I'm at Loncon3, using the free wifi to update. The weather continues rainy and cool, which means it's good to be inside. I've ran into a number of Chicago and KC fans I know, and several authors ( Read more... )

I'm back in Chicago, but not back at work (that's Monday's curse). While doing something close to nothing on the Internet, I stumbled upon "the forbidden island," AKA North Sentinel Island. This 28-square mile island in the Andaman Island chain in the Indian Ocean is inhabited by the most unknown people on Earth. I mean that quite literally, in ( Read more... )

So, Jim wright's post on why he didn't say anything about the last Space Shuttle flight got me thinking about space and railroads. Yeah, bear with me for a bit.

As I've noted before, the US Government created the Union Pacific Railroad and gave it tons of money specifically to build a transcontinental railroad. Without Government money, the ( Read more... )

Because it's Friday, have some link salad:

1) Here's an interesting article about passenger rail - the case for not-so-high-speed rail. The author's points are that, although Europe has some very fast trains, much of the rail passenger traffic flows on quick but not super-fast trains. The same economic factors that make European trains viable ( Read more... )

The first permanent building in Las Vegas, Nevada was built in 1905. In 1930, the 5,100 people there made it the very definition of a "jerkwater" town - a place the locomotives stopped to refill on water. In 1960, well into the casino era, the population was 64,000. As of the 2010 census, Clark County (Las Vegas and suburbs) has a population of ( Read more... )

Via Tobias Buckell, here's an interesting thought about our non-return to the Moon:

In 1956, a US Navy expedition led by Admiral George J. Dufek flew to and landed on the South Pole. They were the first group to stand on the Pole since Robert Falcon Scott's party in 1912. That's a gap of 44 years. (Admiral Dufek's group was also only the second ( Read more... )

I'm not at work tomorrow (driving downstate) so this will probably be the last post before Christmas. For those of you that celebrate, Merry Christmas! (For all others, please enjoy your weekend.)

On to the topic of the day. Via Tobias Buckell, a man on fire, I read an interesting article about using the Biosphere 2 to study global warming. ( Read more... )

While writing yesterday's post about Amelia Earhart, I ended up doing a bit of research on Pacific islands. Being a space geek, this led me to think about space - specifically asteroid colonization. Basically, the economics of asteroid colonies could be similar to Pacific islands ( Read more... )

So, a private company, SpaceX, has successfully placed a capsule in orbit and retrieved it. SpaceX becomes only the seventh organization, and the first non-governmental organization, to acomplish this feat. Said launch was a test flight of SpaceX's Dragon capsule, which has an unmanned cargo version and a manned transport version ( Read more... )

So, I said I was going to talk about Mary Roach's book Packing for Mars
( Read more... )