Science chat!

Ok, the earth is spinning, and orbiting the sun. The sun is moving around the the milky way’s galactic center. The milky way is orbiting - something. If you could somehow define a FIXED point in space - how fast am I, as a human on earth, moving per second way from that fixed point.

Right, this is a cracking question and the answer involves some beautiful layers of physics. Let me break it all down.

The “Fixed Point” Problem

First, the philosophical snag: there is no universally agreed fixed point in space. The universe has no centre, no anchor. The best we can do is use the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) as a reference frame - the afterglow of the Big Bang, which permeates the entire universe and is effectively the closest thing we have to an absolute frame.

Using that as your fixed point:

The Stack of Velocities

But here’s the critical bit: you cannot just add these numbers. They’re all vectors pointing in different directions, and some partially cancel depending on time of year and galactic geometry.

The Bottom Line

The Sun’s total velocity relative to the Cosmic Microwave Background, accounting for all contributions, is approximately 370 km/s.

Your rotation contribution at 52°N is tiny (~0.29 km/s), so realistically you’re sitting at somewhere in the ballpark of ~370 km/s relative to the CMB.

That’s 370 kilometres every single second. About 1.3 million km/h.

The Fun Wrinkle

Your cumulative speed through the Milky Way alone can vary from as little as 208 km/s to as much as 237 km/s depending on whether Earth is travelling in the same direction as the Solar System moves through the galaxy or the opposite direction - and this changes over the course of a year.

So your speed is literally seasonal. You’re going faster in some months than others, relative to the galaxy.

The Rabbit Hole Gets Deeper

The Milky Way itself is being gravitationally dragged toward the Great Attractor (a massive overdensity of matter about 250 million light-years away), and beyond that the Shapley Supercluster. That’s baked into the 370 km/s figure.

At the absolute largest scale? The entire observable universe is expanding in every direction. “Moving away from a fixed point” starts to become a philosophically broken concept - spacetime itself is stretching, not objects moving through space.

Einstein sends his regards. The universe is deeply weird and there’s no such thing as standing still.

When they’re going to the moon, roughly how fast per second are they moving?

Great follow-up, because the contrast is stark.

Apollo to the Moon

The rough speeds during a lunar mission:

The Counterintuitive Bit

The cruise phase slows down dramatically because Earth’s gravity is still pulling the spacecraft back the whole way. Think of throwing a ball upward - it slows as it climbs. Same principle, just over 384,000 km.

At the L1 Lagrange point - roughly 90% of the way to the Moon where lunar gravity starts winning - the spacecraft is at its slowest, around 0.8-1 km/s, before the Moon’s gravity starts pulling it back up to speed.

The Punchline vs Your Previous Question

At ~10 km/s peak velocity, the Apollo spacecraft was moving at roughly 1/37th of your speed relative to the CMB.

You, sitting completely still in your chair right now, are moving ~370 km/s relative to the CMB. The Apollo astronauts burning their engines as hard as they could managed about 2.7% of that.

Rocket technology is simultaneously one of humanity’s greatest achievements and a humbling reminder of how cosmically slow we actually are. We’re not going anywhere fast. ✨

We had a chat a few weeks ago, but I can’t seem to find it - about how, if I had a VERY good rocket and an indestructible space suit, and I wanted to go directly opposite of the earth’s orbit until my my rotational speed around the sun was zero, how long would it take to fall into the sun.

Now, what I can’t remember was, what speed do I need to get the rocket to - relative to earth - to do that? And, do we have rockets capable of that speed?

Got it - found the conversation. The answer was actually already in there. Let me pull out the exact number for you.

The Speed You Need

From our previous chat, the key figure was buried in the detail:

To come to rest relative to the Sun you need to cancel Earth’s orbital velocity of 29.78 km/s. The actual Δv requirement, accounting for also escaping Earth’s own gravity well, works out to roughly √(29.78² + 11.2²) ≈ 31.8 km/s relative to Earth, fired retrograde (directly opposite Earth’s orbital direction).

So roughly ~30 km/s is the headline number - that’s what you need to zero out your solar orbital velocity. The extra ~2 km/s is the cost of climbing out of Earth’s own gravity well first.

Can We Do That?

Short answer: not even close.

The Saturn V + Apollo stack achieved about ~15 km/s of total Δv, and most of that was spent just getting to LEO (~9 km/s). The trans-lunar injection burn was only about 3 km/s on top of that.

The fastest human-made object ever launched, the Parker Solar Probe, reaches around 163 km/s relative to the Sun - but that’s with the Sun’s gravity doing the accelerating after multiple Venus gravity assists. Its launch Δv was nowhere near that.

To actually cancel 30 km/s of velocity requires an absolutely brutal amount of fuel under the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation - propellant requirements scale exponentially with Δv. You’d need a rocket so large it essentially can’t exist with chemical propellants.

The Irony

It is genuinely harder to hit the Sun than to escape the solar system entirely. Escape needs ~42 km/s from Earth’s surface, but you’re already moving at 29.78 km/s in the right direction - so you only need to add ~12 km/s. To fall into the Sun you need to cancel that 29.78 km/s you already have. Working against your own momentum is brutal.

NASA has noted this exact problem. The Parker Solar Probe doesn’t even try to go straight in - it uses seven Venus flybys over years to bleed off velocity gradually, because a direct deceleration burn is basically impossible with current tech.

And also remind me, because I though it was cool: Let’s say I could come to that dead “stop” in relation to the sun - I’d stop orbitting. I remember you said I’d fall for about 64 days. How fast would I be moving by the time I hit the sun’s atmosphere? And what was the g-force I’d hit on impact?

From the previous chat, these numbers were in there:

Impact Velocity

After 64.5 days falling, your velocity would be ~617 km/s when you hit the solar surface.

The elegant reason: that’s the Sun’s surface escape velocity. By conservation of energy, falling into a gravity well from effectively infinity accelerates you to exactly the same speed as escaping it would require. 1 AU is close enough to “infinity” for this purpose that the maths works out cleanly.

For context: that’s about 0.2% of the speed of light.

The G-Force on Impact

This is where I need to be honest - the previous chat covered the surface gravity (28x Earth’s, so your 90kg becomes effectively ~2,500kg standing on the surface), but the impact deceleration depends entirely on how quickly you stop, which depends on the density and depth of the material stopping you.

The honest answer: the number would be so catastrophically large it’s essentially meaningless.

You’re hitting tenuous plasma at 617 km/s. The photosphere is actually less dense than Earth’s atmosphere at the very top, but it deepens rapidly. You’d be decelerating from 617 km/s to zero over some very short distance. Even if it took 100km to stop you (generous), that deceleration would be roughly:

v² / 2d = (617,000)² / (2 × 100,000) ≈ ~1.9 billion m/s²

That’s about 190 million G.

For reference, a fighter pilot blacks out at ~9G. A bullet experiences ~100,000G. You’d be experiencing forces that make a bullet impact look like a gentle hug.

Your indestructible suit would survive. You would become a very thin layer of paste distributed uniformly throughout it.

As always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice and if you made it this far thanks for reading!

Chris

Now, I don’t know if I can name the actual client but it’s a major UK energy provider that generates and supplies electricity.

The consultancy works in squads and ours has few data engineers, a platform engineer (me), a software engineer, along with a number of leaders to keep an eye on things. As the lead (and only) platform engineer, I feel deeply responsible for making sure the team has the tools and infrastructure they need.

I’m currently working on two projects:

• Building a Video AI Engine Platform on AWS using Terraform. It’s a video analysis application that processes uploaded videos using AWS AI/ML services to identify customer vulnerabilities. It’s currently a human review process, that takes hours, and the goal is to automate it to provide near real-time insights.

  So this involves setting up:

  • S3 buckets for video and metadata storage with triggering events.
  • AWS Lambda Python functions for processing.
  • AWS Rekognition for video analysis.
  • AWS Transcribe for speech-to-text conversion.
  • A Cloudront distribution, with a WAF attached, with:
    • An Origin for a React frontend hosted in S3.
    • An Origin for API access through API Gateway to a Python Lambdas.
    • An Origin for video access via signed S3 URLS.
  • Cloudfront for content delivery.
  • Dynamodb to provide data to the UI
  • SNS for notifications.
  • Cognito for user authentication.
  • And a extensive Github Actions CI/CD pipeline for automated deployments.

  All the while ensuring security, scalability, and cost-efficiency - along with complying with the client’s extensive patterns and policies.

• The second project is helping out with building an AI scenario framework for a weather-dependent energy simulation system for their Wholesale Market Optimisation team. It simulates weather regimes, wind speeds, and solar irradiance to support energy market forecasting and analysis.

  • This one quite simply involves building a very modular Lambda based framework in Python that sets up S3 input and output buckets to fetch climate data, and will eventually pul configuration from a RDS database - and then trigger simulations.
  • The client here is curiously using Serverless Framework for IaC, so I’m getting familiar with that tool as well.

Whist this is all meaty stuff and it’s exciting to be at the forefront of integrating AI/ML, I have to say that I’m really enjoying working with both the Mesh-AI team and the client’s team. Everyone is super smart, collaborative, and driven to make a real impact. And, despite me hating commuting, working in the heart of London a few days a week never gets old. I’ve found an excellent place to get get tacos near the office, can attend a lot of tech meetups again, and just generally feel energised by the city’s vibe.

As always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice and if you made it this far thanks for reading!

Chris

Well, on Monday it occurred to me that I had 2 weeks left in this contract. So, I poked my manager, expecting to get one more extension, but later that afternoon I got the news that weren’t going to extend me. Frequent readers - if you exist - will know this has been on the cards for some time. I’m the last contractor standing, and their new finance person clearly doesn’t want any of us any more.

So, I instantly went all-in on job hunting. I applied to a few places, dropped posts on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Mastodon, got my CV out to some folks, networked, and made some calls. All in all, a productive first few hours of job searching. Later that day, my manager messages me to say that they might have a way to renew. Good lord. I replied frankly that I was already looking, and if they wanted to renew, they needed to do it quickly. I also noted that 3 month contracts are not ideal, and that finding out with only days left to go is stressful.

But here’s the interesting bit… Got a message from a previous colleague at Tide, who’s now working in the public sector. They have a permanent role in AI security that sounds interesting, pays well, and he wanted to chat. I had an application in the next day. Yesterday, we had a call and I ended up feeling really positive about it. I don’t want to get too excited because there’s a LOT of competition for it, but this would be a great opportunity and frankly a lot of fun. It would also be a chance to step back from contracting for a time - or maybe permanently? I don’t know. Watch this space.

Between you, me, and the wall, I’m going to admit something cringeworthy… This country’s given me a such good career, a good life, and the BEST of times. I’ve worked with the most amazing people and learned so much. Of course I work for myself right now, but in the private sector, all I’ve ever really accomplished is to make other people rich. With the public sector, I kind of like the idea of giving something back to the country that gave me so much. I know, I know, cringeworthy. But there it is.

Outside of that, it was a smashing week at work. I managed to detangle a heap of bugs with our integration to Dynatrace for version 2 of the architecture. I think there’s like 1 more pull request to get merged, a quick test later - and touch wood - that’s the ticket done. I’ve got a one day spike to evaluate something else in architecture v2, but other that than it’s gonna be nothing left but handover - unless they renew me.

If they do renew me, I don’t think I’m going to stop looking / interviewing. I need something more stable.

Minor Bits in No Particular Order

• I got the kitchen door hung up. The Dewalt 18V Brushless Planer made quick work of getting it fitted into the door frame, and the Dewalt 20V Brushless Router let me cut the hinge recesses perfectly. Now it’s just the handle and lock to fit.

• Finally got our 12 year old Sky box swapped out for a shiny new Sky Q box. The old was giving off vibes of imminent failure, and I knew the Sky Q boxes supported 4K, so it was a no-brainer. Better yet, when the engineer came round, because I share my mini-dish with the neighbour, he had to fit a new dish. The old one tended to stop working in bad weather, so this should help on that front.

• I’ve given up and subscribed to a year of Github Copilot. The code suggestions were just too convenient.

• And lastly, I’m trying Visual Studio Code once more. I’ve tried it several times before, but have always gone back to Vim. Problem is, it’s starting to feel like that’s aging me a bit, and certainly making me feel like I’m missing out on some cool stuff. So, I’ll be forcing myself to use for at least 7 days - the rest of this contract. I’ll report how I get on. I must say, editing this post, whist the Hugo server is running in the terminal, is pretty sweet.

That’s My Week

As always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice and if you made it this far thanks for reading!

Chris

But let’s get real. If anyone tells you it’s not useful, they idiots. If they think it’s going to magically go away, they’re delusional.

Search engines have been degrading for years! The quality of results is getting worse and worse. Something has to change. AI is that something. It’s not perfect, but it’s what we have. And from a work context, if you don’t use it, you’re going to be left behind. It’s that simple.

So, I use it extensively to research things and to help me work, so I thought it might be interesting to share some of the prompts I’ve used over the last week, along with some of the followup questions. I’m currently using ChatGPT only. In some cases I’ve redacted huge boring chunks of code back and forth, but you’ll get the idea.

Securing my website.

• “How do I set a Content-Security-Policy header in nginx?”
  • “Am I able to use Content-Security-Policy-Report-Only if I have no URL to point that to?”
  • “Hey, whist I’m here - what curl command can i use to test http3?”

Random Questions

(I also got personal. I do treat it like a person sometimes. Queue Bluesky rage.)

• “I’d like a 1 page brief on GCP’s CloudSQL.”

  • “What is Kong (from a engineering / devops context)”
  • “Are you able to draw diagrams?”

  Spoiler alert: Yes, it can - but not very well AT ALL

  • What software or service could I use to make a single page A3 sized cheat-sheet for interviews and technical chats

  • “Sorry, I’m juggling eleventy-seven things today and my questions are all over the shop. How are you today ChatGPT? People getting used to gpt-5 yet? I gather it was a tough first few weeks. (I honestly had no complains at all aside from some slowness on your first days)”

It started it’s reply to that last one with “I’m steady, thanks for asking - multitasking right along with you.”

😆 🤜🤛

Working on my Radio Page

• “Is there any way to play the audio only from a video/mp2t stream in a web page?”
  • “Hmm. I have this web page that I use to play radio streams. That “test” stream doesn’t work. [provides the code] What’s wrong with it?”
  • Questions about specific radio stations
  • Lots of discussion over how to parse XML in javascript
  • Lots of discussion over how to parse “Server-Sent Events (SSE)” in javascript
  • “How can I include a MIT license at the top of a html file ?”
  • Lots of discussion over how to parse plain vanilla text in javascript
  • “Hey, given this index.html - [I provide the code] - I’d like to add a discrete button on the site that changes it from a light theme to a dark theme and back. But defaulting to whatever the user’s browser is set to. How can I do that?”
  • “When I put in a URL into Facebook - where does it find the image it puts into the post?”

Return a Pixel 9 Pro XL for Trade-in

• “I have a pixel 9 pro XL that I need to return for a trade in. Can you give me step by step instructions for everything I need to do to wipe and reset it?”

Curious about Kirpans

• “Can Sikh’s use that knife they carry for self defence, or is that not allowed?”

Working on a bug @ Work

• “Where in the AWS console do I see Route53 resolver endpoints?”

  • “I can’t see any menu item called “DNS settings” ?”

  Just to note, this one returned absolute nonsense. I ended up finding it myself.

Transferring 14,000 music files from MacBook to my new Pixel 10 Pro XL.

• “How do you transfer a lot of files from a MacBook to android phone in 2025. The old tool they used to use isn’t maintained anymore. Are there any open source tools?”
  • “Why is OpenMTP so WILDLY slow?”
  • “Ok, next question, on Android, what’s the most popular music player for local music files? specifically mp3s and flac? Well maintained open source ones preferably?”
  • “Can you tell me the URLs of VLC and Phonograph?”
  • “How do i install adb with brew?”
  • “And, how do I know where to copy the files on the android? Is there any way to do a directory listing?”
  • “adb shell doesn’t see the device?”

Trying to remember my own military history

• “What was the military action that happened in Iraq around October 1994”

  • “Ok, with Operation Vigilant Warrior, do you know which squadrons of the USAF from Pope AFB were sent to Saudi and where they were sent?”
  • “I was there with the F-16s”
  • “No, there were F-16 from Pope AFB back in those days. I was sure we were the Flying Tigers.”
  • “Were any of those F-16 sent to an air base near Riyadh?”

  ChatGPT was deeply trying to suggest the Flying Tigers were A-10 Warthogs. I had to keep insisting they were F-16s too. I’m quite proud to have been a part of a squadron that John Wayne once portrayed in a movie. ;-) I don’t blame ChatGPT for that though. The F-16 long left Pope AFB.

Some research. I really just wanted to know if Mongo was a NOSQL database.

• “Can i get a 1 page summary of MongoDB from a devops / engineering perspective?”

I’ve thought about building a personal wiki for YEARS but can’t find one I like.

• “What’s the most popular wiki for businesses these days. I’m thinking about building a knowledge base. I’m looking for a good WYSIWYG editor that lets me link to other articles with ease.”
  • “I think, of those, I’d like one I can self host, and don’t need to pay for it, but Media Wiki is way too complex for normal humans perhaps?”
  • “Both of those sound nice but here’s the decider: Which one “looks” more modern”
  • “Let’s go with wiki.js! Hit me up with a “first deployment plan” with the target being a docker compose powered system.”

As always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice and if you made it this far thanks for reading!

Chris

It’s been a month now “between contracts”.

Not gonna lie, the DevOps job market for ultra senior folks like myself is sluggish out there. I’m finding roles to apply for, and talking to agencies multiple times a week , but only getting my first interview today with Farnell (who used to be called Element14). The interview went pretty well and it sounds like fun.

No panicking yet though. It’ll improve in time. It always does.

I suspect, I’ll either end up taking a slightly lower daily rate than usual, or maybe pick up a permanent role with a 6 digit salary for maybe a year and a day if it comes to that. One thing I’m still not doing is going back to 2019 and working more than two days (in London) or three days (anywhere) in the office. There’s just no need for it and a 3 hour a day commute to and from London isn’t a productive use of anyone’s time.

Continuous Learning

I’ve set 3 goals for this period of being “between contracts”:

• First, in the mornings, I’m doing a quick course on Google Cloud Skills Boost called “Introduction to AI and Machine Learning on Google Cloud”. It covers AI foundations, AI development options, AI development workflows, and generative AI.

• In the afternoons, I’m studying to renew my Hashicorp Terraform certification. For that I’m using a Udemy course.

• In a longer term thing, I’m exploring running Debian Sid (unstable) as my primary Linux daily driver operating system. It’s powering my Lenovo laptop and the server you’re reading this site on now. Is it dangerous and a bad idea? Maybe. But it also teaches you how to be super careful with what your doing and how to fix things when they go wrong. That said, nothing’s gone wrong yet.

My Birthday

My 51st came and went quietly. I was mostly just in the mood for a Texan dinner of beans, cornbread, and BBQ brisket.

The Annual Druid Network AGM

I’ve been a trustee and IT officer of The Druid Network for 17 years now and as a registered charity in England and Wales, we’re obliged to have an AGM every year.

For the first 15 of those years, our AGM was held in The Bilberry Hill Centre, near Birmingham. But the building ended up closing down. So, the last 2 we’ve had at The Nightingale Centre, in Great Hucklow, near Buxton in the Peak District.

I left home like mid-day on a Friday, singing road trip songs at the top of my lungs with the windows down until I was horse.

The official parts of our AGMs are quick affairs lasting maybe an couple of hours. I luckily picked up no additional tasks for the year outside of working on a new members-only chat site with Discourse.

Outside of that, as always, we chat a lot, go to the pub for dinner both evenings, drink respectable amounts of mead and wine afterwards, and perhaps get our tarot cards read. This year a bunch of us found our way to the swings behind the building. It must have been an odd site to see a bunch of 40+ people swinging.

I ended up leaving on Sunday morning, first listening to Taylor Swift’s new album in its entirety on Spotify, before switching to singing sea shanties at the top of my lungs with the windows down until I was horse and arrived home.

A good AGM and a fun trip!

Allotment 2024

Not much progress this year so far. The weather is crap. It’s either raining or freezing cold. At this point, I’ve given up on seeds and will be planting out straight from garden-centre bought plants.

Planet of Lana

This game is AMAZING! Exactly the sort of thing I like to play.