Today is the anniversary of Gemini VIII, one of the most notable early close calls in US space history. The mission started on a sour note, with some questions about whether the wrong program might have been loaded in the Agena test vehicle. Command pilot Neil Armstrong was able to successfully rendezvous with the Agena and dock, a first for NASA ( ( Read more... )

I've heard several reports of people at the Congressional hearings on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the new term, to get away from the stigma of woo-woo on the term UFO) are saying things relating these things to non-human organic intelligent beings (in other words, not post-biological machine life a la Eclipse Phase and other cyberpunk/ ( Read more... )

The author of The Intel Trinity makes an excellent argument that Moore's Law is not just descriptive, but also predictive: try to get ahead of that curve and build a "super-chip," and you're going to get burned, bad. As evidence he offers the sad example of Gene Amdahl's Trilogy Systems, which had as its flagship product a super-chip so powerful it ( Read more... )

In the Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, Robert J Sawyer gives us a vision of a world in which the Neanderthals became the dominant human race, and our kind of humans went extinct (and are assumed to have been much less intelligent). Such is his masterful storytelling that he's able to make us believe in a world in which Neanderthals developed a ( Read more... )

Most of us are familiar with the great extinction that ended the era of the dinosaurs, leaving the birds as their only remnant and opening the field for the Age of Mammals. Less known is the even more extensive extinction that made the era of the dinosaurs possible ( Read more... )

Most people don't set out to be hypocrites -- yet time and again we discover that we've fallen into it without even realizing, and often are insisting that what we are doing is Different, and therefore doesn't constitute hypocrisy at all ( Read more... )

This week's Odd Prompts writing challenge at More Odds than Ends was from nother Mike: In a cut glass vase on the table sat a bouquet of flowers, each with its own meaning.This is one of those things that can be so hard because it's so wide open that it's hard to narrow down the approach. Since I'm mostly working in the Grissom timeline right now, ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

There's a new vignette challenge over at Sarah Hoyt's blog. My effort is from the Grissom timeline, as the astronauts of the NASA moonbase discuss problems at the latest Soviet moonbase while the Lanakhidzist Revolution rages down on Earth.

marycatelli is still posting from her Dreamwidth account because of the crossposting problem, so her vignette challenge ( Read more... )

( Read more... )