Russ Swan

A free agent

Author: RS

Today, Friday 26 August 2011, is my last day as an employee of Centaur Media. A few weeks ago, the company announced wide-ranging redundancies and a major internal reorganisation. I fully expected my position as editor of Laboratorytalk to become redundant as part of that process, as I mentioned here.

In the event, and for reasons insufficiently interesting to relate here, I have jumped rather than be pushed. My resignation has been tendered and accepted and, as of the close of play today, I am a free agent.

This means, of course, that I am available for freelance commissions, and also for discussions on any permanent or contract positions. Please form an orderly queue! I have over 20 years experience writing about science, engineering, and technology and have maintained a high level of reader engagement with the titles I have edited. My weekly Laboratorytalk newsletter – issue no 508 published this week – has enjoyed excellent circulation and feedback, due at least partly to my leading column.

I have no information at this moment about the future of Laboratorytalk or any other titles, but I suspect there may be some news on this in the near future.

UPDATE 9 SEPT: I’ve now had confirmation that Laboratorytalk has been sold to start-up firm Synthesis Media, along with print magazine Process Engineering. I’ve written about this on my other blog, LaboratoryOratory.

August 26th, 2011  |  Posted in Journalism, Laboratorytalk, Russ  |  1 Comment »

Cat and mouse on Broadwater Farm, 1985

Author: RS

The riots and disturbances of the last few days in English cities had me casting my mind back to the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot, thinking of the similarities between the circumstances, and recalling my own slightly surreal experience of policing on that estate.

Welcome to Broadwater Farm, riot flashpoint in 1985 and 2011

The spark that led to the initial disturbances in both cases was a death for which Tottenham residents blamed police. This week, it was the shooting of a young man, reportedly a drug dealer, who was originally said to have fired first. This now seems not to have been the case, leading to local protests which escalated and, ultimately, sparked lawlessness in many other urban areas.

In 1985, it was the death of a middle-aged woman during a house search, after her son had been arrested on a minor matter involving a car tax disk. Just as this week, protests led to wider disturbances. The defining incident in 1985 came with a second death, the brutal killing of police officer Keith Blakelock.

Both times, the disturbances kicked off on the Broadwater Farm estate. Both involved a death which was perceived as being the result of aggressive policing. Both times the initial protests were poorly managed, leading to frustration which vented itself in violence.

Then, as now, a Conservative government was hell-bent on cutting public services to save a few pounds. Then, as now, police powers were being extended and police accountability seemed to be disappearing. Then, as now, the divisions between the haves and have-nots in society were becoming ever more visible.

Concrete ziggurats and heavy policing

I’m going in

A few days after the 1985 riot, I was sent in to report on its aftermath in the context of the built environment. Broadwater Farm was already notorious as a particularly soulless example of 1960s brutalist architecture, and had by the 80s become a modern ghetto.

The first thing I noticed was how empty the place was. The estate had a large number of large buildings and a seriously high density of population, yet there was nobody about. I wanted to find some residents, to talk to them about what it was like living there, but there was hardly anybody outdoors. Even the estate’s general store was deserted, and the manager unwilling to speak to me, so I resolved to knock on a few doors and hope for the best.

It was then that I realised just how many pairs of eyes were following me. Coming out from the shop, at the base of the infamous Tangmere block, the view ahead was of a stack of multi-level elevated walkways with a central zigzag staircase. On each side of each of the five levels, a pair of uniformed officers stood facing me.

Thinking this would make an interesting picture, I raised my trusty OM-10 to my eye and was astonished to see all the officers disappear. It was a synchronised move, clearly deliberate, and clearly a reaction to the camera. I put the camera down, and the officers re-appeared. I brought it to my eye, and again they sidestepped into the shadows.

I had been aware of being watched, almost from the moment I’d entered the estate. While there were hardly any civilians to be seen, the area was heavily policed and I’d taken a few photographs with uniformed officers – always in pairs – against the backdrop of the stained hard-edged concrete structures. As a young reporter, alone, in a known trouble spot and carrying an expensive camera (my own property), I was actually quite reassured by the police presence. But this choreographed display was chilling, and I’ll admit to being a little creeped-out by it.

I never got the picture I really wanted, of a couple of dozen police officers silhouetted against the backdrop of the brutalist structures of the Farm, but I did manage to grab one or two shots snatched from hip level. This was long before the days of digital photography, and film was expensive. I now notice that I shot just a single roll of Ilford HP5 that day (more remarkable is that I was able to find it again, so many years later).

The cat and mouse game continued, and the hovering uniforms made it harder than usual to find interviewees, but as the light faded that October afternoon I finally got the quotes I needed for my article (I think it was for Local Government News, but it might have been Building, or Contract Journal) and made my way home.

The article itself is long forgotten, but the sight of two dozen police officers repeatedly sidestepping out of shot is something I will never forget.

Gotcha! I count seven police helmets in this shot, but there were twice as many more hiding from my camera

August 10th, 2011  |  Posted in Journalism  |  No Comments »

Ripping into Rip Tide

Author: RS

I didn’t get it at first. Ploughing my way through Stella Rimington’s latest novel Rip Tide - an advance copy kindly sent by her publisher before my interview with the great Dame of spy fiction a couple of weeks ago – I couldn’t understand why it all seemed so second-rate.

I had arranged to see Rimington, a former director general of MI5, when I learned she was to appear at our local book festival. She was a late replacement for John Simpson, who had been due to speak but was called away to interview Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Stella Rimington, spook turned novelist

As the first woman to lead a British intelligence service, and the first spymaster to be publicly named, Stella Rimington demonstrated a mould-breaking attitude from the beginning. As a junior intelligence officer in the 1970s, she led a campaign to have women treated equally in this bastion of testosterone-fuelled machismo. As the leader of the service, she drew back some of the shrouds surrounding it. On retirement, she broke the mould by publishing an autobiography.

And now, as a novelist, she has again set out on a quest for modernisation. During our interview and during her public speech, she explained that she wanted to get away from the caricatures portrayed in older spy fiction – the Duckworth Drews and James Bonds that typify the genre. She also wanted to get away from the unrealistically dramatic portrayal of events that fire the public imagination, pouring particular scorn on the popular TV series Spooks.

And so she created Liz Carlyle, the MI5 agent who is “not me, but with some elements of me in her”. Carlyle stands for no nonsense and, in a phrase which Rimington returned to a few times during our chat, “will not be patronised”. The fictional agent is also sometimes “allowed to say things that I once thought about saying”.

In this sixth Liz Carlyle novel, Rip Tide, our heroine becomes embroiled in an international plot which begins when a young British muslim is captured taking part in a pirate raid off the coast of Somalia. The threads are gradually pulled together and bring about the appearance of many of the key characters from previous books. Meanwhile, of course, Liz has a minor romantic intrigue playing in her own life.

When I started reading the book, I thought my review would focus on the sloppy errors which fairly leap off the page. 

In the opening chase, a French corvette opens fire on the pirate skiff using its “pair of .30 mm cannons”. I’m no armaments expert, but I know that there is no such thing. A quick scan of Wikipedia tells me that the cannons typically mounted on a modern French corvette would fire 20mm rounds, not 0.3mm. Ships of WWII vintage may have been equipped with .303 inch guns, but that’s still a very different thing.

Rip Tide is the sixth Liz Carlyle novel; a seventh will be published in 2012

Just a detail? A dozen paragraphs later and battle is underway: “The gunners swung their cannons round to point directly at the skiff and fired. A hole appeared above the little vessel’s waterline, and the skiff began rapidly to take on water.” 

The devil may be in the detail, but it’s hard to imagine a bullet measuring just a third of a millimetre across managing to sink anything, even if it struck below the water line.

Technical details aside, this is a book begging for an editor. When I see an organisation given both singular and plural identities in a single sentence, I know that something is seriously wrong (“Al Qaeda, under pressure in Pakistan and Afghanistan, was looking for safer bases from which to launch their attacks against the West“). There is further sloppiness elsewhere: “…he was trying to stop the blood by stanching it with what was left of his shirt…” If stanching doesn’t work, perhaps he might try staunching it.

Don’t they have a spellcheck facility at Bloomsbury?

In fact, these errors provided a bit of welcome relief from the stilted prose and clunky plotting of the book. I began to look forward to the next one, and at least this made me persevere to finish the volume. So, is my conclusion that that this is a slightly dull book peppered with faults, and worth reading only if you’ve already invested in the Liz Carlyle story?

No. Because that’s when it struck me. The book certainly is dull, and certainly has serious flaws. But that is its genius.

Stella Rimington said that real life intelligence work was much more boring than people might think. She said that there was never enough good information, and described various cock-ups that in some ways defined her career. She also said that she wanted her fiction to more closely resemble reality than most spy novels. Clearly, then, this is a triumph!

Rip Tide by Stella Rimington is published by Bloomsbury. ISBN-10: 140881112X.

In person, Stella Rimington was much warmer and funnier than I might have expected a former spookmaster-general to be

July 9th, 2011  |  Posted in Russ, books  |  3 Comments »

All change

Author: RS

I’ve been asked a few times in the last week or so about what is happening at Centaur Media and what the implications will be for Laboratorytalk and the other Pro-Talk sites.

To answer this we really need to untangle about three different threads, and provide a little backstory. So here goes:

Background: Pro-Talk was the brainchild of Chris Rand and Andy Pye, and launched with Engineeringtalk way back at the end of the 20th century. Engineeringtalk was initially a weekly email newsletter backed up by a website archive, but the site rapidly became the real focus of the enterprise (although the newsletter was always important).

In fairly short order, the concept was expanded to the manufacturing and electronics sectors, with (you’ve guessed it) Manufacturingtalk and Electronicstalk, and it was at about this time that I got involved. I’d just been spat out of the dotcom bubble when the start-up I’d joined, VerticalNet, had folded. I’d been European employee number 6 in what should have been the reinvention of B2B publishing, backed by a quarter of a billion dollars of Microsoft and BT finance. It failed for multiple reasons, which I outlined in a well-received article for New Media Age at that time.

When Vert entered its death spiral, one of the first people to call me was Chris Rand. Soon we’d joined forces to launch the fourth Pro-Talk site, Laboratorytalk. I’ve edited this since its launch in 2001, and just last week (29 June 2011) published the 500th edition of the Laboratorytalk weekly newsletter.

Further launches came, and by the middle of the decade there were about a dozen Pro-Talk B2B websites covering a range of publishing niches.

Pro-Talk was acquired by Centaur Media, a substantial magazine publisher, in mid-2006. After bouncing around internally for a while, the portfolio became part of a group based around The Engineer, a long-established magazine.

Moving this story along rapidly to the present day, there are three separate but interlinked issues. First is the absorption by The Engineer of most of the remaining Pro-Talk sites; second, whether Laboratorytalk will join them there; and third is the recent news of editorial layoffs across Centaur.

Engineer Source: this new consolidated website takes Engineeringtalk, Processingtalk, Electronicstalk, and Manufacturingtalk, and rolls them up into one great big web resource under the banner of The Engineer. Find it here. Source was launched on Monday last week, shortly before Centaur’s announcement of redundancies.

Will Laboratorytalk join the others within this engineering website? At this point I think it probably will, despite being an uneasy fit alongside its industrial partners. Yet only a few months ago I was leading a project to create a new and more differentiated website for the laboratory sector. Whether that project has any life left I do not know, because I withdrew from the development team after what in the music world might be termed ‘artistic differences’. Maybe it will resurface, but that seems less likely in light of…

The wide-ranging cutbacks announced by Centaur last week. About 10% of editorial staff, or around 60 jobs, have gone. Two magazines, Design Week and New Media Age, have folded their print editions and are now web-only (ironically it was NMA that published my account of the VerticalNet debacle, a decade ago). Within the Engineer group, I’m learning of some surprising cuts and job losses, and it’s probably too early to tell what the effect of these will be on the future of Laboratorytalk.

But it seems probable that, whatever that future is, I will play no part in it. I’m informed that my position as editor of Laboratorytalk is likely to become redundant, perhaps as soon as a couple of weeks from now. Officially we will enter a period of consultation in the next few days, but in reality I’m polishing my CV and looking for that next opportunity.  Interesting times!

July 4th, 2011  |  Posted in Journalism, Laboratorytalk  |  2 Comments »

When computer companies can’t count

Author: RS

If I were to write a blog post every time I saw an inappropriate use of numbers in the general media, well, I’d have a lot more blog posts. Innumeracy is rampant, at least partly due to the prevalence of arts- and humanities-educated people in the business, and sadly few seem to think this is an issue worth shouting about.

I’m one of those few.

A story on the BBC news website this morning caught my attention. Reporting on Cisco’s prediction of a boom in mobile internet devices, it included what I thought was a rather odd statistic: “by 2015, one million minutes of video will be watched online every second“.

Now, I take an interest in internet developments in general, and video in particular. At the time of writing, among other things, I’m head of video content at Centaur Media. Bandwidth is an issue facing anybody working in online video, and according to this report Cisco identifies it as a problem large enough to affect the whole net. But “one million minutes per second” seems a very odd way to define bandwidth.

Thinking this was perhaps the BBC reporter Maggie Shiels’s spin on the issue, I checked Cisco’s original report. It wasn’t, and Shiels has at least partly improved an obtuse statistic. Cisco’s fifth annual ‘Visual Networking Index Forecast’ says: ”By 2015, 1 million video minutes – the equivalent of 674 days – will traverse the Internet every second“.

Not only did Cisco inaugurate the minutes-per-second form, it helpfully rephrased this into days-per-second. It’s a wonder it didn’t go further, giving it as 1.9 years per second (one million minutes, by the way, equates to 694 – not 674 – days, but we’ll let that slide).

Considering that Cisco is a tech firm, this bizarre presentation of numerical data seems especially odd. Is there not a better way?

Of course there is. A million minutes is 60 million seconds. 60 million seconds per second. You don’t need to be a Fields Medal winner to work out that this is the same as 60 million minutes per minute, or years per year. It’s just 60 million.

Cisco could have simply said that, by 2015, it expects 60 million people to be simultaneously watching online video, all the time. That’s a much tidier way of expressing the problem.

Innumeracy in the media is one thing, but innumeracy in Silicon Valley? Yikes.

Making video for online viewing, bandwidth permitting

June 1st, 2011  |  Posted in Journalism, science coverage  |  1 Comment »

Shutting the stable door after the embargo has bolted

Author: RS

Reindeer pic by Martha de Jong-Lantink on Flickr

There is a growing consensus among journalists and editors that the present embargo system is broken and should be abandoned. It is a subject I’ve written about before, both on this blog and elsewhere. It is a subject I’m confident that I will find myself writing about again.

Embargoes are supposed to be used to allow us specialist writers a preview of a story, so that we can do our own research on the topic and have a well-crafted article ready for when it goes ‘live’. Usually this is timed to coincide with the publication of some new research in a peer-reviewed journal. If that was all that they were used for, that would be fine.

Today we find yet another example of the abuse of an embargo. Those nice people at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, BBSCR, issued a story yesterday (Tuesday 10 May 2011), based on a paper soon to be published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The news release had attached to it a short embargo – just two days – expiring on Thursday 12 May.

Over 24 hours later, and with just 15 hours remaining of the original embargo, BBSRC has attempted to add a further two weeks to the embargo, taking it to Thursday 26 May.

Luckily for me, this particular story was one I didn’t pursue. But if I had, perhaps spending a good part of a day honing an article on a specific commission from a newspaper or magazine, I’d be mightily unhappy to have the rug pulled from under me like this. In fact I’d probably fail to see the attempted embargo extension, because I can only see in visible light. I hope you like the picture of the reindeer, by the way.

May 11th, 2011  |  Posted in Journalism, science coverage  |  No Comments »

The Royal Family – my part in their downfall

Author: RS

Earlier today a young couple got married in London and, to celebrate the occasion, we all got the day off work. I arrived at the pub at about 10.30am and stayed until 7pm, but not a drop of alcohol passed my lips until I’d returned home. The Four Bells was running a royal wedding party, and somehow I’d found myself swept up in the preparations – initially as editor of the local news website, and also to help my daughter raise money for the local Guides troop.

Anne Davies and Kylie Pentelow report live from the Four Bells. That blur over Kylie's shoulder, below the Union flag, is me

From early in the planning for the event, months ago, it was clear that there would be quite a lot of media interest. At the first planning meeting I gave an interview to the local BBC radio station, which was the first of many reports the station carried on the preparations for the big day. The local daily newspaper and ITV News also gave it some coverage, but it was the BBC which kept coming back for more, both on radio and TV.

Yesterday, I was among those asked to come to the Four Bells a day early so we could be filmed making our final preparations. Today, BBC East Midlands Today was out in force with two news crews and a full outside broadcast unit on station. They spent the entire day with us, and even the regional weather report came from the pub’s beer garden.

The story presented was unremittingly one-dimensional: here in rural Nottinghamshire there was a community drawn together in common purpose – to celebrate the royal nuptials, and by extension the continuation of monarchy. The story had to fit into the catalogue of similar tales being broadcast from up and down the country, from the New Forest to Newcastle, that for this day at least Britain loves its royals.

I think this uniform and superficial coverage should be challenged. Yes, it was a pleasant day and yes, there are plenty of ardent royalists in the population. But for many people the day was appreciated mainly for being a bonus holiday, and the union of two people from very privileged backgrounds, hundreds of miles away, was of little actual interest. Put the republicans and anti-royalists to one side, and the monarchists and imperialists to the other, and what’s left in the middle is a large mass of people who really couldn’t care less.

But this is not the impression anybody might get from today’s coverage. Time after time the cameras focused on the flag waving, hat wearing, happy faces. People who, we are supposed to believe, were only flag waving, hat wearing, and happy, because of a wedding in Westminster. The cameras saw bunting by the hectare, cheering children, and above all they saw crowds.

Those things were all there, but it was incredibly localised. Half a street away the village was as quiet as on any other holiday. In the next village, and the next, there was no street party, no bunting, and little to mark the occasion other than a few more people than usual enjoying the spring sunshine, walking, having a pint, tending the garden.

The reason the BBC was so keen to broadcast from the Four Bells was that it was the only party for miles around. Elsewhere, interest and support for the royal wedding ranged from calm interest (spurred at least a little by the inescapable media coverage) to mild apathy. So why does the BBC feel the need to lead public opinion, rather than merely report it?

I have to admit, though, that I was very happy about one aspect of the BBC coverage. Our Guides fundraising centred around a game we had made specially for the occasion, using an old stepladder, some cardboard tube from a roll of carpet, and some dog puppets made of brown socks. It was called Splat the Corgi, and offered a mildly subversive means of letting off steam. Not only did it prove extremely popular with the party goers, but the anchor of East Midlands Today, Anne Davies, did a live broadcast playing the game and interviewing my daughter on the 6.30 news.

It’s a small thing, but it’s a thing all the same. A tiny squeak of not-quite-pro-monarchist fun to be seen floating on a sea of loyalist royalist subservience. And it was my part in the fall of the House of Windsor.

Splat the Corgi live on the 6.30 news, but does the BBC lead opinion or just report it?

April 29th, 2011  |  Posted in Journalism, Russ  |  No Comments »

Storm in a test tube

Author: RS

What follows below is my original editorial column for the Laboratorytalk weekly newsletter, 30 March 2011. It was deemed too controversial to use.

A rare squabble between testing laboratories has been filling up my inbox this week, after an investigation by a UK newspaper showed that one lab may have been inflating its qualifications.

The Times newspaper article said that Trimega Laboratories, which specialises in detecting drug and alcohol use by testing hair samples for fatty acid ethyl esters, misled clients into believing that it had full ISO 17025 accreditation when it does not. The Trimega website has since sported a number of explanations of its various accreditations.

These include ISO 9001 accreditation, which covers quality management systems, and ISO 14001 for environmental management. The company also tells visitors about its Investor In People award (a personnel management thing) and its charter membership of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, which is a social initiative aimed at teenagers. Finally, and at last significantly, we learn that its German partner company Trimega Drogencheck is accredited to ISO 17025, which covers competence of testing and calibration laboratories, and that the UK lab “operates to ISO 17025 standards”. Trimega also says that its UK operation is being audited and expects its own accreditation “very soon”.

Meanwhile, rival testing company Alpha Biolabs has stepped into the fray. Its managing director David Thomas said: “These false claims mislead the courts that rely on competent laboratories to produce results they can use to deliver justice…We’ve worked solidly for four years to achieve our accreditation from UKAS and the Ministry of Justice.” The company says that court cases may be “jeopardised by rogue testers posing as officially accredited laboratories”.

Trimega’s response is that the Ministry of Justice does not actually require hair testing labs to be accredited.

The whole thing might seem a little like the sort of spat seen on television shows like the Jerry Springer Show in the USA. If so, it is perhaps no coincidence: Alpha Biolabs has the contract to carry out the paternity tests which have become such an integral part of the Jeremy Kyle Show, the UK equivalent of Springer.

March 30th, 2011  |  Posted in Journalism, Laboratorytalk  |  No Comments »

Lost in space

Author: RS

I have been known to shout at the television. I know it doesn’t help, but it makes me feel better. I was certainly doing so when watching what I thought would be a fascinating BBC documentary called Around the World in 60 Minutes (available on iPlayer in the UK until 22 March 2011). This film “whisks you around the planet” to see what an astronaut would see on a single orbit from the International Space Station (ISS).

What a great idea, I thought, wondering just where the chosen orbit would go.

We started at Greenwich, on the prime meridian, which makes some sense from a navigation perspective. It soon became clear, however, that this programme had major flaws. In particular, it demonstrated a shocking ignorance of space travel.

The inevitable breathless commentary began delivering statistics of such mind-numbing stupidity that I wondered if somebody on the production team had written it by assembling a few random facts from Wikipedia.

The ISS, we were told, is structurally complete and is “the size of two football pitches”. Because it is most clearly not the shape of any number of football pitches, this strikes me as a singularly unhelpful bit of dumbing-down. Kudos, then, to astronaut Piers Sellers who provided some genuinely interesting insights. He’s been up there six times, the lucky so-and-so, and was both eloquent and engaging about the experience. The pressurised volume of the ISS is about the same as two jumbo jets, he told us, adding that this is plenty for the typical six-strong crew.

As the documented ‘orbit’ progressed, it immediately became apparent that fatal errors had been made. The first ’stop’ (the term used in the commentary) was Iceland, for no apparent reason than to show the plume from the infamous Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull. This gave an excuse for a spurious statistic: that the Atlantic Ocean widens by 0.003mm during each 90-minute orbit of the ISS.

Here’s a fact that the programme makers might have thought about, but apparently didn’t: the ISS orbits at an inclination of 51.6 degrees. This means that the furthest north or south it travels is 51.6 degrees from the equator (the orbit itself is approximately circular but appears like a sine wave when plotted on a two-dimensional map – see below). The southernmost tip of Iceland is at about 63.3 deg N. This means that the closest the ISS ever gets to Iceland is 190 miles above a point about 11.7 degrees – 700 miles - to the south. An orbit that takes the station over Greenwich (which happens to be at almost exactly the most northerly possible latitude of an ISS orbit) would pass more than a thousand miles south of Iceland. Not exactly a fly-by.

This is just the first of several basic mistakes about the way the ISS, or the Shuttle, moves. It isn’t even the biggest mistake.

From Iceland the programme moves us to the Amazon rainforest, in order to make a point about deforestation and deliver another spurious statistic. During an orbit, Amazonia loses 447 acres of rainforest, we are told. 447 acres happens to be 180 hectares, which works out at a suspiciously-precise two hectares a minute.

The statistics get worse, but not before the laws of orbital mechanics are further abused. From the Amazon, which is just about the equator, the orbit moves north to Venezuela before heading for Texas and Las Vegas. Just to be clear, any orbiting craft using current Earth technology must, by the laws of physics, spend equal time in the northern and southern hemispheres. Our erratic orbit, in contrast, has taken us as far south as the equator before making a handbrake turn back north. It’s just wrong.

Also wrong is the ludicrous precision claimed in the next sets of statistics. Every 90 minutes, 49,657 cattle are “slaughtered for food” in Texas, while 69,437,500 litres of water are consumed in Las Vegas. These stats are offered to five or six significant figures of accuracy, which (as any statistician will confirm) is completely unsupportable. To me, it makes the programme look rather desperate.

Our random tour of the globe continues with stops in Hawaii, South Korea, China, India, Kazakhstan, the Gulf, Ethiopia, and (another handbrake turn) Sweden. Each time we are offered some unconnected geographical factoid supported by a questionable statistic and interspersed with footage from orbit. The only thing that links these places is the track of our spaceship – but it is a completely bogus orbit that even the Starship Enterprise would struggle to perform and which the ISS certainly can not.

I’ve saved the worst until last, because there is one other fundamental error that wins this programme my nomination for the stupidest science documentary ever aired on British TV. Throughout the show, we travel east to west – from Greenwich to the Americas to Asia and back to Europe. The ISS, and the Shuttle, and the rest, go the other way. They have to, because they are launched to take advantage of the direction the Earth rotates.

To me, this demonstrates a level of stupidity that beggars belief. And it made me shout at the television even more than usual.

A tale of two orbits: in red, the impossible track taken in this TV programme, while the blue arrows follow an actual ISS orbital track

March 17th, 2011  |  Posted in Journalism, science coverage, space  |  No Comments »