Dammit!

I just learned this morning that the past six weeks or so of physical therapy helped with general lower-back achiness, but did nothing for the real problem of my sacrum rotating into my hipbone and pinching my iliac nerve.  I was fine when I went to bed last night.  This morning I rolled over in bed and felt the familiar ball-peen-hammer sensation.  I've been walking around this morning as carefully as though I were walking on eggshells, because I know if I jar this wrong, it's going to HURT.

Update:

Then again, whether the PT helped with this specifically or not, this morning the iliac nerve pinch seems to have gradually eased once I got up and started moving around, and never progressed to the stabbing "Oh god I can't move" state.  So whether the PT was responsible or not, it looks like I dodged a bullet today.

In memoriam: Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE

So many people have already written about Arthur C. Clarke's death yesterday, at the age of 90 in his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka, that it's difficult to know what there is left to add.  It's taken me quite a while to think about it, because I feel the loss so keenly.

I think it should never be forgotten, though, that Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, wasn't "just" a science fiction writer (even though it was as a writer that he most wished to be remembered); he was a scientist and, perhaps most important of all, a visionary.  He made important contributions to the development of radar, which was at least partly responsible for winning the Battle of Britain, and thereby changed the course of the Second World War and all history that has followed it.  His radar and GCA (ground-controlled approach) work was vital to the success of the Berlin airlift, and was the direct ancestor of modern instrument landing systems that allow civil airliners to continue to land by night and in almost all weather.  As is also widely known, it was Clarke who saw — and first described in detail — the value of the geosynchronous orbit for telecommunications relays, and is thus credited with the invention of the communications satellite.  (And, indirectly, various other things a lot of us now take for granted, including the GPS system.  The odds are good that had communications satellites not paved the way, no-one would have thought of GPS.)  The International Astronomical Union officially recognizes the 36,000km equatorial geostationary orbit as the Clarke Orbit in his honor.  I don't believe it is an exaggeration to number him among those who shaped the course of the latter half of the 20th Century.

I know that he declared in September 2007 that he would never leave Sri Lanka again, being completely wheelchair-bound due to post-polio syndrome.  But I so dearly wish he'd been able to hang on long enough to take a trip into space.  If anyone ever deserved a complimentary ticket on the inaugural flight of Spaceship Two, surely it was Sir Arthur Charles Clarke.

"My god ...  It's full of stars."

Godspeed, Sir Arthur.