Skylon: the Future is About to Arrive

You may never have heard of Skylon but if your age is greater than twice the sum of your shoe size and your hat size you have probably heard of Hotol (HOrizontal Take-Off and Landing), an idea from the 1980s that, it was hoped, would lead to cheap (relatively) space-travel and 2-hour flights from London to Sydney. The idea never took off (literally, as well as figuratively) due to the immense technical challenges involved but it seems that the engineers involved didn’t just give in; they have been working away at the problems ever since Hotol was cancelled.

The result of this persistence is Skylon, a 21st Century version of Hotol that seems to hold great promise. The key difference between Skylon and Hotol is technical feasibility. Where Hotol was a great idea held back by the engineering of the day, Skylon seems to be a lot closer to being feasible, to the point where the European Space Agency, charged by the UK Space Agency with evaluating the concept, has found no significant problems and have suggested that the project is ready to proceed to the next stage.

The company designing the system, Reaction Engines Limited, is conducting further tests through the summer. If all goes well they will soon be looking for investors to release a further £220m (which is a ludicrously small amount of money given both the possibilities and the other sums we’ve been spending recently) to fund a prototype of the revolutionary Sabre engine. It is still a hugely risky project - there are many things that could go wrong - but it is also enormously exciting.

The prize, of course, would be a world-beating technology, built and controlled by a UK company, giving the UK a serious advantage in space technology and, possibly, sparking a new phase in both the UK’s and the world’s development. Cutting the cost of launching satellites or other space-bound cargo could trigger all sorts of opportunities, from orbital manufacturing to power generation to tourism.

Is it fair to hang such huge ambitions on the outcome of a single product development project? Possibly not, but I would be willing to bet that this is exactly the aim of the engineers working on it. After all, if you are literally aiming to revolutionise near-space travel you might as well hope to achieve big things on the back of it.

So what can we do to help out? At the moment, probably nothing, but sooner or later the project is likely to need Government help, either as a customer, regulator or investor, and if this happens we should enthusiastically jump aboard.

The UK is already a major operator in the defence, aerospace and satellite manufacturing industries. Skylon might open new opportunities for the UK in space innovation, travel, satellite launching and next-generation industry, supporting our already significant activities in defence and aerospace. Whatever the costs and technical difficulties, that’s a huge prize and it’s definitely worth pursuing.

Visit Greenwich, get stuck in traffic

Greenwich, as a tourist destination, is pretty good; in a day you can stroll through Greenwich Park, see the excellent Royal Observatory, visit the National Maritime Museum, view (what’s left of) the Cutty Sark (currently being restored after years of slow deterioration), sample the myriad wares of the covered market and explore various other bits and pieces that might be of interest. There are restaurants like The Old Brewery (which has the most fantastic selection of beers) and cafes like Royal Teas where hunger and thirst can be slaked.

But why would anyone return for a second visit? Greenwich has many fine features and it would be a nice place to visit occasionally except for the one thing; truly horrendous traffic. 

The air pollution is unpleasant (although still nowhere near as bad as Oxford Street - a similarly blighted area of London) but the real problem is simply the volume of traffic trying to navigate the narrow streets of Greenwich. It is clear that efforts have been made to keep the traffic moving but the cost is to force pedestrians one to narrow, highly congested pavements from which the view of the opposite side of the street is about as close as they can hope to get without a life-risking dash across the tarmac.

The main problem is the A206, which splits the village in two. As you can see from the map above, there’s no obvious alternative to the road’s current routing (building bypasses in south London isn’t really an option; maybe a tunnel would do the trick?), which is a pity, because it blights the area and must surely reduce the residents’ quality of life. 

The only answer I can see consists of enhancing the area for pedestrians and making the driving experience (which must already be fairly awful at peak times) even less pleasant, thus discouraging through-traffic from using the route. To do this we might:

• Widen the pavements to ease pedestrian congestion
• Add cycle lanes and racks to encourage the use of bikes instead of cars
• Add regular pedestrian and cycle crossings to make the roads less of a barrier
• Lower the speed limit to 20mph (although this may already be the speed limit - I didn’t check)

All of these changes could be done on the existing roads and would have positive benefits both for residents (assuming that they can limit their car use to off-peak times) and visitors. Making the general environment more pleasant is almost guaranteed to attract more tourists who will then be encouraged to stay longer and return sooner. 

Could this be done? Probably not, because it disadvantages the one group that Transport for London really care about; motorists. Unfortunately, despite the likely benefits to residents, tourists, local business and the environment, anything which interrupts the smooth flow of traffic powered by the internal combustion engine is anathema, unlikely ever to see the light of day. Time for a change at TfL, maybe, or a re-balancing of their remit?

PlainText - iPad App Extraordinaire

A while ago I wrote a post about my experiments with distraction-free writing, as supported by Apple's Pages app for OS X (I've since tried MS Word under similar conditions - Pages is better for my purposes). I was reasonably happy with the text but the blog-reading public, perhaps unaware of the brilliance of my prose, didn't visit in any great numbers (two people only, it seems).

Why am I mentioning the (entirely unsurprising) lack of public interest in my blog? Other than a slightly masochistic delight in exposing the utter lack of appeal of my writing, it gives me an opportunity to mention an app I have been using on my iPad to do essentially what Pages does on the Mac; PlainText.

There are two things that I particularly like about PlainText. First, it is, as the name suggests, very plain; when you are working in full-screen mode you will not be distracted by pop-ups, formatting tools, borders, rulers, menus or anything else. The three-quarter screen mode is also almost entirely clutter free, adding only a file list in the left-hand margin, which seems strange until you want to switch files, at which point it turns out to be rather useful and elegant.

Isn't it a bit wasteful to devote a quarter of the screen to the file list? Not really. There are so few controls (i.e. None) that you might as well make the file navigation control as easy to use as possible. It works really well, allowing you to move quickly through the folder structure to the file of choice.

Second, the app syncs with DropBox so that you never lose your files (if you are not already using DropBox as secure backup for your files, give it a go: dropbox.com). Unlike other apps that sync with remote file storage services, PlainText saves your files every few seconds, taking advantage of breaks in your typing to bung a copy up to the cloud. This makes it a very safe app; it's almost impossible to lose your work, even if the worst happens and the app crashes half-way through editing your magnum opus or your iPad is eaten by a cow.

Leaving aside concerns about bovine consumption of tablets, I think it is fair to say that PlainText's simplicity and security are enough to recommend the app for pretty much any notation exercise you might care to undertake. At some point, of course, you'll probably want to format the text, add pictures or insert hyperlinks and that's when you need to switch to Pages. By this point, however, you've done all the really tough work (capturing your thoughts as text) and you're on the home straight.

Any weaknesses? No, not really, unless you want to list the main features (lack of features, for example) as a "weakness". I don’t, so I can strongly recommend the app; it's fast, secure, easy to use and it does exactly what it says it will do.

Sources of News

So where do you turn when you want to know what's going on in the world? For me the choice depends on the type of news I am looking for. For economics, business, politics and current affairs I turn, in order, to The Economist, BBC News and Reuters using a combination of iPhone, iPad and desktop browser (I used to watch the news on the TV but I stopped that long ago). For weather forecasts I use Google (if you search for "weather " Google presents not only the weather for your chosen city but also links to other sites with similar information) or, if I want more detail or a five-day view, BBC News.

These sources, although informative and interesting and full of well-constructed opinion (not the BBC, unfortunately - I'm mostly thinking here of The Economist) are a bit impersonal. Most of the news is of events happening far away to people I'm never likely to meet doing things in which I am only peripherally interested; what about the people I know and topics that fascinate me?

The answer, assuming you have an iPad, is that for personalised news you want two apps: FlipBoard and Reeder. Why? Read on.

One of the best ways to keep track of blogs is via an RSS feed reader. Google Reader is an excellent management system for your RSS subscriptions (although it's easy to overload by simply subscribing to, for example, BBC News) but the user interface could be better. That's where Reeder comes in, offering a great user experience in a simple, elegant and easy-to-use interface. Once you've given Reeder your Google Reader account credentials it syncs your feeds and presents them to you in a fast, easy-to-read format. I now skim through my feeds, read some of the stories in detail and throw longer articles at Instapaper for reading on the bus.

And for the other stuff, when an RSS feed is a bit too simple but you can't be bothered to read a dozen different websites (especially the interesting ones that generate lots of long, detailed stories or posts) there is FlipBoard. I feel comfortable describing FlipBoard as new and innovative because it really is. The premise is simple; you give it your FaceBook and Twitter details, choose your information sources (New Scientist, TreeHugger, BBC News etc.) and it aggregates your news into a magazine-style layout that you flip through or drill into depending on your level of interest in the article in question.

As an aside, Instapaper is great for reading long articles. If you've never tried it you're probably asking why you would need another reading app but, trust me, it's great. Instapaper takes your articles or web pages, strips out the adverts and other rubbish and presents back the text in an easy-to-read format. Try it, it's more useful than it sounds.

So that's it. You need Flipboard and Reeder. And Instapaper for longer articles. Nothing more.