify it as a business expense.

Also new on the reading list, by way of lovely presents: Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics, which promises to be what What the Bleep Do We Know definitely wasn’t, and a really nice illustrated edition of A Short History of Just About Everything.

It’s going to be a busy holiday season, I presume.

Update 2006-12-28: I’ve heard Pynchon criticised as basically “Gibson with too many words”. Guess what William Gibson is reading right now? :)

Well, there I go mourning his imminent death, and now the guy starts a blog. How’s that for Operation Mindfuck?

Update: Uhm, I guess that was to good to last. But he seemed pretty cheerful about the whole affair, a real role model there.

You know, back when I learned to code, you probably weren’t even alive…