Get this book. Read it. You'll be glad you did.
on
Uncle Tungsten
·
· Score: 1
Nothing much to add here excepting my voice to the choir. Sacks has the Magic Touch. Everything he writes seems to be top notch. Glad to see this favorible review in/.
How many air accidents can you name... on large commercial jets at lest... where crashes happned because "something happened to the pilots"?
Not meaning to be impertinent, but the events of 9-11 fall squarely under your heading. And as far as it goes, I wouldn't be the least upset if they decided that everything down to and including crop dusters was going to be mandated to have automatic control systems, just in case.
(I also seem to remember my grandfather telling me about a B-17 that was converted to remote control for the testing of some of the first air to air missiles.
You remember well, and your grandpa wasn't making it up.
I remember watching B-17 drones FLY here at Patrick Air Force Base (I'm still living less than a quarter mile away from the place.) when we were living on base (pretty much directly under the glide path, not very far at all from the north end of the runway) back in the 50's.
They were painted in outlandishly LOUD yellow and black or silver and black striped paint jobs.
I guess they didn't want anybody not knowing something that big was flying around without somebody sitting inside of it.
Unfortunately, they did their missle testing out beyond the horizon over the ocean. We never got to see any of the really cool stuff (although the spectacular failures of innumerable IRBM's and ICBM's out at the Cape was plenty cool enough).
I have worked with many a user that has had problems with the concept of folders (directories). Perhaps those users can grasp this concept easier.
Indeed, labyrinthine structures for locating information are not a Good Thing.
Is this the answer?
Too soon to tell, but I hope it is.
Finding things a few years later in a computer has always seemed harder for me than doing a similar task with physical pieces of paper.
With a computer you have no muscle memory or any of the other contextual clues that aid in piecing something (like a half forgotten location) together. Tappity tappity tap, and !bling it's gone.
But even if this IS "the solution" I greatly fear that the QWERTY effect will doom it to obscurity.
That said, in my machine, I can do whatever I like.
I intend to check this thing out and see for myself.
As with any other tool, for any other job, it cannot do anything by itself.
The most well-stocked mechanic's shop isn't going to be doing much by way of repairing automobiles unless there's a couple of SKILLED MECHANICS on hand to use the tools.
With the arrival of each new "Big Thing" (those of us with enough depth of memory and experience will easily come up with a substantial list), dimwits in positions of authority attempt to latch on to the tool as if it was going to solve problems and fix things all by itself.
Sigh.
My guess is that this is some sort of fundamental lapse in human nature and will never change.
Although, to look on the bright side, it certainly provides a competitive edge to those who figure out at an early age that they must inevitably figure things out for themselves if they wish to get excellent results, and then use those excellent results to take command of whatever situation it is that they are most interested in.
...how many people will try to hack into the wireless link that controls it.
As the 'A' team hacks away at Central Control, the 'B' team will be out on the park grounds working the beast with TASERS(!), attempting to short circuit the damnable thing into some kind of murderous dance.
You are saying it would be ok for Ford and GM to put monitors on all of our cars so that if we exceed the speed limit they can come take the car back?
Soon, very soon, you're going to be seeing this VERY THING on cars and Bob knows what else, and when you've violated your Ford EULA, your warranty is kaput. For starters.
The folks in Redrum WA have opened up an Evil Can of Worms with all this EULA crap and before it ever gets better, it's going to get a LOT worse.
Bob forbid that this should ever come to pass.
on
The End of Solotrek
·
· Score: 4, Funny
These things wouldn't even work if they were all controlled by some kind of ubercomputer to keep them in line, nevermind if they were just go-n-fly's completely at the whim of the operator.
A list, if you will, of things I never wan't to see coming my way, especially from above, and a few other things I don't want to see, either.
1. Idiot hot rodders whamming around over your head and between the trees.
2. Slashdotters who had cracked the codes on the ubercomputer, going seriously against the grain.
3. Low maintainence goobers who won't keep their rig in proper flying order.
4. Bank robbers (or worse), fleeing the scene of the crime, guns blazing.
5. People who drop things.
6. Horny losers, staring at some girl's butt, from just below treetop level.
7. Idiots on the ground with guns pointed at the sky and a psychotic grin on their face.
8. The bad eyesight brigade, especially when near overhead powerlines.
9. People who forget to check the gas gauge before driving down to the store.
10. Folks altered chemically, including the chemical alcohol.
11. Heart attack victims.
12. People who all of a sudden regurgitate dinner, or perhaps didn't wear their depends.
13. Suicidal types (including the overly religious ones).
Not trolling, not watering the dry grass with gasoline, but I just can't help but wonder what the/. response would be if this joker had done the exact same thing while working under contract for MS?
Create a virus that sends erroneous user data, generated randomly, to the largest anti-privacy culprits.
Even as the scriptos continue to shallowly work on figuring out new ways for you to enjoy "a very humor game," certain other parties are hard at work on close analogs of your above. You've very nearly hit it square.
Knowing what CD tracks you listen to and when, what groceries you buy and when, and videos you rent and when, who you call and when, where you go and when, and the list goes on and on. The sum of these things is just a bit too much information for corporate america to be keeping detailed track of.
Every drop of rain can truthfully say, "I did not cause the flood."
Room at the top.
on
Web Zeitgeist
·
· Score: 5, Funny
How about the biggest declines? Boy bands. nSync down from 36 to 163, and Back Street Boys tumble to 250 from 58.
While this might look like good news, it's not. It only means that cultural space is being made for even stupider things.
I was just wondering(not stating) if there was a possibility that there were more lately because of some larger scale pattern that has them peaking now.
Nope.
No pattern change.
No increase in meteors.
Substantial increase in media attention (at least until the next fad hits).
And at long last, with honest capitalism at the wheel, space tourism will become as normal, safe, available, and comparatively inexpensive as a luxury sea cruise.
Below, a review I wrote back in '96 of a pretty good book on the subject.
It was originally written for a rigorously nontechnical audience and I decided, what the hell, paste it in here with no modifications for the dashslot crew.
Apologies if you think it overly long or drifts off topic, or just sucks in general.
Should nanotech really catch fire and turn out to be somehow actually workable, the LONG term implications are weird, to say the least.
Potentially very creepy stuff.
BOOK REVIEW: Nano, Ed Regis, Little Brown & Co., 1995
There's a monster living under the bed. And I've got the proof. It's called Nano, the emerging science of nanotechnology: remaking the world - molecule by molecule. And it concerns itself with exactly that.
It's a scary motherfucker.
Scary as hell, in fact.
Ed regis takes us on a guided tour of hell. And it's one of those extra creepy hells that you'd find in an old Twilight Zone episode. One where all the damned had fervently hoped, wished, and dreamed for exactly what they wound up with.
My guess is that this fucker is coming and there's not a thing in the world any of us can do to stop it.
Our tour of the coming nightmare is told somewhat as a biographical sketch of a certain K. Eric Drexler. It follows him around from the time when he first really glommed on to the realization that this incredibly outre shit just might work (read: there's really nothing to stop it) down to the near present, wherein he shouts of riches and evils beyond the ken of imagination to a world filled with people who are mostly deaf. Like one of those unpleasant recurring dreams you have. Like hell.
Along the way, ER takes time to explain the scenery in a way that allows us to more completely understand the chilling implications of it all.
I'm sure that you are a lot like me. That is, you probably know more about the lyrics to Dead Kennedy's music than you know about goofy shit like molecular bonding, enzymatic reactions, and other wooly boogers of similar esoteric boredom inducement. ER, bless his heart, explains crap like this only when it's really necessary and in a style that could mislead you into thinking shit like this might actually be fun to muck around with.
No small achievement, that.
After finishing this pecker, I feel like I actually know what's going on.
I'd rather not.
It's brutal.
Allow me to digress for a bit, if you please. Years ago, when it finally dawned on me as to the full ramifications of genetic engineering, I was seized by a vision most bizarre that I occasionally would twit my son with. The "Steak Tree". Which is exactly what it is. A tree upon which would grow delicious sirloins, rib eyes, or whatever you wanted. With real hemoglobin, cholesterol, muscle tissue, the works. Anything producible by our good friend, DNA. Anything. And all that that implies.
Turns out that I was a piker.
By quite a bit, too.
Drexler envisions a "meat machine".
I quote: "The machine might be about the size and shape of a microwave oven, for example, and it would work the way a microwave oven did, too, more or less. You'd open the door, shovel in a quantity of grass clippings or tree leaves or old bicycle tires or whatever, and then you'd close the door, fiddle with the controls, and sit back to await results. Two hours later, out rolled a wad of fresh beef."
Unlike my "tree", Drexler's "machine" isn't limited to things that ultimately come from DNA. Artifacts produced via nanotechnology are limited only to what the laws of physics impose on them. If you've ever peeked at a physics text or maybe read The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, you'll immediately realize that the restrictions on Drexler's "meat machine" are hideously loose and permissive.
It's all allowed. Manufactured items, diamonds for free, living/nonliving hybrids, duplicates of yourself complete with the fucking thoughts preprogrammed into you head, horrible new virus things that aren't really viruses but are instead maybe little mechanical sherman tank doodads no bigger than a pneumococci that are programmed to maybe place nasties like thallium atoms in very specific locales, reproducible people that not only can't be killed (they'll just make more of themselves) but that could conceivably self replicate and take over the whole fucking world. Half man half cyclotron crosses....all of it. And a whole lot more.
Disposable humans.
Disposable SELVES for fucking sakes.
All dwelling in a world where the business of producing goods and services via the efforts of people or "traditional" manufacturing processes has been abolished.
Throw some crap into the box, stand back a while, and pull out...whatever the hell you can imagine.
Including more boxes. It's endless.
Where do humans fit in a world like that?
Yes yes, I know I know, you've about by now decided that I've lost my fucking mind. Can't really blame you. In truth, I hope I have lost my mind. Along with K. Eric Drexler, Ed Regis, and an ever growing list of others.
Yes indeed. Here's to hoping we've all lost our minds.
Your point is a good one, as far as it goes. However, anybody who goes all the way back to FidoNet days will understand that the workarounds for Redrum's PallBearerAdium will be implemented, and implemented in some outstandingly clever and independant ways.
FidoNet was impressively clunky and had no graphics capability to speak of at all. That said, I had loads of fun exchanging information, files, and general howdedoo with folks on the other side of the globe.
The cat's well and truly out of the bag. Redrum's wishes notwithstanding.
I was at work, at Cocoa Beach Surf Company. Apparently I work well enough, 'cause my boss kindly allowed me to go up to the top of our five story parking garage to watch the shot this evening.
On top of the garage I met my son, and an old friend who is now senior photographer for the local paper hereabouts, Florida Today. My son had the scanner and his telescope (we're both pretty seriously into this). Nice view from our perch, and we could plainly see the launch vehicle, sitting there on the pad out on the Cape, lit up by the searchlights. After sundown, but not dark by any means. The guy on the Photo Ops channel counted it down and when they fired it up, it put out an impressive blaze of orange flame, and began lumbering upward. Kinda slow getting off the ground and as my son (staring through the telescope) called "tower clear!" I made a comment about how it was nearly as slow as an Atlas getting going.
Soon enough, it got to moving right along, arcing seaward over the lights of Cocoa Beach with a brilliant yellow-orange flame topping a dense column of smoke from the two strap on solid rocket motors.
Nice rumble when the sound finally arrived.
It moved into and above the deck of thin cirrus that covered the whole sky, and remained plainly visible and audible.
I wondered aloud to my son as to how it was going to look when the solids went out and were jettisoned. (The main engine is LOX/LH2 and has no sensible flame that you can see. It's see-through clear, kinda like an alcohol flame or something like that)
Soon enough, the two solids separated and could be seen winking on and off, tumbling over and over in free fall, now in direct sunlight way the hell and gone up there. The Delta IV continued on its merry way, now arcing (apparently) downward, as it sped towards an aim point vastly beyond our local horizon. Surprisingly, despite the LOX/LH2 flame, it remained QUITE bright. Moreso even than the Shuttle, which has an identical deal (LOX/LH2 clear flame) going on after SRB sep. Not sure what the deal is with that. With the Shuttle, the brilliant light is coming from the inside of the three SSME's. The nozzle lining is white hot and puts off a pretty bright light. I guess that's what was going on with the Delta, also, but since the Shuttle has three motors and the Delta has one, I just wasn't expecting that much bright light following SRM sep. Anyhoo, it stayed visible for quite a while, before fading into the cirrus murk out over the ocean.
Shortly after everybody else departed the parking garage roof (I'd put a couple of tourists on to the fact that there was going to be a little show today and they were fully stoked at what they saw) my son and I noticed a weird cloud at extreme altitude, with direct sunlight shining on it. We had earlier discussed whether or not this one would "blow a balloon" and had decided that it wouldn't.
["Balloons" form when rockets exit the sensible atmosphere and the exhaust gasses from the engine nozzles begin spreading out without any resistance from the surrounding atmosphere, which isn't there anymore. On evening shots, with the sun the exact perfect distance BELOW the local horizon and the sky the exact perfect shade of dark, the exhaust gas will rapidly expand, and form a weirdly beautiful {fucking GORGEOUS, to be more precise) spectacle in the darkling sky, enveloping the pinpoint brilliance of the rocket itself, before fading away a few minutes later]
This bird did NOT blow a "balloon" (we've NEVER seen LOX/LH2 do it and have more or less decided it just doesn't happen), but it DID leave that weirdie bluish-white glowing cloud. Not sure what the deal was. We'll probably both be very old and very gray before an identical set of circumstances repeats.
Whatever.
Anyway, it was a real pretty shot, and we're glad the vehicle performed nominally and put the payload where it's supposed to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing much to add here excepting my voice to the choir. Sacks has the Magic Touch. Everything he writes seems to be top notch. Glad to see this favorible review in /.
How many air accidents can you name... on large commercial jets at lest... where crashes happned because "something happened to the pilots"?
Not meaning to be impertinent, but the events of 9-11 fall squarely under your heading. And as far as it goes, I wouldn't be the least upset if they decided that everything down to and including crop dusters was going to be mandated to have automatic control systems, just in case.
(I also seem to remember my grandfather telling me about a B-17 that was converted to remote control for the testing of some of the first air to air missiles.
You remember well, and your grandpa wasn't making it up.
I remember watching B-17 drones FLY here at Patrick Air Force Base (I'm still living less than a quarter mile away from the place.) when we were living on base (pretty much directly under the glide path, not very far at all from the north end of the runway) back in the 50's.
They were painted in outlandishly LOUD yellow and black or silver and black striped paint jobs.
I guess they didn't want anybody not knowing something that big was flying around without somebody sitting inside of it.
Unfortunately, they did their missle testing out beyond the horizon over the ocean. We never got to see any of the really cool stuff (although the spectacular failures of innumerable IRBM's and ICBM's out at the Cape was plenty cool enough).
I miss those old planes. They were neat.
I have worked with many a user that has had problems with the concept of folders (directories). Perhaps those users can grasp this concept easier.
Indeed, labyrinthine structures for locating information are not a Good Thing.
Is this the answer?
Too soon to tell, but I hope it is.
Finding things a few years later in a computer has always seemed harder for me than doing a similar task with physical pieces of paper.
With a computer you have no muscle memory or any of the other contextual clues that aid in piecing something (like a half forgotten location) together. Tappity tappity tap, and !bling it's gone.
But even if this IS "the solution" I greatly fear that the QWERTY effect will doom it to obscurity.
That said, in my machine, I can do whatever I like.
I intend to check this thing out and see for myself.
A computer is a tool. Period.
As with any other tool, for any other job, it cannot do anything by itself.
The most well-stocked mechanic's shop isn't going to be doing much by way of repairing automobiles unless there's a couple of SKILLED MECHANICS on hand to use the tools.
With the arrival of each new "Big Thing" (those of us with enough depth of memory and experience will easily come up with a substantial list), dimwits in positions of authority attempt to latch on to the tool as if it was going to solve problems and fix things all by itself.
Sigh.
My guess is that this is some sort of fundamental lapse in human nature and will never change.
Although, to look on the bright side, it certainly provides a competitive edge to those who figure out at an early age that they must inevitably figure things out for themselves if they wish to get excellent results, and then use those excellent results to take command of whatever situation it is that they are most interested in.
Astounding photographs.
Kindest thanks for drawing my attention to them by providing the link.
File this one under: Fixes for things that already work.
Didn't we just do this with somebody elses rig? Didn't we already decide we didn't want these people falling out of the sky all over us?
Did I miss something somewhere along the (very short) line?
Neat looking rig though.
...how many people will try to hack into the wireless link that controls it.
As the 'A' team hacks away at Central Control, the 'B' team will be out on the park grounds working the beast with TASERS(!), attempting to short circuit the damnable thing into some kind of murderous dance.
Hula Hoops for the new millennium.
Drifting OT here, apologies in advance.
You are saying it would be ok for Ford and GM to put monitors on all of our cars so that if we exceed the speed limit they can come take the car back?
Soon, very soon, you're going to be seeing this VERY THING on cars and Bob knows what else, and when you've violated your Ford EULA, your warranty is kaput. For starters.
The folks in Redrum WA have opened up an Evil Can of Worms with all this EULA crap and before it ever gets better, it's going to get a LOT worse.
These things wouldn't even work if they were all controlled by some kind of ubercomputer to keep them in line, nevermind if they were just go-n-fly's completely at the whim of the operator.
A list, if you will, of things I never wan't to see coming my way, especially from above, and a few other things I don't want to see, either.
1. Idiot hot rodders whamming around over your head and between the trees.
2. Slashdotters who had cracked the codes on the ubercomputer, going seriously against the grain.
3. Low maintainence goobers who won't keep their rig in proper flying order.
4. Bank robbers (or worse), fleeing the scene of the crime, guns blazing.
5. People who drop things.
6. Horny losers, staring at some girl's butt, from just below treetop level.
7. Idiots on the ground with guns pointed at the sky and a psychotic grin on their face.
8. The bad eyesight brigade, especially when near overhead powerlines.
9. People who forget to check the gas gauge before driving down to the store.
10. Folks altered chemically, including the chemical alcohol.
11. Heart attack victims.
12. People who all of a sudden regurgitate dinner, or perhaps didn't wear their depends.
13. Suicidal types (including the overly religious ones).
Thirteen's enough, yes?
Not trolling, not watering the dry grass with gasoline, but I just can't help but wonder what the /. response would be if this joker had done the exact same thing while working under contract for MS?
Creative Commons provides an easy way for creators to give away some of their rights under copyright law without wading through hundreds of pages...
This stuff doesn't strike me as being particularly lawyerproof.
Here's hoping I'm wrong.
Create a virus that sends erroneous user data, generated randomly, to the largest anti-privacy culprits.
Even as the scriptos continue to shallowly work on figuring out new ways for you to enjoy "a very humor game," certain other parties are hard at work on close analogs of your above. You've very nearly hit it square.
Stay tuned.
Knowing what CD tracks you listen to and when, what groceries you buy and when, and videos you rent and when, who you call and when, where you go and when, and the list goes on and on. The sum of these things is just a bit too much information for corporate america to be keeping detailed track of.
Every drop of rain can truthfully say, "I did not cause the flood."
How about the biggest declines? Boy bands. nSync down from 36 to 163, and Back Street Boys tumble to 250 from 58.
While this might look like good news, it's not. It only means that cultural space is being made for even stupider things.
I was just wondering(not stating) if there was a possibility that there were more lately because of some larger scale pattern that has them peaking now.
Nope.
No pattern change.
No increase in meteors.
Substantial increase in media attention (at least until the next fad hits).
Trust not, those with journalism degrees.
And at long last, with honest capitalism at the wheel, space tourism will become as normal, safe, available, and comparatively inexpensive as a luxury sea cruise.
Like the Titanic?!?
It fits inside the ice maker (I removed the water hookups) in my freezer compartment.
Who cares about heat?
Adds a whole new angle of enjoyment to those late night refrigerator raids.
Below, a review I wrote back in '96 of a pretty good book on the subject.
It was originally written for a rigorously nontechnical audience and I decided, what the hell, paste it in here with no modifications for the dashslot crew.
Apologies if you think it overly long or drifts off topic, or just sucks in general.
Should nanotech really catch fire and turn out to be somehow actually workable, the LONG term implications are weird, to say the least.
Potentially very creepy stuff.
BOOK REVIEW: Nano, Ed Regis, Little Brown & Co., 1995
There's a monster living under the bed. And I've got the proof. It's called Nano, the emerging science of nanotechnology: remaking the world - molecule by molecule. And it concerns itself with exactly that.
It's a scary motherfucker.
Scary as hell, in fact.
Ed regis takes us on a guided tour of hell. And it's one of those extra creepy hells that you'd find in an old Twilight Zone episode. One where all the damned had fervently hoped, wished, and dreamed for exactly what they wound up with.
My guess is that this fucker is coming and there's not a thing in the world any of us can do to stop it.
Our tour of the coming nightmare is told somewhat as a biographical sketch of a certain K. Eric Drexler. It follows him around from the time when he first really glommed on to the realization that this incredibly outre shit just might work (read: there's really nothing to stop it) down to the near present, wherein he shouts of riches and evils beyond the ken of imagination to a world filled with people who are mostly deaf. Like one of those unpleasant recurring dreams you have. Like hell.
Along the way, ER takes time to explain the scenery in a way that allows us to more completely understand the chilling implications of it all.
I'm sure that you are a lot like me. That is, you probably know more about the lyrics to Dead Kennedy's music than you know about goofy shit like molecular bonding, enzymatic reactions, and other wooly boogers of similar esoteric boredom inducement. ER, bless his heart, explains crap like this only when it's really necessary and in a style that could mislead you into thinking shit like this might actually be fun to muck around with.
No small achievement, that.
After finishing this pecker, I feel like I actually know what's going on.
I'd rather not.
It's brutal.
Allow me to digress for a bit, if you please. Years ago, when it finally dawned on me as to the full ramifications of genetic engineering, I was seized by a vision most bizarre that I occasionally would twit my son with. The "Steak Tree". Which is exactly what it is. A tree upon which would grow delicious sirloins, rib eyes, or whatever you wanted. With real hemoglobin, cholesterol, muscle tissue, the works. Anything producible by our good friend, DNA. Anything. And all that that implies.
Turns out that I was a piker.
By quite a bit, too.
Drexler envisions a "meat machine".
I quote: "The machine might be about the size and shape of a microwave oven, for example, and it would work the way a microwave oven did, too, more or less. You'd open the door, shovel in a quantity of grass clippings or tree leaves or old bicycle tires or whatever, and then you'd close the door, fiddle with the controls, and sit back to await results. Two hours later, out rolled a wad of fresh beef."
Unlike my "tree", Drexler's "machine" isn't limited to things that ultimately come from DNA. Artifacts produced via nanotechnology are limited only to what the laws of physics impose on them. If you've ever peeked at a physics text or maybe read The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, you'll immediately realize that the restrictions on Drexler's "meat machine" are hideously loose and permissive.
It's all allowed. Manufactured items, diamonds for free, living/nonliving hybrids, duplicates of yourself complete with the fucking thoughts preprogrammed into you head, horrible new virus things that aren't really viruses but are instead maybe little mechanical sherman tank doodads no bigger than a pneumococci that are programmed to maybe place nasties like thallium atoms in very specific locales, reproducible people that not only can't be killed (they'll just make more of themselves) but that could conceivably self replicate and take over the whole fucking world. Half man half cyclotron crosses....all of it. And a whole lot more.
Disposable humans.
Disposable SELVES for fucking sakes.
All dwelling in a world where the business of producing goods and services via the efforts of people or "traditional" manufacturing processes has been abolished.
Throw some crap into the box, stand back a while, and pull out...whatever the hell you can imagine.
Including more boxes. It's endless.
Where do humans fit in a world like that?
Yes yes, I know I know, you've about by now decided that I've lost my fucking mind. Can't really blame you. In truth, I hope I have lost my mind. Along with K. Eric Drexler, Ed Regis, and an ever growing list of others.
Yes indeed. Here's to hoping we've all lost our minds.
Your point is a good one, as far as it goes. However, anybody who goes all the way back to FidoNet days will understand that the workarounds for Redrum's PallBearerAdium will be implemented, and implemented in some outstandingly clever and independant ways. FidoNet was impressively clunky and had no graphics capability to speak of at all. That said, I had loads of fun exchanging information, files, and general howdedoo with folks on the other side of the globe. The cat's well and truly out of the bag. Redrum's wishes notwithstanding.
I was at work, at Cocoa Beach Surf Company. Apparently I work well enough, 'cause my boss kindly allowed me to go up to the top of our five story parking garage to watch the shot this evening. On top of the garage I met my son, and an old friend who is now senior photographer for the local paper hereabouts, Florida Today. My son had the scanner and his telescope (we're both pretty seriously into this). Nice view from our perch, and we could plainly see the launch vehicle, sitting there on the pad out on the Cape, lit up by the searchlights. After sundown, but not dark by any means. The guy on the Photo Ops channel counted it down and when they fired it up, it put out an impressive blaze of orange flame, and began lumbering upward. Kinda slow getting off the ground and as my son (staring through the telescope) called "tower clear!" I made a comment about how it was nearly as slow as an Atlas getting going. Soon enough, it got to moving right along, arcing seaward over the lights of Cocoa Beach with a brilliant yellow-orange flame topping a dense column of smoke from the two strap on solid rocket motors. Nice rumble when the sound finally arrived. It moved into and above the deck of thin cirrus that covered the whole sky, and remained plainly visible and audible. I wondered aloud to my son as to how it was going to look when the solids went out and were jettisoned. (The main engine is LOX/LH2 and has no sensible flame that you can see. It's see-through clear, kinda like an alcohol flame or something like that) Soon enough, the two solids separated and could be seen winking on and off, tumbling over and over in free fall, now in direct sunlight way the hell and gone up there. The Delta IV continued on its merry way, now arcing (apparently) downward, as it sped towards an aim point vastly beyond our local horizon. Surprisingly, despite the LOX/LH2 flame, it remained QUITE bright. Moreso even than the Shuttle, which has an identical deal (LOX/LH2 clear flame) going on after SRB sep. Not sure what the deal is with that. With the Shuttle, the brilliant light is coming from the inside of the three SSME's. The nozzle lining is white hot and puts off a pretty bright light. I guess that's what was going on with the Delta, also, but since the Shuttle has three motors and the Delta has one, I just wasn't expecting that much bright light following SRM sep. Anyhoo, it stayed visible for quite a while, before fading into the cirrus murk out over the ocean. Shortly after everybody else departed the parking garage roof (I'd put a couple of tourists on to the fact that there was going to be a little show today and they were fully stoked at what they saw) my son and I noticed a weird cloud at extreme altitude, with direct sunlight shining on it. We had earlier discussed whether or not this one would "blow a balloon" and had decided that it wouldn't. ["Balloons" form when rockets exit the sensible atmosphere and the exhaust gasses from the engine nozzles begin spreading out without any resistance from the surrounding atmosphere, which isn't there anymore. On evening shots, with the sun the exact perfect distance BELOW the local horizon and the sky the exact perfect shade of dark, the exhaust gas will rapidly expand, and form a weirdly beautiful {fucking GORGEOUS, to be more precise) spectacle in the darkling sky, enveloping the pinpoint brilliance of the rocket itself, before fading away a few minutes later] This bird did NOT blow a "balloon" (we've NEVER seen LOX/LH2 do it and have more or less decided it just doesn't happen), but it DID leave that weirdie bluish-white glowing cloud. Not sure what the deal was. We'll probably both be very old and very gray before an identical set of circumstances repeats. Whatever. Anyway, it was a real pretty shot, and we're glad the vehicle performed nominally and put the payload where it's supposed to be.
Well...how many of us are typing our words of wisdom on a QWERTY keyboard? Fucked up? Of course it is. And yet it works and works well. Go figure.