more robotic probes for sure. Mars, Titan, Europa, Venus -- there are a lot of fascinating places in the solar system which we'd get a lot of scientific value and public interest from exploring.
moon base, maybe someday. people on Mars, maybe someday. for the near term, though, robotic probes can provide the "romance" while also giving us valuable science on the bodies to which we send them.
but it wasn't a ticket to an amusement park with roller coasters - it was a ticket to a gentle cruise, which turned into a roller coaster without seeming provocation after the victim was already aboard.
it obviously took a long time to set up this particular article, with questions and movies and all that. it would have been nice had the final sentence of the short article blurb said something like, "What a coincidence it is that this article's timing comes so recently on the heels of the death of Gary Gygax" with a link to yesterday's article.
Red Mars / Green Mars / Blue Mars
on
Caves on Mars?
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· Score: 1
In Kim Stanley Robinson's brilliant Mars trilogy, a key settlement is inside a lava tube cavern complex.
The planet was being terraformed, but the intelligent crystal beings that lived in the thin layer of water under the sand re-programmed the laser drill and killed at least one of them.
My favorite quote from that episode:
"Ugly bags of mostly water"
That's how the "micro-brain" referred to the humans. At my job not long after that episode aired, I was in the break room with a cow-orker and opened up the drawer to find the instant coffee packs. I held one up and said, "Look, Al! Ugly bags of mostly coffee!"
I was briefly thrilled the other day about the possibility of counting neutron stars as individual atoms of stable super-heavy elements. I asked my brother, a nuclear physicist, if this was reasonable. he said no, because the neutrons in a neutron star are held together by gravity.
Right -- "...slightly less than the total area of Earth's dry land." That means they're not counting the other 70% of the Earth's surface covered by oceans.
""If someone tells me they don't vote, I'll thank them for their time and get off the phone."" "But I thought you said you only called registered voters. Give me a break."
There are TONS of people who are registered voters who do not vote. That's how we have statistics such as "24% voter turn-out."
having wrangled beta testers, I know that I totally spoiled the engineers at my last/psuedo-current gig by writing coherent and complete bug reports... sigh.
the stillness and solitude were the characteristics which really made MYST work for me.
I played Riven, and it was quite good too, despite the fact that there were many more 'people' in it than MYST. I ate it up, I worked on nothing but the game for four days. it haunted my dreams and my artwork for months afterwards. I drew maps of Riven (see the bottom of the page) and they were an instant hit, driving my website over quota for weeks. the maps were published in a couple different gaming magazines in Europe.
I tried Exile, but the "full motion" bothered me. so, I never got very far. I'm sure it was a great game, but I missed the 'stillness'.
based on what I've read in the parent post, Uru will never interest me.
I have Starry Night, a night sky simulator, and I was amazed at what things looked like when I set my location to the north pole and sped up time by 300x. There were dozens of satellites zooming overhead constantly!
nice try, but patent number 5,764,932 is "Method and apparatus for implementing a dual processing protocol between processors" filed Dec 23 1996 and assigned to Intel.
I was in line at a bookstore the other day when I heard a ringing that sounded like a phone from the early 70's, a rich, full bell. the guy behind me in line whipped out his phone and I said, "whoa, nice ringtone."
for a while I was a member of a car club, and we'd rent Sears Point for a weekend, put on our helmets and do a little hard driving. I had the pleasure of having a brilliant driving instructor ride with me for one session. with him in the car talking to me about the track and about the other cars on the track and about my driving, I was able to drive better and better with each lap.
I've also been driving around San Francisco with a friend and she knows the city way better than I do, so she was able to say things like 'watch for that red light' in the middle of our otherwise non-driving-related conversation.
I don't even own a cellphone and if I did, I sure as heck wouldn't even _try_ to use it when driving.
while I've had fun driving and for the most part consider myself to be a reasonbly good driver when I put my mind to it, I cannot wait for the day when we have self-driving cars... if there's one thing that driving on the track has taught me it's that people driving on the streets are idiots. they don't pay attention and they haven't had nearly enough training.
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more robotic probes for sure. Mars, Titan, Europa, Venus -- there are a lot of fascinating places in the solar system which we'd get a lot of scientific value and public interest from exploring.
moon base, maybe someday. people on Mars, maybe someday. for the near term, though, robotic probes can provide the "romance" while also giving us valuable science on the bodies to which we send them.
I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I typed "etymology props" into Google and came away with "shorthand for 'proper respect'."
but it wasn't a ticket to an amusement park with roller coasters - it was a ticket to a gentle cruise, which turned into a roller coaster without seeming provocation after the victim was already aboard.
it obviously took a long time to set up this particular article, with questions and movies and all that. it would have been nice had the final sentence of the short article blurb said something like, "What a coincidence it is that this article's timing comes so recently on the heels of the death of Gary Gygax" with a link to yesterday's article.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's brilliant Mars trilogy, a key settlement is inside a lava tube cavern complex.
Star Trek: The Next Generation -- _Home Soil_
The planet was being terraformed, but the intelligent crystal beings that lived in the thin layer of water under the sand re-programmed the laser drill and killed at least one of them.
My favorite quote from that episode:
"Ugly bags of mostly water"
That's how the "micro-brain" referred to the humans. At my job not long after that episode aired, I was in the break room with a cow-orker and opened up the drawer to find the instant coffee packs. I held one up and said, "Look, Al! Ugly bags of mostly coffee!"
I was briefly thrilled the other day about the possibility of counting neutron stars as individual atoms of stable super-heavy elements. I asked my brother, a nuclear physicist, if this was reasonable. he said no, because the neutrons in a neutron star are held together by gravity.
Right -- "...slightly less than the total area of Earth's dry land." That means they're not counting the other 70% of the Earth's surface covered by oceans.
""If someone tells me they don't vote, I'll thank them for their time and get off the phone.""
"But I thought you said you only called registered voters. Give me a break."
There are TONS of people who are registered voters who do not vote. That's how we have statistics such as "24% voter turn-out."
having wrangled beta testers, I know that I totally spoiled the engineers at my last/psuedo-current gig by writing coherent and complete bug reports... sigh.
;)
(hi, Ben!
I played Riven, and it was quite good too, despite the fact that there were many more 'people' in it than MYST. I ate it up, I worked on nothing but the game for four days. it haunted my dreams and my artwork for months afterwards. I drew maps of Riven (see the bottom of the page) and they were an instant hit, driving my website over quota for weeks. the maps were published in a couple different gaming magazines in Europe.
I tried Exile, but the "full motion" bothered me. so, I never got very far. I'm sure it was a great game, but I missed the 'stillness'.
based on what I've read in the parent post, Uru will never interest me.
I have Starry Night, a night sky simulator, and I was amazed at what things looked like when I set my location to the north pole and sped up time by 300x. There were dozens of satellites zooming overhead constantly!
I thought it was, "Murdered by pirates is good."
http://www.venganza.org/
RAmen to that -- at least for general transportation / public roads.
but I'd still like to take the wheel 'round a race course here and there on any Sunday or two.
-calyxa
-calyxa
I gave up on moderating, so here's a post to say, "ha! that's teh funnay!" ;)
nice try, but patent number 5,764,932 is "Method and apparatus for implementing a dual processing protocol between processors" filed Dec 23 1996 and assigned to Intel.
I was in line at a bookstore the other day when I heard a ringing that sounded like a phone from the early 70's, a rich, full bell. the guy behind me in line whipped out his phone and I said, "whoa, nice ringtone."
thanks - I was just reading at -1 to see if anyone had posted this yet ;)
-calyxa
Jef! thanks, dude ;)
-calyxa
for a while I was a member of a car club, and we'd rent Sears Point for a weekend, put on our helmets and do a little hard driving. I had the pleasure of having a brilliant driving instructor ride with me for one session. with him in the car talking to me about the track and about the other cars on the track and about my driving, I was able to drive better and better with each lap.
I've also been driving around San Francisco with a friend and she knows the city way better than I do, so she was able to say things like 'watch for that red light' in the middle of our otherwise non-driving-related conversation.
I don't even own a cellphone and if I did, I sure as heck wouldn't even _try_ to use it when driving.
while I've had fun driving and for the most part consider myself to be a reasonbly good driver when I put my mind to it, I cannot wait for the day when we have self-driving cars... if there's one thing that driving on the track has taught me it's that people driving on the streets are idiots. they don't pay attention and they haven't had nearly enough training.
dunno about photos of the landers taken from Earth-based telescopes, but the experiments with the laser targets ought to count for something...
and a big laser... and a real genius....