This sounds like a very dangerous place to visit…
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We used to have a National Geographic fire sale in our town once a year. It was obscene what you could get - both books and expedition gear. Fortunately we would metro out there, which regulated our purchasing somewhat. No trunk (boot) and all…
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Luckily I live nowhere near Hemel Hempstead nor have reason (other than this!) to visit!
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To anyone asking, yes, exceedingly dangerous.
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But they have nice things. I got the top one, but felt I had to share a pic of the Lovecraft due to this forum.
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Especially if you have to navigate The Plough.
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I’m in South London and had no other reason to be in Hemel Hempstead, but people travel from FAR away to go to this thing.
(Best time = Sunday afternoon, no queue at all. Other times = car park will be full and queue to get into the building can be up to 90 mins. It’s weekend only but Saturday morning is not a good idea).
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I bought my first car just to the south of The Plough Roundabout. Was an interesting start to the drive home.
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I only had one patient in today who looked at the eclipse
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I stood in the street of an Irish housing estate and told neighbourhood children to mind their protective goggles, while sneaking the occasional glance at the near eclipse with pointedly unprotected eyes.
“Oi, youse horrible lot, do as I say, not as I do! You’ll burn your wee little eyes out. Don’t you go emulating the bad habits of incautious foreigners! Youse heard me. Goggles!”
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The rest eneded up across the street, because they couldn’t read the sign?
In non-eclipse optometry news, I got my first pair of progressive lenses this afternoon. I can’t decide if it’s just that they’re so weird, or if they have put the the centerline too high, because it feels like I have to tilt my head a tad to look forward. I guess I’ll see what I think tomorrow…
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Thinking of cosmic distance scales and ways of mentally dealing with them.
I’ve met a similar effect in an entirely mundane context: being a treasurer for a convention.
Some people in British SF fandom are rich, some are poor. For some of them an expenditure of twenty pounds needs serious consideration and the few hundred for the hotel at a big convention may mean saving up all year.
But for some and only some, and not particularly the poorer ones, the idea of being responsible (not liable, but responsible) for some tens of thousands of pounds of convention funds is clearly terrifying. And for others, it’s not, because it’s just like single digits of pounds, you just put some more zeroes on the end.
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Call from my manager to check over some paperwork regarding my impending ill-health retirement. She mentioned a retirement gift, which was a surprise. “Here it is… If you’ve had twenty years or more… You’ve been here for twenty years, haven’t you?”
And there it is. I have indeed been doing the job for twenty years, but for the first eight or nine months they employed me through an agency. I then applied directly when the opportunity arose and everything stayed the same, apart from who was directly paying me. I’m guessing that means that I shall not be getting the retirement gift I was only told about ten minutes ago 
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I am the on-call IT person for my company this week. Last night I got a call from one of our Maintenance people that a back hallway, where we have crammed six workstations, had flooded, and had about 3 inches of standing water, making the power strips and computer power supplies had all been submerged.
He had unplugged the power strips from the power drop that was there, and had put signs on all the stations not to turn them on until checked out by IT. He then told me I might want to get there early today.
With an internal giggle, I informed him I WFH on Fridays, but let the rest of the IT team know.
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In my entirely mundane life, the sum of £50,000 or the equivalent marks a significant distinction. Any lower than that and going to trial would have to be on a point of principle, with the client made aware that even if they won, they’d probably receive less than their actual costs are. The losing side in a legal case here is supposed to pay the costs of the winner, but judges almost never award the actual costs, but just their arbitrary idea of how much they should have been.
So I’m very rarely responsible for less than £50,000 and if I am, I’ll be telling my client it is a bad idea and we need to settle.
I’ve never taken my personal finances seriously and mostly just assume they’ll work out somehow. So far they have, no thanks to me, because our firm has a bookkeeper who will order me to bill at least some clients whenever I owe taxes or something.
Money is entirely imaginary, but still real in the sense that anything society agrees is valid has an existence independent from the imagination. And, of course, it can affect our lives.
The vastness of space is not imaginary and does not require social consensus. It just is real. Ironically, however, for anyone not an astronomer, rocket engineer or anyone else directly or indirectly working on space exploration, as long as we don’t actively go around imagining the vastness of space, it does not really affect our lives. Or, well, there are plenty of ways the orbital mechanics of our solar systems affect us, but none of them require our attention or buy-in.
So, practically speaking, most people never contemplate the vastness of space. I can’t really imagine it, not to scale. Can anyone?
It’s easier for me to feel awe and unease at the depths of the powerful Atlantic Ocean, because I see and hear it all the time. I can’t make myself feel anything while looking at photos of the nothingness of space, because the scale is so far from anything which I’ve experienced.
Plus, falling into an endless abyss would only be worrying if I might live through it. In space, there is no oxygen or anything else humans need to survive, so surely I’d die relatively quickly. It’s like how a ten meter fall worries me much more than a hundred meter one, because the latter will probably kill you near enough to instanteously, but you might survive a ten meter fall with lots of painful broken bones and probably lifelong disability.
There are lots of fates worse than death, but seeing as humans can’t survive in space, I don’t really rate falling into space among them. An unpleasant death? Sure. I guess any death where you are not sedated and unconscious would be less than pleasant and dying from lack of oxygen would be really unpleasant for several minutes. But so would drowning and death from decompression after a failed dive would probably be a slower, more painful process than death in space.
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I occasionally work with a number of eminent judges and hugely expensive barristers, and the single common factor in the advice I’ve heard from them is “if you propose to go to law, and the lawyer you consult does not beg you to exhaust all other possibilities first, do not employ that lawyer”.
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On that topic (which I can imagine some folks not wanting to read about, hence the blurring),
I have a weird take on how unpleasant drowning is, in that my memories of the time I tried it (in a swimming pool as a child) are of only a remarkably brief amount of unpleasantness before regaining consciousness after being rescued. I can believe that my brain just never stored memories of most of it and that it was actually worse than I can recall, but it’s nevertheless left me with a life-long feeling that drowning isn’t as traumatic as people imagine it would be. An impression which is vaguely backed up by witnessing a demonstration of strangulation which was inadvertently applied too well, such that the partner lost consciousness, which happened in just a few seconds (albeit that case was a more direct cut-off of oxygen to the brain). Not that I’m volunteering to put any of these possibly-bad impressions to the test; but I’ve always felt slightly comforted by the idea that if it ever happened, the awfulness may actually be pretty quick.
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