The X Prize:
For pure space age weirdness, it’s hard to beat Burt Rutan’s White Knight and SpaceShipOne.
The new spaceship looks like a pair of giant insects mating. Strange insects at that.
This is not your grandfather’s rocket ship.
Friends
Nora thinks she’s figured out how to get my blog’s feed to show up on her friends page. Let’s see if this works.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
I’ve always loved what seems to me to be the fundamental coolness of science – the idea of seeing things no one’s ever seen before. That’s what hooked me on this:
Training their telescopes on it repeatedly over the years, they saw an expanding shell of matter thrown off by the blast. Astronomers have seen such a shell before, but when they pointed a cluster of radio telescopes at NGC891 in November 2002 and again last June, they saw something new.
At the center of the expanding shell of gas was another tiny new dot. Something small but bright had formed at the very center of the void left by the expanding blast.
Dr. Rupen was good enough to play along. “That’s why we do astronomy,” he said.
blogroll
I’ve been moaning for a while about the relative paucity of interesting local blogging. Albuquerque’s got a pretty active life of the mind, but I’ve not found very much being written in the blogorealm. So I’ve been happy lately with my encounters with Quirky Burque. Added to my blogroll.
The Smell of Smoke
Ya know how in the wee hours, half awake, you get all loony?
That’s how I felt this morning Lissa woke me up at 3:30: “Do you smell the smoke?”
When I drove home from work last night, before sunset, you could see the pall of smoke blowing up from the South Valley, from a fire in the woods along the river.
It’s many miles from our house – probably ten or more – but it’s still disconcerting in that half-waking pre-dawn to smell the smoke.
Also Zaire
My socially conscious daughter points out in the comments to my previous post that she and her friends are not Eurocentric. They also circulated a petition demanding that the United States, “as one of the leading industrialized nations of the world,” remove the bureaucratic barriers that are preventing refugees from Zaire’s civil war from finding asylum here.
A Pig Like That
At a dinner part once (a Washington, D.C., dinner party, really) a guy told me a joke that Ronald Reagan had told him. It’s my two degrees of separation from the Great Communicator:
A farmer is giving a guy from the city a tour of his farm when they see the famer’s three-legged pig.
“Why does that pig only have three legs?” the man asks.
“That there is an amazing pig,” the farmer replies. “Last year, I was plowing out on the south field when my wheel caught in a ditch and the tractor flipped over on me. The pig saw I was in trouble and ran to the house, oinking at the door until my wife saw what was wrong and went for help.”
“That’s amazing,” the city man replies. “But I still don’t understand why he only has three legs.”
Says the farmer, “You don’t eat a pig like that all at once.”
Latvia and Estonia
My socially conscious daughter and her friends yesterday evening collected 34 signatures on a petition abhorring the terrible violence now besetting the border regions between Latvia and Estonia.
Their petition demanded UN peacekeeping forces and “immediate foodstuffs and monetary support to the suffering civilian populations.” The majority of people they approached signed, though some disagreed with the petition. One person asked them if they supported the war in Iraq. When they said “no,” she responded that she did, and would not sign. Another said, by way of explaining his refusal, “I’m an American! I’m a Republican!”
Getting One’s Name in the Paper
Today we learn about the strange hobby of one Greg Packer, a New York man who has “been quoted or photographed at least 16 times on separate occasions by the Associated Press, 14 times by Newsday, 13 times by the New York Daily News, and 12 times by the New York Post.” This is not Norman Ornstein or something, someone widely quoted because they have weighty comments on the important issues of the day. This is some guy who specializes in getting himself in those “man on the street” schticks that reporters have to do to liven up otherwise dull copy with generic human reaction.
You know, I always come up with an answer for everything, number one. And, and I always give everybody, you know, the respect and the time that they need. I make it very easy for them. I make it accessible….
Bulletin Board
I failed last night in my efforts to set up phpBB on Inkstain (Nora and her friends want a bulletin board) because of a PHP version mismatch. The suggestion on the PHP site – upgrade your PHP – is not an option. So I’m looking for a good GPLish alternative. Any suggestions (keeping in mind the jfleck motto – “I do not want to be a hacker.”)? The main thing the kids seem to need is threaded discussion.