Fifty years ago today, a small, two-man vessel landed on the surface of the Moon. The great effort behind this feat began as a political stunt by the United States to outshine its perceived rival, the Soviet Union. The end result was one of the truly transcendent moments in human history. Nothing like it had happened before.
And for fifty years, ( Read more... )

Forty-seven years ago on this day mankind set foot upon another world for the first time in history. A feat not repeated in the last 44 years, since the landing of Apollo 17.

Sigh. I know probes are safer, and can provide much the same data, and are much less expensive, but still...

Listening to the Audible edition of Rendezvous With Rama [1] and just got to the bit where they realize why the southern cliffs of the Cylindrical Sea are 500 meters high compared to the 50 meters for the northern shore, to accommodate the sea's rise against the aft end when Rama accelerates.

Except when Rama stops accelerating, wouldn't that mean ( Read more... )

So I was looking through a 1980 era copy of Analog looking for an example of the game ads Metagaming used to run for an article/youtube about the history of Ogre I was thinking of writing. Flipping through it I found an old Alternative View column written by JP, in which he decided that Velikovsky had more scientific integrity than a group of ( Read more... )

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly ( Read more... )

Gacked from elfs

Nevada governor signs law for liscence plates to identify robot cars

Now if can just get an AI installed in Burt Rutan's flying car we can have a real life Gay Deciever

(not that I ever want to read that book again...)

No, that above sentence doesn't parse for me either.

Nevertheless, Seth (Family Guy, American Dad) McFarlane is going to produce Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey for FOX television, billing it as a sequel to Carl Sagan's classic series.

Funny, I'm pretty the calendar says August 8th, not April 1st.

Earth rising above the moon, taken on Christmas Eve, 1968 by the crew of Apollo 8

Gacked from filkertom

Merry Christmas, everybody. Peace on Earth and goodwill to all.