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https://youtu.be/dLgvKwOYniY

The physics is abysmal.  So is a lot of the astro science.

Oddly enough, the first movie got a small thing right--then undid it in the re-edit.  When the Millennium Falcon left the Death Star it flipped over to face forward.  In the remake it rotated about its short axis.  The angular moment about the short axis is trice that about the long axis.

I was still in engineering school, or maybe just graduated, and that bit impressed me.

You have the chance in chapter one to leave the reader wondering if Aedre's mystical  experiences have power in this world.  Again, not stated directly.  Maybe something in how quickly her following ShSh's direction gets results?  (Sorry, I haven't mastered the name.)  I'm tempted to suggest that her smoking (of whatever) should release the power, but that risks echoing Dr. Lao with his pipe.

Postscript: Maybe have Aedre think when the call comes in that she shouldn't have smoked ao soon?

I don't recall if you gave us any detail of the pipe, but a brief description (bowl fitting in her hand, long/short, straight/curved, smooth/worn stem to her lips) would tell us it may be important.  (Look there!)

Thank you again for the lesson.

Is The Moonstone litfic?  Genre didn't exist when it was written?  What about The Name of the Rose?  That's a detective story.  What about Time Enough for Love?  I'd put it up against The Glass Bead Game any day.

A pair of brackets for the switch panel cut, not yet drilled:

I wasn't planning on having them go most of the way down the panel, but those switches are stiff.  Note that two of the top-row switches are absent so that  I can work on the mounting.  I plan to drill the bracket holes to mount the panel for tapping, and to tap them for the #4 machine screws.  The nuts behing the brackets will be jam nuts, to keep things from working loose.

After the review for Amy I'll finish the wiring layout.  Saturday later I'll get on with the drilling and mounting.

The 100 ohm resistors are the cement block type; the 50-ohm resistors are deep black cylinders.

I'm overdue too.  Thanks for the dedication.  I'm not sure what I did to deserve it.

I need to start doing reviews, LIFO.

Short summary: you need, not to cut, but to condense, and not by an awdul lot   There are spots that feel flabby, and the reader carries the impression along, even where it no longer applies.

Love the staff-of-many-mages.  And the ending.

Wonder what's in that book, and what you're clueing us in on?

Don!t sweat it so badly.  Preserve the scansion, even if it means that your editor will have to tolerate a contraction.

I've been half-lurking lately, doing some reviews and replying to some.  So, what's up?

I've been trying to get Big Project out of the way, and I was hoping to have it done by last week.  Not done.
First, here are some pictures of the framework:

Before I build the circuit to go into this (you may be able to see the big transistors on the heat sinks, 3 each FLJ4315 and FLJ4215 on each) I need to verify one small part of it.  (There are six sections, one for each column on the front panel, two big FLJ42's or FLJ43's each, 3 sections in each polarity, and I need to get the resistor values right separately for the negative and positive sides).

This will be easier if I have some tools.  I've spent days working on designs, which I invariably grow to projects as big as the first one.  I'd love to build them someday but I can't go off into those right now.

Worse, all of those require units just like the one I need to verify!  I've chosen a bootstrap path, building a modest but capable adjustable constant voltage load.  To bootstrap that, I'll use a network of resistors with switches.  And I've let that grow a bit, too, to give me something I can use in the future.

I thought I had an electrical design I liked, then decided to smooth one irregularity.  I spent 8 hours last night making sure it would work, and working to make the diagram easier to read, so that if I need to refer to it while building the thing, I can do it.

Here's the physical skeleton:

The plastic welding clamps are just there to hold the control panel in place for the photo shoot.  I have to cut a couple of brackets.  Three of the switches are in place.  I have more on order.  These are $5.90 high-dc-rated Eaton DPDT toggle switches.  (That's Newark Electronics price, probably a bit off list.)  You can see lots of extra holes drilled where I made mistakes, then realized I needed to allow for 20 resistors instead of 15, and finally decided that the big power resistors should be placed on alternate lugs to allow more room, and so needed to use a double-column.

What you can't see is that the back and far edge of that board are painted a nice semi-gloss black.  I have four tuck-in-the-gap 10" ship-flat-assemble-yourself bookshelves.  They came with 6 shelves each, but I've only used four, so I have a stack of spare shelves.  When I drilled the holes in this one I was careful not to drill all the way through, so that in the unlikely case that I needed to return the board to its original purpose I could do it with the only evidence on the bottom and ends of the shelf.

You can see the many extra holes where I decided I needed to go to a double-column so that I can place the big 10W power resistors on alternate lugs, and where I drilled holes at the wrong line intersections, and where I didn't think clearly when I marked them and left the ends of the terminal strips hanging off the bottom.

About those 10W power resistors: I thought I had a good cache of 10W sand resistors(*), but the cache turned out to be mostly 10 ohm and one ohm.  I had only a few of the 100 ohm resistor that I will need.  I had enough 50 ohms for that value and to parallel to make 25 ohm and 16.67 ohm resistors, but I toddled off to the Newark website again, looking for bargains.

(*'sand' resistors, also called 'cement' resistors: the resistive element, usually nichrome wire, is encased in a small concrete block, usually 1/4" or 3/8" of an inch square in cross-section and 3/4" to 2" in length, generally with the wire leads sticking out the center of each end.  The concrete used to be coarse-grained, hence the old name.  You can see some sand/cement resistors in the selection advertised here.)

I found a real bargain, but the mobile-device web page didn't tell me that they were in the UK stock, which adds a week and $20 to shipping.  I went looking again and found some others discounted, big cylindrical, non-sand jobbies; I hope to see them by Friday evening.  (Gotta' work on those brackets, and on the battery stack switchbox I need.)  Discount or no, I've busted my budget for the sixth time in three months.  (Learning lessons on drilling stainless and part-stainless steels, TiN and Co drill bit sets, bulk replacement bits for the ones I'm likely to break in the future, a new drill machine (a good deWalt), electronic parts (always cheaper to stock up) and bargains (they'll be bargains when I use them somewhere in the future!), ... ... ...)

Tonight I need to finish a review reply, do at least one review (there are about two###three dozen I should do), and work out a new physical wiring diagram for the revised circuit.  And I have to layout and drill a case to hold switches for a battery stack.

(Digression: If you are buying things that use AA, AAA, or D batteries, check out the Harbor Freight alkalines.  They seem to have at least 90% of the energy reserve of Duracell and Energizer, at about half the price.)

And now I've spent a long afternoon on this posting.

Thank you, but I think it's a little overwritten.  My point is that you can mix action and setting it it's just right.

Seems I'm not the only one with the notion of a barricade spell.

Math major math or applied math?  If it's math major math, I'm in minor awe.

Note the difference between parens and curly braces.

(To celebrate {infinitive phrase acting as an adverb of place/circumstance/purpose} (his book's arrival { 'his' modifying 'book', poss. of 'book' modifying 'arrival' } ( on the N.Y.Times' best seller list { prep. phrase 'on list', 'list' modified by 'best seller' as a compound noun, modified by poss. 'N.Y.Times', article 'the' applies to 'list'} ) ) ( (Dirk and his twin brother Dallas {proper nouns in 'and' conjunction as subject of 'spent'; 'brother' the noun following 'and', 'his' (poss.) and 'twin' modifying 'brother', 'Dallas' as an appositive on 'brother'} ( spent {verb of main clause predicate} (the night {direct object of 'spent', modified by article 'the'} ) ( carousing and drinking ) {verbs joined by conjunction in a construction whose name I have forgotten; alternatively you could claim they are gerunds, object of an elided 'in', creating a prep. phrase with adverbial effect } (as if they were back in college { 'as if' acts as a subordinating conjunction; the subsequent clause uses a copula in the subjunctive with back in college' acting as a predicate adjective on the copula } .)

I hope I've got all the parentheses matched.  Note that English sometimes allows multiple parses, and grammarians disagree on some things.

Let the arguments begin!  (And if you've got a clean way to lay this out on a web page w/o formatting control, please tell me.)