Hello there Reader! I hope you're having a great week.

Since the last newsletter, we've tipped over the 600 subscriber mark! Thanks to each and every one of you that has signed up to hear more about me, and / or enjoys the strange and wonderful things I love to share with you all.

Writing news first - and I think I'm going to miss my deadline. I told myself I'd have the first draft of Book 3 in the Martians trilogy finished by the end of July, and I suspect that's not going to happen now. But rest assured, it's still coming along nicely, the characters are being tested like never before, and I can't wait to let you all read it.

I've just met a new character who I think is going to be inveigling his way deeper into the story than I planned. Private Bailey was a member of the Lancashire Fusiliers before the Martians arrived, and I had just expected him to do a little light guard duty and perhaps offer some wisdom to our overwhelmed protagonist, but he seems to be itching to do more.

I shouldn't be surprised - if he is the last survivor of that regiment, then he has a remarkable real-world legacy to embody. During the First World War, they stormed Cape Hellas beach in Gallipoli, an assault that was horrifically managed. Most of the landings ended in disaster, and huge numbers of Lancashire Fusiliers were cut down almost as soon as they set foot on land. Nevertheless a small number did fight their way through, capture the headland and were commemorated as winning 'Six Victoria Crosses before breakfast'. Good luck to Private Bailey...

Space News

Investigating Murder In Space

So far, fortunately, there haven't been any murders beyond the surface of the earth. But as we expand outwards into the solar system, the more people we send, the closer we come to the day when the first violent act takes place in zero gravity.

Now perhaps investigating it would be easy - if there are two people in a capsule and one is murdered, you don't need Poirot to figure that out. But on a large space station, lunar colony or Mars base, things might not be as straightforward.

Forensic science would still be mostly the same, but there is one area where our earth-bound understanding would let us down, or even mislead us: blood spatter analysis.

The way that blood is cast off and flows on Earth is well understood, and understanding and interpreting it forms a vital part of determining the sequence of events in a crime. Direction of spray, the shape of the droplets, even the size of individual blood stains can tell us something about what happened.

In zero or low gravity, all bets are off. Luckily someone has already decided to advance the state of the art, before we urgently need it. Detective Zack Kowalske is a crime scene investigator in Roswell, Georgia (not the UFO-famous one in New Mexico, as fitting as that might be) and he teamed up with researchers from US and UK universities to see what happens in zero-G when blood sprays.

So they took a parabolic flight to induce a few seconds of zero gravity, and sprayed fake blood around. Fortunately they did it in a closed box, so as not to end up with a massive clean-up job. They've already made some interesting discoveries, not least that the spatter pattern is actually smaller than expected.

Next up, working out who's jurisdiction such a crime might fall under. According to the letter of the law, any space object remains under the jurisdiction of the state that launched it... so you can imagine a crime aboard the ISS might be contested depending on which module it occurred in.

Source: the-line-up.com

Other Books To Check Out

Strange News

Ms Anaria's classroom rules for well-behaved kindergartners when alien ambassadors dock with the wrong ship.

A slight departure from the norm for 'Strange News' this week. This is a little bit of flash fiction by Catherine Tavares that absolutely tickled me when I came across it.

Imagine the long-awaited First Contact with an alien species occurs. In fact, imagine it's a whole parliament of ambassadors from various cultures which, after a long interstellar voyage, accidentally dock with a public education space station instead of the World Government.

Now picture a harried kindergarten teacher trying to make the best of it.

The best fiction, the best art in general, holds up a mirror to let us see ourselves more clearly. The complex negotiations of interstellar politics being reduced to a set of rules that a five-year-old could understand is simultaneously hilarious and sobering. Look at the state of politics here today, and tell me it couldn't be vastly improved by treating them all as petulant children.

If anyone sees how this practice might be particularly relevant and potentially applicable to future discussions with other friends and/or tri-system leaders, they can have a gold star sticker.

It's very clear that the author spent time as a teacher, and it's great to see such faith in grown-ups that they, too, can learn basic civility and respect.

Source: Nature

Other Books To Check Out

Miscellany

Why NASA can't launch the lunar rover they just completed.

Source: youtube.com

Think every McDonalds looks the same? This photographer will prove you wrong.

Source: Atlas Obscura

Unpicking the legend of the Bean Sidhe, better known as the Banshee.

Source: lairbhan.blogspot.com

And Finally

I'm writing this as the fallout from a botched software upgrade continues to settle. Cloudstrike (a huge Cybersecurity company) pushed out some changes to their Windows security software which caused a reboot loop. Normally this wouldn't be the end of the world, but this ended up being a perfect storm of problems.

It seems it was an update about viruses and malware, so most companies had it set to install immediately - some of these malicious programs can spread within hours, so it's no good waiting a month to install updates.

It caused a reboot, but then the computers couldn't get far enough into the new boot to recover, so down it went again. If they had stayed up a little longer, they might have received the antidote patch that was sent out shortly afterwards.

And most companies have device encryption turned on, for additional security. If someone leaves a laptop on a bus or a train (which happens a lot) then this means no-one should be able to read what's on it. This is a Good Thing(TM). Unfortunately, the only fix is to boot into a mode which needs this disabling, which needs a password, which most end-users won't know (by design) so some IT professionals will be having a very bad weekend.

I think it's a good reminder to keep backups of anything important to you - while no data should have been lost as a result of this, that's not always going to be the case. And I'm very glad that I wasn't directly affected. There are folks expecting flights, operations and thousands of other appointments that are now just stuck waiting.

One thing the last few years have taught me is to remember to breathe, relax, and be kind to people when things go bad. This whole disaster was caused by people genuinely trying to do the right thing to keep our modern infrastructure safe - and now folks who had no say in any of it are on the front lines dealing with the fallout. I've been there, and it's no fun.

Be kind to each other, and remember - this too shall pass.