Hang on... The (completely insane and already disproven multiple times) Electric Universe theory has only been talking about these rings since 2004.
These spokes were first spotted in the '80's.
Isn't this a bit like "I have a theory, this theory is that Orange Polkadotted Jet Propelled Chickens from the Pleides are currently touring the universe blowing up stars. The last star they visited was SN1987A, and sure enough observations back me up".
If they predicted it before they hit Saturn, then maybe we'd pay attention. But seeing how they predicted it after it had already been observerd places you fairly in the OPJPC camp.
And their mission plan is "Net Harbour delivers unparalleled, innovative and trusted IT solutions to Australian businesses. We understand that your investment in technology needs to deliver a measurable return. Our mission is to help you identify the technology solutions that will deliver this return."
I might wander past their door on Monday (Suite 516, Level 5 15 Lime Street Sydney 2000) and see what sort of hole-in-the-wall refugee from 1999 this company is.
Here's a mindboggling stupid idea from our Marketing Department that you might be able to use. We make [type of machine]. A new version of our product is both cheaper and faster. A great breakthough, right?
Well marketing wants Engineering to slow the unit down so they have a low cost unit to sell. Then sell them upgrades to full speed at an enormous price. These would be physically identical, just one would have the code messed up on purpose to run slow.
So does this mean [type of machine] = Digital Cameras ?
He was doing what he was told to do, a Demonstration flight for Columbus day, when they discovered that the F-100 was unstable due to a unstable airflow over a newly designed tail fin.
"On Columbus Day of 1954, Welch was performing a demonstration flying the new F-100A. His flight card called for a symmetrical pull-up at 1.55 Mach. The maneuver would generate more than 7 Gs. As he began the maneuver, the airflow over the wing suddenly burbled, completely blanking the newly redesigned and smaller vertical stabilizer. The fighter yawed slightly and then suddenly turned partially sideways to the direction of travel. The nose folded up at the windscreen and crushed Welch in his ejection seat. Miraculously, the seat fired and carried Welch clear of the plane as it disintegrated. Ejecting at supersonic speeds is not only hard on the human body, it's hard on parachutes as well. Welch's chute was nearly shredded by the violent blast of air. With many panels blown out, the rate of descent was much too fast to avoid serious injury, or even death. When rescuers arrived at Welch's side, he was barely alive. He died before he could be transported to a hospital. Ironically, Yeager had complained that the F-100A, with its smaller vertical stabilizer, was dangerously unstable. Welch elected to fly it anyway"
I did a quick Google on the first time humans passed the "sound barrier" in 1947. 50 years later, every school kid knows^W should know Chuck Yeager's name
Please correct the above.
Not to take anything away from Chuck Yeager, who did a terrible dangerous thing, but in 1997 the US Air Force has admitted that George Welch broke the sound barrier twice in the XP-86 (the test version of the Sabre, which was a front line fighter through the 1950's and early 60's).
Although ordered not to enter supersonic trials until Bell's project was complete, he purposly dove his plane on October 1st, 1947, and again 15 minutes before Yeagers flight on October 15th, 1947. He later died testing the YF-100 in 1954.
This is why Yeager's record has changed from "The first man to break the sound barrier" to "The first man to break the sound barrier in level flight", but they still try to avoid mentioning George Welch.
This is also why you shouldn't always trust Google. Check again, but this time for his name and you'll find a lot of articles that mention this. He was also involved in another famous aviation act, as he was one of the few pilots who took off from Pearl Harbour to attack the incoming Japanese air raid, and you'll find that he is also widely discussed as one of the few people who should have been ordered the Congressional Medal of Honor twice. Click Here for information on his actions at Pearl Harbour Click Here for information about him breaking the sound barrier
1) Make a character. Max it out. 2) Camp a rare drop item from a rare spawn that everyone else wants. 3) It tells you to delevel, and max out another character of class $random 4) Camp a rare drop item from a rare spawn that everyone else wants. 5) It tells you to delevel, and max out another character of class $random2 6) Camp a rare drop item from a rare spawn that everyone else wants. 7) It tells you to delevel, and max out another character of class $random3 8) Camp a rare drop item from a rare spawn that everyone else wants. 9) It doesn't tell you what to do. You just max out 2 other classes and hope that's them 10) (Possible) Visit every location. 11) Max out a serious number of tradeskills 12) Camp some rarespawn items for the lightsabre 13) Make the first step of the lightsabre to make the Training Sabre. 14) Camp some more items for the real lightsabre. 15) Do the final combine, and it's bugged, and doesn't work.
Giselle Loren as Buffy Summers, but IMDB still lists Alyson Hannigan as doing her character's voice. I wonder how hard they'll try to hide it this time - I recall in the first game they listed Giselle Loren as "Other Voices", to try to misdirect people.
I found her attempt to do a "Buffyisms" the 2nd most annoying part of the game, beaten only by the textbook failure in game design that was the "Dream Level" which is where I abandoned the game at.
Strategy games normally require careful balancing otherwise the game is useless. No one side should be seen to be more powerful then the other, and all sides should bring something to the table.
Slapping the name "Everquest" on a Strategy game is a bit like designing a classic text-based adventure game and marketing it to the Quake crowd.
Oh well, it can't flop worse then Everquest Online Adventures for the Playstation 2.
I am interested to see what World of Warcraft comes out like, considering that at one time the #3 guild in Everquest (Legacy of Steel was heavily populated with the World of Warcraft design team. At least Blizzard didn't throw together a quick and dirty MMORPG to try to make cash, they spent a long time and a lot of money to make a graphically impressive MMORPG to try to make cash.
They went to a small area of known volume and gravity conditions where noone had been able to see small asteroid-type bodies, and promptly went and found 18 of them.
Sounds like a perfect proof of concept test,which is then followed by calibration, and is then followed by upscale to production.
The techniques being developed here are *exactly* what you are asking them to do.
Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 4, Troll
Got this in Email this morning, passing it along:
Published on Monday, March 17, 2003 by Michael Moore A Letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush on the Eve of War by Michael Moore
George W. Bush 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington, DC
Dear Governor Bush:
So today is what you call "the moment of truth," the day that "France and the rest of world have to show their cards on the table." I'm glad to hear that this day has finally arrived. Because, I gotta tell ya, having survived 440 days of your lying and conniving, I wasn't sure if I could take much more. So I'm glad to hear that today is Truth Day, 'cause I got a few truths I would like to share with you:
1. There is virtually NO ONE in America (talk radio nutters and Fox News aside) who is gung-ho to go to war. Trust me on this one. Walk out of the White House and on to any street in America and try to find five people who are PASSIONATE about wanting to kill Iraqis. YOU WON'T FIND THEM! Why? 'Cause NO Iraqis have ever come here and killed any of us! No Iraqi has even threatened to do that. You see, this is how we average Americans think: If a certain so-and-so is not perceived as a threat to our lives, then, believe it or not, we don't want to kill him! Funny how that works!
2. The majority of Americans -- the ones who never elected you -- are not fooled by your weapons of mass distraction. We know what the real issues are that affect our daily lives -- and none of them begin with I or end in Q. Here's what threatens us: two and a half million jobs lost since you took office, the stock market having become a cruel joke, no one knowing if their retirement funds are going to be there, gas now costs almost two dollars -- the list goes on and on. Bombing Iraq will not make any of this go away. Only you need to go away for things to improve.
3. As Bill Maher said last week, how bad do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein? The whole world is against you, Mr. Bush. Count your fellow Americans among them.
4. The Pope has said this war is wrong, that it is a SIN. The Pope! But even worse, the Dixie Chicks have now come out against you! How bad does it have to get before you realize that you are an army of one on this war? Of course, this is a war you personally won't have to fight. Just like when you went AWOL while the poor were shipped to Vietnam in your place.
5. Of the 535 members of Congress, only ONE (Sen. Johnson of South Dakota) has an enlisted son or daughter in the armed forces! If you really want to stand up for America, please send your twin daughters over to Kuwait right now and let them don their chemical warfare suits. And let's see every member of Congress with a child of military age also sacrifice their kids for this war effort. What's that you say? You don't THINK so? Well, hey, guess what -- we don't think so either!
6. Finally, we love France. Yes, they have pulled some royal screw-ups. Yes, some of them can pretty damn annoying. But have you forgotten we wouldn't even have this country known as America if it weren't for the French? That it was their help in the Revolutionary War that won it for us? That our greatest thinkers and founding fathers -- Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. -- spent many years in Paris where they refined the concepts that lead to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution? That it was France who gave us our Statue of Liberty, a Frenchman who built the Chevrolet, and a pair of French brothers who invented the movies? And now they are doing what only a good friend can do -- tell you the truth about yourself, straight, no b.s. Quit pissing on the French and thank them for getting it right for once. You know, you really should have traveled more (like once) before you took over. Your ignorance of the world has not only made you look stupid, it has painted you into a corner you can't get out of.
Well, cheer up -- there IS good news. If you do go through with this war, more than likely it will be
"I just use it to download Red Hat ISO's" is a explanation often heard when ISP's try to get their residential customers to stop abusing their service. Second only to "I only use it to get free, open distributed MP3's"
These people seem to download Red hat ISO's 4-6 times a week. Why not just come out and admit that 90% of the time you are downloading copyrighted material ?
The biggest bandwith hogs are:
Pirate Software Pirate Music Pirate Video
If Red Hat ISO's didn't exist, it'd be OS service patches, or redownloading the virus definitions every 20 minutes being used to justify massive data bills.
No pure residential user in this world can justify 30 gb of data / month. And if you are using it for CVS or streaming video, bite the damn bullet and purchase a Business plan, and claim it on tax. You are ruining it for the true residential customers.
"-where, like everyone else, I stopped in my tracks and stared, gaped, gawked, slack-jawed as a country yokel seeing his first transsexual hooker, awestruck as an atheist in Paradise, silent on a peak in Florida--stared, with my own personal eyeballs, across no more than a couple of miles of stunningly beautiful country, at an honest to God spaceship, right there at the edge of the shining sea."
- Extract by Spider Robinson, from the fiction novel "Callahan's Key", where his mismatched group of world savers were moving from New York to Florida. In the process, they make what they consider a vitally important stop on the way.
When I read this in the First-edition hard cover, it managed to get rid of that jaded feeling you get from reading NASA Budget whiners and people complaining.
After sitting watching the footage playing on loop, I walked over and pulled it off the table next to my bed and re-read that part. I remembered that I also have it as an Ebook for my Palm, so I thought I'd post it here.
It's long. It's almost an entire chapter of his book, I hope Spider doesn't mind too much, but he's been generous with his work in the past (through Baen Books) and I think he did an excellent job at passing along the sense of wonder at the feat, and the frustration at how the general public react.
For those without patience, try this second sample sample:
"For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter century it had been a news story-one that seemed to bore most of my fellow citizens silly. But now it was reality-real reality; that is, the part experienced by me-and the two million year old dream had really come true: The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches."
OK, they've left, here's the full text.
WE LEFT DISNEY WORLD just before dawn, in the most orderly and timely departure of our trip to date. A good thing, as I got us lost twice on the way. Jim Omar and the Lucky Duck had left even earlier, at high speed in the horrid little VW and of course since the Duck was involved the timing worked out perfectly. Just as I was standing at the edge of the traffic jam from hell, trying to breathe pure carbon monoxide and having one of the most surreal conversations of my life with a Florida state trooper who wanted me to move all those ugly friggin' buses right God damn it now, Omar and Ernie came roaring up along the shoulder, back from Merritt Island, waving from the passenger window the stack of magic orange stiff-paper rectangles they'd managed to wheedle out of a guy Omar knew from his college days. It's always pleasant to watch a hard-on in a uniform detumesce. Clout can be a beautiful thing-when you've got it. The orange cards were distributed one to a bus, placed prominently in their front windows, and one by one we pulled onto the shoulder and drove slowly and smugly past hundreds of other stopped vehicles full of envious strangers. When we came to the huge barrier that was stopping them all, beefy cops horsed it out of our way and gestured us through. We were waved through a couple of checkpoints, stopped and very briefly questioned at a third, then passed over a small bridge and found ourselves on a two-lane road through flat tidal plain country. Deep drainage ditches on either side of the road, nothing much visible in any direction except wet-looking ta grass. The sun was up by now, and there was fog on the ground here and theme. Shortly we found ourselves on the tail end of a slow moving line of cars, most of them considerably more expensive-looking than anything we had. We tooled along for a while at about twenty miles an hour, and once or twice the line stopped altogether for a minute or two, when more important vehicles up ahead had a use for that particular road. I didn't mind a bit. My hands were trembling so badly from-excitement that I'd have had trouble controlling my bus at anything over twenty. I heard my own pulse playing a Krupa solo in my ears, I could feel myself grinning like an idiot, my voice when I spoke sounded to me like a chipmunk on methedrine. Zoey and Erin were equally buzzed, and probably so was everyone in the caravan. Even Pixel felt it; he sat rigid on Erin's lap with his head thrust forward, staring out ahead and purring as loud as the bus in low gear. And then suddenly we were there. Find a spot, pull approximately into it, brake to shuddering halt, slam her in neutral, set brake, kill engine, leave keys, crank open door, spring for the stairs, bounce off wife, spring for stairs again, trip over cat, fall backward, land heavily, whack skull, feel daughter leap down onto chest from car seat and run down torso to stairs, curse feebly, spring for stairs again, fall down stairs onto hard blacktop, whack forehead, get up, postpone checking for broken bones or concussion and join thundering herd sprinting uphill past the souvenir stands and portable toilets to the viewing area- -where, like everyone else, I stopped in my tracks and stared, gaped, gawked, slack-jawed as a country yokel seeing his first transsexual hooker, awestruck as an atheist in Paradise, silent on a peak in Florida- -stared, with my own personal eyeballs, across no more than a couple of miles of stunningly beautiful country, at an honest to God spaceship, right there at the edge of the shining sea.
Apparently Omar's friend had prudently concluded that our caravan was just a little too flagrantly weird fom the Kennedy Space Center's main VIP site; the passes he'd supplied us were for the secondary VIP viewing area on Static Test Site Road. I didn't give a damn. I was forty-something years old and I was standing in a fucking spaceport. The weather was less than ideal; there was a good deal of ground fog, and the air was on the chilly side. I didn't give a damn about that either. Let 'em hold! I was prepared to wait-to stand right there in that spot without shifting my weight or shitting my pants-for a week if necessary. Suddenly I let out a squeak, spun in my tracks, and sprinted back downhill to the parking area, for the binoculars we had all forgotten when we'd spilled off the bus. I collected all three pairs, plus a reference book, the camera, and a collapsible tall chair for Erin to sit in, so I wouldn't have to carry her on my shoulders to let her see over the heads of the crowd. Then I sat on the bottom step and waited for my breathing and pulse to return to normal-it seemed a poor idea to die just now-then I got up and trudged slowly back up the hill. Stopping along the way at a tourist-vacuum to load myself down further with two coffees, an apple juice, film, postcards, a NASA sunhat for Erin, NASA ballcaps for myself and Zoey, and three pairs of sunglasses. Fortunately I was able to offload an awful lot of money. With my total mass thus lowered, I was able to achieve escape velocity, and reached the top of the hill before my main engine ran completely out of fuel. While I was setting up Erin's high chair and lifting her into it with the last of my strength, Pixel drank about a third of my coffee. I claimed it from him and finished it, then aimed my binoculars across the Banana River at Pad 39-B, and began serious gawking. She was fucking gorgeous. Discovery, she was. Flight STS-29, the twenty-eighth Shuttle mission. (STS-28, Columbia, had developed serious problems, we were told, and would not lift until the following August.) A heartbreakingly beautiful sight, standing there against the sky. This would only be the second launch since the Great Hiatus that had followed the Challenger Tragedy-the horrid pause that might well have turned into the end of the space program, if blessed Richard Feynman had not thought of a novel use for a glass of ice water. For a while I had feared I might never have a chance to see such a sight as this again. All my reading had not prepared me for how big she was. Oh, I know the Space Shuttle is a midget compared to the old Apollo Program boosters-from where I stood, I could see that the immense doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building off to the left were almost twice as tall as they needed to be to pass a Shuttle. But knowing that brontosaurs once walked the earth does not diminish the impact of your first close-up encounter with an elephant. I could not believe they proposed to hurl that enormous massive object into the air, so high that it wouldn't come down until it was damn good and ready. I felt an enormous thrill of pride to belong to a species that could even conceive of a thing so splendidly arrogant-let alone pull it off. There were maybe two hundred or so of us scattered across that bluff. Some were sober serious professionals, busy setting up complex and obviously expensive equipment of various' kinds. Dozens of others had set up simple tripods, and were mounting and testing either cameras or video gear. An equal number was preparing for handheld work-and perhaps half the total crowd had come simply to watch. Two boomboxes could be heard, one softly playing anonymous music, one somewhat louder tuned to a local newsfeed. Two giant and powerful loudspeaker towers were supplying us with live transmissions between Mission Control and Discovery's flight deck, but at this point in the launch sequence, exchanges were infrequent and usually incomprehensible. I had my breath back under control, but my heart was still hammering like mad. I could feel it. "Can you see okay, Pumpkin?" I asked my daughter. "It looks foggy down there, Daddy," Erin said. Sitting there high on hem aluminum throne in her yellow sundress and sunglasses, she looked quite regal. "Do you think they'll launch on schedule?" She was right: Discovery stood somewhere between ankle-deep and knee-deep in ground fog. But the sun had risen well above it by now. "Hard to say, honey. They never have once, so far. But they might-or they might come close, anyway. The sun will burn that off pretty quick, I think." Behind me, Jim Omar's voice said, "Two-hour hold, max-if nothing else goes wrong." "Well, tell 'em not to hurry on my account," Zoey said, tugging at Em's yellow sundress to straighten it. "This is a nice place to sit and be." "Amen," Omar said. His diagnosis was prophetic: that bird was scheduled to lift at 8 A.M., and it was only a little after 10 when they went into the final countdown.
Okay, you've probably seen film or video footage on TV. But if you haven't been to a launch, at least as close as the thousands of cars stacked up back out on the highway, you just don't know anything about it. At first the world is nothing but horizon, endless ocean and sky, all of it still, tranquil, serene. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree Spielberg, rich and vivid. Lazy clouds overhead, a flight of birds just visible gliding low over marsh flats in the distance, a few boats out on the water. The stillness is not perfect-there is the countdown bellowing out of those superb speaker horns, and there is the internal thunder of elevated pulse-but basically the world is as it has always been: at rest, indifferent to anything any of the scurrying ants on its surface might come up with. Then Hell breaks loose. A dirty white explosion spreads in all directions. At its center, beneath the stacked array, a Beast is born. It is mighty. And angry. Its roar shatters the world, splits the sky, echoes up and down the Florida coast and miles out to sea. You thought you knew what to expect, but this is louder. The sound is tangible, hits you with physical force, vibrates up your legs from the ground beneath your feet, scares the living shit out of you. Your first thought is that you are witnessing a disaster even more awful than Challenger: an on-the-pad explosion. Then the Beast's two big brothers wake up-the giant solid rocket boosters-and Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo all break loose together and start to argue. The sound is indescribable, just short of unbearable. So insensate is the rage of this new Beast that the world itself will not have it. No matter that something the size and weight of an apartment building is sitting on its back: it lifts from the ground on a raving column of its own fury and rises impossibly into the air, becomes a thick growing tower of white smoke, the 128-ton Shuttle stack balanced on top like a Ping-Pong ball on the stream from a firehose. The bonds of Earth can be as surly as they like: the Beast is surlier, shrugs its terrible shoulders, and slips them clean. You realize that you are pounding your hands together and screaming "Go, baby, go!" like an idiot at the top of your lungs, and you gather that everyone around you is doing the same, but you can't hear any of it. Part of you wishes you had control of your hands so that you could take photos like you planned to, and another part is amused at the audacity of the notion that this literally earthshaking event could possibly be squeezed through a pinhole and captured on a piece of celluloid smaller than a matchbook. Instead you watch in reverent terror as a utensil built by bald apes flings ninety-seven tons of metal and plastic two million miles. With five live men aboard. You can read about something like that, and see it on television, and spend a large portion of your leisure hours trying to imagine what it must be like and thinking about what it means, and you think you get it. You're a space buff: if anybody gets it, you do. And I suppose you do- as an intellectual concept. Then you go there and see it with your own eyes, feel it with your own bones . .. and are astonished to discover that only now, for the first time, do you really Get It. Until now space travel had been real to me in the same sense that World War II was real to me, or China: I'd been told about it and had no reason to doubt what I'd been told. Now I got it. My automatic pilot reminded me I hadn't checked on Erin in too long; I snatched a glance, saw her just behind me, in her chair where she belonged, and turned back to the spectacle. For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter century it had been a news story-one that seemed to bore most of my fellow citizens silly. But now it was reality-real reality; that is, the part experienced by me-and the two million year old dream had really come true: The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches. In that moment, I knew, as fact, with utter certainty, that one day we were going to climb all the way to the top. Nothing was going to prevent us. Not presidents, proxmires, press, public opinion, economic forces, or nuclear winter. No, it could be delayed, but it could not be stopped. This was evolution in action, before my eyes. As surely as we had come down out of the trees, as surely as we had crawled up out of the tidal pools in the first place, we were going to do this thing. As long as we don't end the universe first, came the thought, and suddenly I was terrified. When Nikola Tesla had first told me I had to save the universe I thought I Got It. Hell, I'd helped save the world, twice: what was the big deal? Glibness, flipness, denial. Now I got it. Sometime in the next ten years or so, I was going to be involved in something alongside which this paradigm shifting world-shaking thing I was now experiencing was an utterly insignificant event. This had only required billions of dollars, millions of people, and a few centuries of scientific advance. But for my immensely more important and difficult task, I had access to my wife, my kid, and a bunch of rummies personally known to me to he collectively about as reliable as an Internet connection. The big white beanstalk rose toward heaven. carrying a truck, carried it so high that it appeared to dwindle away to nothing at all, while I stood there and felt myself sweating.
I was snapped out of my fog by the sound of Long-Drink McGonnigle's annoyed voice behind me. "Where the hell are they going?" Low Earth Orbit, of course; what the hell did he mean? I turned to him, saw him looking around and glaring. So I looked around myself. The crowd was leaving. Half of them were already gone, disappearing down the slope past the souvenir stands and portable toilets toward the parking area. The rest were in the last stages of disassembling tripods, packing gear, collecting possessions, clearly about to depart. Some were taking their time about it, but clearly only because they knew there was going to be a jam-up out in the parking lot: none of them watched the white beanstalk anymore, and none of them appeared to pay the slightest attention to the two speaker towers, which were still broadcasting live transmissions. I couldn't believe it. Three college kids near me finished strapping up their packs and started to amble away. I put out a hand to stop one of them. "Excuse me, but where the hell are you going?" He stared at me. "Daytona Beach. Why, you need a ride?" "No, I mean. . . I mean. . . how the hell can you go?" I gestured helplessly at the curving white beanstalk above us, and the glowing dot still visible at its tip. "Now?" He turned and glanced at it, turned back to me. "It's over," he said, as one stating the obvious. "Over?" I scroaned. "Are you out of your fucking mind? The SRBs are still firing! It was later in the flight than this when the . .." I trailed off, superstitiously unwilling to speak the Challenger's name while there was a bird in the air. Zoey tugged 'my arm. "Jake-" "For Chrissake," I told the kid, "they haven't even reached the first abort point: at this point we don't know if they're going to Low Orbit or Portugal-" "Thirty seconds to SRB separation," the speakers brayed. "-you see? It'll be at least five more minutes before MECO-before we'll know whether those five poor bastards are gonna live through the next four days or not." I pointed to the nearest speaker tower. "When we do, we'll know it before anybody else in the country. How can you possibly leave?" He looked at me as if I were a penguin at a zoo, with mild interest and just a trace of pity. "The show's over, Pop," he explained, and took off to catch up with his friends, who had paused to see if he needed help kicking the old hippie's ass. "Jesus, what's wrong with that generation?" Long-Drink asked. "Do they think all this is, like, a rock concert' One big spectacular special effect? And as soon as it's off the screen it doesn't exist anymore? Is this what comes of putting on Pink Floyd laser lightshows down at the Planetarium?" "It's nothing to do with age," Tommy Janssen said. "Look around." He was right. People of all ages were leaving. Even people who looked intelligent, seemed educated. Everybody but me and my hundred-odd friends, most of whom were looking just as baffled as I was. "Screw 'em," Isham Latimer said. "Look up, quick." Just as we did, the SRBs broke away. I'd seen it many times, on film or on TV much more clearly through very good telephoto lenses. No matter: the beauty of it struck me dumb. The boosters pinwheeled away; the Shuttle kept climbing. After a while my neck hurt, and there was no longer anything much to see, so I looked down and divided my attention between the reference book I had fetched along and the loudspeakers, translating their cryptic acronyms and following the ffight in my imagination, as happy as I've ever been in my life. Some indeterminate time later, I was rudely yanked back to the lower world by the unmistakable smell of an approaching civil servant. Sure enough: a twenty-something android with NASA patches on his shoulders. He looked harassed. Somehow his bureaucratic intuition told him I was the closest thing to a leader he was going to find in this group. He approached me, powered down, opened his oral cavity, and played the prerecorded tape for this situation. "Youpeoplewillhavetocleartheareanow." I had been expecting him to say something stupid, but this seemed excessive. "I beg your pardon," I said politely, "but are you on drugs?" Confused, he replayed his tape, with an addition of his own that I took as a cry for help. "Youpeoplewillhavetocleamtheareanowplease." I pointed to the nearest of the loudspeaker towers. "It's almost four minutes to MECO," I explained. The term baffled him; I paraphrased. "This launch is not over yet. We can't possibly leave now." Treating him like a rational being was poor tactics; the word "can't" triggered him to go to DefCon Two. He lowered his brows the prescribed amount, swelled his shoulders, made his jaw muscles squirm, and said, "SirI'mafraidl'mgoingtohavetohavethisareacl -" "Do you know who you're talking to, son?" Omar's deep voice rumbled from off to my left. It's one of the interrupt codes. The kid turned toward him and waited for a password to be entered. "That," Omar said, pointing solemnly at me, "is Neil Armstrong." To my mild surprise, the kid recognized the name. His apprenticeship for that job must have been giving tour spiels at the visitors' center. The password was valid; he had to step back down to DefCon Three. "Sorry, Mr. Armstrong," he said, relaxing his shoulders and jaw muscles. He'd omitted my rank, but I let it pass. He'd also forgotten Armstrong never wore a beard, long hair, or glasses. "That's all right, son. Now fuck off, okay?" His eyebrows remained lowered. "Uh..." I sighed. "What is it, mister?" "Well, sir. .." He gestured vaguely toward the souvenir stands and poetics, where a few other androids were staring at us in bafflement. "We all been out here all morning. You know, the crew. Is it okay if we-" At last I understood. We were all at a holy event. He and his mates were at work. And wanted to split. "Son," I said patiently, "I don't care what you do as long as you leave us alone until MECO. That's when they turn off the big motor in the sky-car up there." "I mean, we're not supposed to remove the portable sanitation units until everybody's-" "I authorize you to leave," I told him. "If any of us shits after you go, I promise we'll cover it up, okay?" I turned away, triggering his dismissal protocols. He thought about saluting, couldn't decide, settled for a sketch of one, and buggered off. We went back to monitoring the flight. When they finally announced MECO, just under nine minutes after takeoff, we all heaved a sigh of relief, gave each other high fives, turned around-and found absolutely no visible sign of life but our own vehicles, waiting in the parking lot below. Not even dust clouds settling in the distance. We didn't see another human being until we reached the visitors' center. There were dozens of them there, buying expensive souvenirs to commemorate an event most of them had neglected to finish observing. I'll never understand people. Even being one doesn't seem to help.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder what I can throw out the window this time.
What are the odds on them firing big shells at us ?
I mean the chances of anything coming from Mars are a Million to One !
I wonder if it will be loud enough to draw the attention of the unknown creature that makes the Bloop noises.
I'm wondering who would win in a fight between an Aegis Cruiser and some cheap Cthulhu knock of from 6 kilometres down
Hang on...
The (completely insane and already disproven multiple times) Electric Universe theory has only been talking about these rings since 2004.
These spokes were first spotted in the '80's.
Isn't this a bit like "I have a theory, this theory is that Orange Polkadotted Jet Propelled Chickens from the Pleides are currently touring the universe blowing up stars. The last star they visited was SN1987A, and sure enough observations back me up".
If they predicted it before they hit Saturn, then maybe we'd pay attention. But seeing how they predicted it after it had already been observerd places you fairly in the OPJPC camp.
http://www.evilbastard.org/jim/integrallimerick.gi f
It's been covered many times before
Creationism and it's jumped up little brother Intelligent Design would be hard put to prove themselves as a Hypothesis.
People who misuse the language of science in order to try to disprove something should be pointed and laughed at, rather then engaged in debate.
Learn the ground rules first people, otherwise you come across as a fool.
A quick browse through his sons' company shows that they also offer Bad HTML and Service Level Agreements as low as 80%.
And their mission plan is "Net Harbour delivers unparalleled, innovative and trusted IT solutions to Australian businesses. We understand that your investment in technology needs to deliver a measurable return. Our mission is to help you identify the technology solutions that will deliver this return."
I might wander past their door on Monday (Suite 516, Level 5 15 Lime Street Sydney 2000) and see what sort of hole-in-the-wall refugee from 1999 this company is.
On the bright side, I guess we'll have the first Black Female Mexican president soon, after a dramatic election day fiasco.
WUBBAwubbaWUBBAwubbaWUBBAwubbaWUBBAwubba
Scott,
Here's a mindboggling stupid idea from our Marketing Department that you might be able to use. We make [type of machine]. A new version of our product is both cheaper and faster. A great breakthough, right?
Well marketing wants Engineering to slow the unit down so they have a low cost unit to sell. Then sell them upgrades to full speed at an enormous price. These would be physically identical, just one would have the code messed up on purpose to run slow.
So does this mean [type of machine] = Digital Cameras ?
Early versions of Doom (Up to 1.6) you could enter the three commands below
Machine #1 : doom -devparm -nodes 3 -left
Machine #2 : doom -devparm -nodes 3
Machine #3 : doom -devparm -nodes 3 -right
and you'd have your main machine as the front screen, and the other two showing the left and right side, for a 270 degree wrap around mode
I actually got it working one night at a LAN, but couldn't 'unlock' my play style enough to use it effectivly.
Now you have video cards like the Matrox Parhelia-512 that do the same thing onboard, a mere 11 years later.
He was doing what he was told to do, a Demonstration flight for Columbus day, when they discovered that the F-100 was unstable due to a unstable airflow over a newly designed tail fin.
"On Columbus Day of 1954, Welch was performing a demonstration flying the new F-100A. His flight card called for a symmetrical pull-up at 1.55 Mach. The maneuver would generate more than 7 Gs. As he began the maneuver, the airflow over the wing suddenly burbled, completely blanking the newly redesigned and smaller vertical stabilizer. The fighter yawed slightly and then suddenly turned partially sideways to the direction of travel. The nose folded up at the windscreen and crushed Welch in his ejection seat. Miraculously, the seat fired and carried Welch clear of the plane as it disintegrated. Ejecting at supersonic speeds is not only hard on the human body, it's hard on parachutes as well. Welch's chute was nearly shredded by the violent blast of air. With many panels blown out, the rate of descent was much too fast to avoid serious injury, or even death. When rescuers arrived at Welch's side, he was barely alive. He died before he could be transported to a hospital. Ironically, Yeager had complained that the F-100A, with its smaller vertical stabilizer, was dangerously unstable. Welch elected to fly it anyway"
I did a quick Google on the first time humans passed the "sound barrier" in 1947. 50 years later, every school kid knows^W should know Chuck Yeager's name
Please correct the above.
Not to take anything away from Chuck Yeager, who did a terrible dangerous thing, but in 1997 the US Air Force has admitted that George Welch broke the sound barrier twice in the XP-86 (the test version of the Sabre, which was a front line fighter through the 1950's and early 60's).
Although ordered not to enter supersonic trials until Bell's project was complete, he purposly dove his plane on October 1st, 1947, and again 15 minutes before Yeagers flight on October 15th, 1947. He later died testing the YF-100 in 1954.
This is why Yeager's record has changed from "The first man to break the sound barrier" to "The first man to break the sound barrier in level flight", but they still try to avoid mentioning George Welch.
This is also why you shouldn't always trust Google. Check again, but this time for his name and you'll find a lot of articles that mention this. He was also involved in another famous aviation act, as he was one of the few pilots who took off from Pearl Harbour to attack the incoming Japanese air raid, and you'll find that he is also widely discussed as one of the few people who should have been ordered the Congressional Medal of Honor twice.
Click Here for information on his actions at Pearl Harbour
Click Here for information about him breaking the sound barrier
OK, as far as I can see, it goes something like :
1) Make a character. Max it out.
2) Camp a rare drop item from a rare spawn that everyone else wants.
3) It tells you to delevel, and max out another character of class $random
4) Camp a rare drop item from a rare spawn that everyone else wants.
5) It tells you to delevel, and max out another character of class $random2
6) Camp a rare drop item from a rare spawn that everyone else wants.
7) It tells you to delevel, and max out another character of class $random3
8) Camp a rare drop item from a rare spawn that everyone else wants.
9) It doesn't tell you what to do. You just max out 2 other classes and hope that's them
10) (Possible) Visit every location.
11) Max out a serious number of tradeskills
12) Camp some rarespawn items for the lightsabre
13) Make the first step of the lightsabre to make the Training Sabre.
14) Camp some more items for the real lightsabre.
15) Do the final combine, and it's bugged, and doesn't work.
Meanwhile, over on Ebay, SWG Bria ~Force Sensitive Jedi Slot~ Jedi characters are up for sale for $510.00
Damn I'm glad I never started that game. I wonder how Luke had time to do all that between making runs out to Toshi Station for power converters.
Explains why he couldn't communicate in english, at very least.
So, I was checking the troll-fest that is "Spouses against Everquest", and I discovered that they are an advertising supported board.
Oh, that's just so tasteful. At least it's a advert for Age of Wonders, rather then EQ
Giselle Loren as Buffy Summers, but IMDB still lists Alyson Hannigan as doing her character's voice. I wonder how hard they'll try to hide it this time - I recall in the first game they listed Giselle Loren as "Other Voices", to try to misdirect people.
I found her attempt to do a "Buffyisms" the 2nd most annoying part of the game, beaten only by the textbook failure in game design that was the "Dream Level" which is where I abandoned the game at.
'Happy Face' crater of Mars
NASA/JPL/MSSS RELEASE
Posted: May 17, 2003
It's a new picture of an old crater. The old one was offset at an angle, this one is finally "Face On" so to speak.
Strategy games normally require careful balancing otherwise the game is useless. No one side should be seen to be more powerful then the other, and all sides should bring something to the table.
Slapping the name "Everquest" on a Strategy game is a bit like designing a classic text-based adventure game and marketing it to the Quake crowd.
Oh well, it can't flop worse then Everquest Online Adventures for the Playstation 2.
I am interested to see what World of Warcraft comes out like, considering that at one time the #3 guild in Everquest (Legacy of Steel was heavily populated with the World of Warcraft design team. At least Blizzard didn't throw together a quick and dirty MMORPG to try to make cash, they spent a long time and a lot of money to make a graphically impressive MMORPG to try to make cash.
Cause he'd get really annoyed at the decendants of the Mutineers trying to poke him with a pin to see if there's anything good inside
...is the sound of all the Mars Loons loading up their copies of Photoshops to see what they can find.
I hope they Have a nice day
Lets see...
They went to a small area of known volume and gravity conditions where noone had been able to see small asteroid-type bodies, and promptly went and found 18 of them.
Sounds like a perfect proof of concept test,which is then followed by calibration, and is then followed by upscale to production.
The techniques being developed here are *exactly* what you are asking them to do.
Got this in Email this morning, passing it along:
Published on Monday, March 17, 2003 by Michael Moore
A Letter from Michael Moore to George W. Bush on the Eve of War
by Michael Moore
George W. Bush
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington, DC
Dear Governor Bush:
So today is what you call "the moment of truth," the day that "France and the rest of world have to show their cards on the table." I'm glad to hear that this day has finally arrived. Because, I gotta tell ya, having survived 440 days of your lying and conniving, I wasn't sure if I could take much more. So I'm glad to hear that today is Truth Day, 'cause I got a few truths I would like to share with you:
1. There is virtually NO ONE in America (talk radio nutters and Fox News aside) who is gung-ho to go to war. Trust me on this one. Walk out of the White House and on to any street in America and try to find five people who are PASSIONATE about wanting to kill Iraqis. YOU WON'T FIND THEM! Why? 'Cause NO Iraqis have ever come here and killed any of us! No Iraqi has even threatened to do that. You see, this is how we average Americans think: If a certain so-and-so is not perceived as a threat to our lives, then, believe it or not, we don't want to kill him! Funny how that works!
2. The majority of Americans -- the ones who never elected you -- are not fooled by your weapons of mass distraction. We know what the real issues are that affect our daily lives -- and none of them begin with I or end in Q. Here's what threatens us: two and a half million jobs lost since you took office, the stock market having become a cruel joke, no one knowing if their retirement funds are going to be there, gas now costs almost two dollars -- the list goes on and on. Bombing Iraq will not make any of this go away. Only you need to go away for things to improve.
3. As Bill Maher said last week, how bad do you have to suck to lose a popularity contest with Saddam Hussein? The whole world is against you, Mr. Bush. Count your fellow Americans among them.
4. The Pope has said this war is wrong, that it is a SIN. The Pope! But even worse, the Dixie Chicks have now come out against you! How bad does it have to get before you realize that you are an army of one on this war? Of course, this is a war you personally won't have to fight. Just like when you went AWOL while the poor were shipped to Vietnam in your place.
5. Of the 535 members of Congress, only ONE (Sen. Johnson of South Dakota) has an enlisted son or daughter in the armed forces! If you really want to stand up for America, please send your twin daughters over to Kuwait right now and let them don their chemical warfare suits. And let's see every member of Congress with a child of military age also sacrifice their kids for this war effort. What's that you say? You don't THINK so? Well, hey, guess what -- we don't think so either!
6. Finally, we love France. Yes, they have pulled some royal screw-ups. Yes, some of them can pretty damn annoying. But have you forgotten we wouldn't even have this country known as America if it weren't for the French? That it was their help in the Revolutionary War that won it for us? That our greatest thinkers and founding fathers -- Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, etc. -- spent many years in Paris where they refined the concepts that lead to our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution? That it was France who gave us our Statue of Liberty, a Frenchman who built the Chevrolet, and a pair of French brothers who invented the movies? And now they are doing what only a good friend can do -- tell you the truth about yourself, straight, no b.s. Quit pissing on the French and thank them for getting it right for once. You know, you really should have traveled more (like once) before you took over. Your ignorance of the world has not only made you look stupid, it has painted you into a corner you can't get out of.
Well, cheer up -- there IS good news. If you do go through with this war, more than likely it will be
You mean This show ?
- Based on a poster that was doing the rounds when the first animatrix episode was announced
"I just use it to download Red Hat ISO's" is a explanation often heard when ISP's try to get their residential customers to stop abusing their service. Second only to "I only use it to get free, open distributed MP3's"
:
These people seem to download Red hat ISO's 4-6 times a week. Why not just come out and admit that 90% of the time you are downloading copyrighted material ?
The biggest bandwith hogs are
Pirate Software
Pirate Music
Pirate Video
If Red Hat ISO's didn't exist, it'd be OS service patches, or redownloading the virus definitions every 20 minutes being used to justify massive data bills.
No pure residential user in this world can justify 30 gb of data / month. And if you are using it for CVS or streaming video, bite the damn bullet and purchase a Business plan, and claim it on tax. You are ruining it for the true residential customers.
"-where, like everyone else, I stopped in my tracks and stared, gaped, gawked, slack-jawed as a country yokel seeing his first transsexual hooker, awestruck as an atheist in Paradise, silent on a peak in Florida--stared, with my own personal eyeballs, across no more than a couple of miles of stunningly beautiful country, at an honest to God spaceship, right there at the
:
.
." I trailed off, l -" ." He gestured vaguely toward the souvenir stands and poetics,
edge of the shining sea."
- Extract by Spider Robinson, from the fiction novel "Callahan's Key", where his mismatched group of world savers were moving from New York to Florida. In the process, they make what they consider a vitally important stop on the way.
When I read this in the First-edition hard cover, it managed to get rid of that jaded feeling you get from reading NASA Budget whiners and people complaining.
After sitting watching the footage playing on loop, I walked over and pulled it off the table next to my bed and re-read that part. I remembered that I also have it as an Ebook for my Palm, so I thought I'd post it here.
It's long. It's almost an entire chapter of his book, I hope Spider doesn't mind too much, but he's been generous with his work in the past (through Baen Books) and I think he did an excellent job at passing along the sense of wonder at the feat, and the frustration at how the general public react.
For those without patience, try this second sample sample
"For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first
fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a
teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter
century it had been a news story-one that seemed to bore most of my fellow
citizens silly. But now it was reality-real reality; that is, the part
experienced by me-and the two million year old dream had really come true:
The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there
is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches."
OK, they've left, here's the full text.
WE LEFT DISNEY WORLD just before dawn, in the most orderly and timely departure
of our trip to date. A good thing, as I got us lost twice on the way. Jim Omar
and the Lucky Duck had left even earlier, at high speed in the horrid little VW
and of course since the Duck was involved the timing worked out perfectly. Just
as I was standing at the edge of the traffic jam from hell, trying to breathe
pure carbon monoxide and having one of the most surreal conversations of my life
with a Florida state trooper who wanted me to move all those ugly friggin' buses
right God damn it now, Omar and Ernie came roaring up along the shoulder, back
from Merritt Island, waving from the passenger window the stack of magic orange
stiff-paper rectangles they'd managed to wheedle out of a guy Omar knew from his
college days. It's always pleasant to watch a hard-on in a uniform detumesce.
Clout can be a beautiful thing-when you've got it.
The orange cards were distributed one to a bus, placed prominently in their
front windows, and one by one we pulled onto the shoulder and drove slowly and
smugly past hundreds of other stopped vehicles full of envious strangers. When
we came to the huge barrier that was stopping them all, beefy cops horsed it out
of our way and gestured us through. We were waved through a couple of
checkpoints, stopped and very briefly questioned at a third, then passed over a
small bridge and found ourselves on a two-lane road through flat tidal plain
country. Deep drainage ditches on either side of the road, nothing much visible
in any direction except wet-looking ta grass. The sun was up by now, and there
was fog on the ground here and theme.
Shortly we found ourselves on the tail end of a slow moving line of cars, most
of them considerably more expensive-looking than anything we had. We tooled
along for a while at about twenty miles an hour, and once or twice the line
stopped altogether for a minute or two, when more important vehicles up ahead
had a use for that particular road.
I didn't mind a bit. My hands were trembling so badly from-excitement that I'd
have had trouble controlling my bus at anything over twenty. I heard my own
pulse playing a Krupa solo in my ears, I could feel myself grinning like an
idiot, my voice when I spoke sounded to me like a chipmunk on methedrine. Zoey
and Erin were equally buzzed, and probably so was everyone in the caravan. Even
Pixel felt it; he sat rigid on Erin's lap with his head thrust forward, staring
out ahead and purring as loud as the bus in low gear.
And then suddenly we were there.
Find a spot, pull approximately into it, brake to shuddering halt, slam her in
neutral, set brake, kill engine, leave keys, crank open door, spring for the
stairs, bounce off wife, spring for stairs again, trip over cat, fall backward,
land heavily, whack skull, feel daughter leap down onto chest from car seat and
run down torso to stairs, curse feebly, spring for stairs again, fall down
stairs onto hard blacktop, whack forehead, get up, postpone checking for broken
bones or concussion and join thundering herd sprinting uphill past the souvenir
stands and portable toilets to the viewing area-
-where, like everyone else, I stopped in my tracks and stared, gaped, gawked,
slack-jawed as a country yokel seeing his first transsexual hooker, awestruck as
an atheist in Paradise, silent on a peak in Florida-
-stared, with my own personal eyeballs, across no more than a couple of miles of
stunningly beautiful country, at an honest to God spaceship, right there at the
edge of the shining sea.
Apparently Omar's friend had prudently concluded that our caravan was just a
little too flagrantly weird fom the Kennedy Space Center's main VIP site; the
passes he'd supplied us were for the secondary VIP viewing area on Static Test
Site Road. I didn't give a damn. I was forty-something years old and I was
standing in a fucking spaceport.
The weather was less than ideal; there was a good deal of ground fog, and the
air was on the chilly side. I didn't give a damn about that either. Let 'em
hold! I was prepared to wait-to stand right there in that spot without shifting
my weight or shitting my pants-for a week if necessary.
Suddenly I let out a squeak, spun in my tracks, and sprinted back downhill to
the parking area, for the binoculars we had all forgotten when we'd spilled off
the bus. I collected all three pairs, plus a reference book, the camera, and a
collapsible tall chair for Erin to sit in, so I wouldn't have to carry her on my
shoulders to let her see over the heads of the crowd. Then I sat on the bottom
step and waited for my breathing and pulse to return to normal-it seemed a poor
idea to die just now-then I got up and trudged slowly back up the hill. Stopping
along the way at a tourist-vacuum to load myself down further with two coffees,
an apple juice, film, postcards, a NASA sunhat for Erin, NASA ballcaps for
myself and Zoey, and three pairs of sunglasses. Fortunately I was able to
offload an awful lot of money. With my total mass thus lowered, I was able to
achieve escape velocity, and reached the top of the hill before my main engine
ran completely out of fuel.
While I was setting up Erin's high chair and lifting her into it with the last
of my strength, Pixel drank about a third of my coffee. I claimed it from him
and finished it, then aimed my binoculars across the Banana River at Pad 39-B,
and began serious gawking.
She was fucking gorgeous.
Discovery, she was. Flight STS-29, the twenty-eighth Shuttle mission. (STS-28,
Columbia, had developed serious problems, we were told, and would not lift until
the following August.) A heartbreakingly beautiful sight, standing there against
the sky. This would only be the second launch since the Great Hiatus that had
followed the Challenger Tragedy-the horrid pause that might well have turned
into the end of the space program, if blessed Richard Feynman had not thought of
a novel use for a glass of ice water. For a while I had feared I might never
have a chance to see such a sight as this again.
All my reading had not prepared me for how big she was. Oh, I know the Space
Shuttle is a midget compared to the old Apollo Program boosters-from where I
stood, I could see that the immense doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building off
to the left were almost twice as tall as they needed to be to pass a Shuttle.
But knowing that brontosaurs once walked the earth does not diminish the impact
of your first close-up encounter with an elephant. I could not believe they
proposed to hurl that enormous massive object into the air, so high that it
wouldn't come down until it was damn good and ready. I felt an enormous thrill
of pride to belong to a species that could even conceive of a thing so
splendidly arrogant-let alone pull it off.
There were maybe two hundred or so of us scattered across that bluff. Some were
sober serious professionals, busy setting up complex and obviously expensive
equipment of various' kinds. Dozens of others had set up simple tripods, and
were mounting and testing either cameras or video gear. An equal number was
preparing for handheld work-and perhaps half the total crowd had come simply to
watch. Two boomboxes could be heard, one softly playing anonymous music, one
somewhat louder tuned to a local newsfeed. Two giant and powerful loudspeaker
towers were supplying us with live transmissions between Mission Control and
Discovery's flight deck, but at this point in the launch sequence, exchanges
were infrequent and usually incomprehensible.
I had my breath back under control, but my heart was still hammering like mad. I
could feel it.
"Can you see okay, Pumpkin?" I asked my daughter.
"It looks foggy down there, Daddy," Erin said. Sitting there high on hem
aluminum throne in her yellow sundress and sunglasses, she looked quite regal.
"Do you think they'll launch on schedule?"
She was right: Discovery stood somewhere between ankle-deep and knee-deep in
ground fog. But the sun had risen well above it by now. "Hard to say, honey.
They never have once, so far. But they might-or they might come close, anyway.
The sun will burn that off pretty quick, I think."
Behind me, Jim Omar's voice said, "Two-hour hold, max-if nothing else goes
wrong."
"Well, tell 'em not to hurry on my account," Zoey said, tugging at Em's yellow
sundress to straighten it. "This is a nice place to sit and be."
"Amen," Omar said.
His diagnosis was prophetic: that bird was scheduled to lift at 8 A.M., and it
was only a little after 10 when they went into the final countdown.
Okay, you've probably seen film or video footage on TV. But if you haven't been
to a launch, at least as close as the thousands of cars stacked up back out on
the highway, you just don't know anything about it.
At first the world is nothing but horizon, endless ocean and sky, all of it
still, tranquil, serene. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree Spielberg, rich and
vivid. Lazy clouds overhead, a flight of birds just visible gliding low over
marsh flats in the distance, a few boats out on the water. The stillness is not
perfect-there is the countdown bellowing out of those superb speaker horns, and
there is the internal thunder of elevated pulse-but basically the world is as it
has always been: at rest, indifferent to anything any of the scurrying ants on
its surface might come up with.
Then Hell breaks loose.
A dirty white explosion spreads in all directions. At its center, beneath the
stacked array, a Beast is born. It is mighty. And angry. Its roar shatters the
world, splits the sky, echoes up and down the Florida coast and miles out to
sea. You thought you knew what to expect, but this is louder. The sound is
tangible, hits you with physical force, vibrates up your legs from the ground
beneath your feet, scares the living shit out of you. Your first thought is that
you are witnessing a disaster even more awful than Challenger: an on-the-pad
explosion.
Then the Beast's two big brothers wake up-the giant solid rocket boosters-and
Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo all break loose together and start to argue.
The sound is indescribable, just short of unbearable. So insensate is the rage
of this new Beast that the world itself will not have it. No matter that
something the size and weight of an apartment building is sitting on its back:
it lifts from the ground on a raving column of its own fury and rises impossibly
into the air, becomes a thick growing tower of white smoke, the 128-ton Shuttle
stack balanced on top like a Ping-Pong ball on the stream from a firehose. The
bonds of Earth can be as surly as they like: the Beast is surlier, shrugs its
terrible shoulders, and slips them clean.
You realize that you are pounding your hands together and screaming "Go, baby,
go!" like an idiot at the top of your lungs, and you gather that everyone around
you is doing the same, but you can't hear any of it. Part of you wishes you had
control of your hands so that you could take photos like you planned to, and
another part is amused at the audacity of the notion that this literally
earthshaking event could possibly be squeezed through a pinhole and captured on
a piece of celluloid smaller than a matchbook. Instead you watch in reverent
terror as a utensil built by bald apes flings ninety-seven tons of metal and
plastic two million miles.
With five live men aboard.
You can read about something like that, and see it on television, and spend a
large portion of your leisure hours trying to imagine what it must be like and
thinking about what it means, and you think you get it. You're a space buff: if
anybody gets it, you do. And I suppose you do- as an intellectual concept. Then
you go there and see it with your own eyes, feel it with your own bones . .
and are astonished to discover that only now, for the first time, do you really
Get It. Until now space travel had been real to me in the same sense that World
War II was real to me, or China: I'd been told about it and had no reason to
doubt what I'd been told. Now I got it.
My automatic pilot reminded me I hadn't checked on Erin in too long; I snatched
a glance, saw her just behind me, in her chair where she belonged, and turned
back to the spectacle.
For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first
fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a
teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter
century it had been a news story-one that seemed to bore most of my fellow
citizens silly. But now it was reality-real reality; that is, the part
experienced by me-and the two million year old dream had really come true:
The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there
is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches.
In that moment, I knew, as fact, with utter certainty, that one day we were
going to climb all the way to the top. Nothing was going to prevent us. Not
presidents, proxmires, press, public opinion, economic forces, or nuclear
winter.
No, it could be delayed, but it could not be stopped. This was evolution in
action, before my eyes. As surely as we had come down out of the trees, as
surely as we had crawled up out of the tidal pools in the first place, we were
going to do this thing.
As long as we don't end the universe first, came the thought, and suddenly I was
terrified.
When Nikola Tesla had first told me I had to save the universe I thought I Got
It. Hell, I'd helped save the world, twice: what was the big deal? Glibness,
flipness, denial. Now I got it.
Sometime in the next ten years or so, I was going to be involved in something
alongside which this paradigm shifting world-shaking thing I was now
experiencing was an utterly insignificant event.
This had only required billions of dollars, millions of people, and a few
centuries of scientific advance. But for my immensely more important and
difficult task, I had access to my wife, my kid, and a bunch of rummies
personally known to me to he collectively about as reliable as an Internet
connection.
The big white beanstalk rose toward heaven. carrying a truck, carried it so high
that it appeared to dwindle away to nothing at all, while I stood there and felt
myself sweating.
I was snapped out of my fog by the sound of Long-Drink McGonnigle's annoyed
voice behind me. "Where the hell are they going?"
Low Earth Orbit, of course; what the hell did he mean? I turned to him, saw him
looking around and glaring. So I looked around myself.
The crowd was leaving.
Half of them were already gone, disappearing down the slope past the souvenir
stands and portable toilets toward the parking area. The rest were in the last
stages of disassembling tripods, packing gear, collecting possessions, clearly
about to depart. Some were taking their time about it, but clearly only because
they knew there was going to be a jam-up out in the parking lot: none of them
watched the white beanstalk anymore, and none of them appeared to pay the
slightest attention to the two speaker towers, which were still broadcasting
live transmissions.
I couldn't believe it.
Three college kids near me finished strapping up their packs and started to
amble away. I put out a hand to stop one of them. "Excuse me, but where the hell
are you going?"
He stared at me. "Daytona Beach. Why, you need a ride?"
"No, I mean. . . I mean. . . how the hell can you go?" I gestured helplessly at
the curving white beanstalk above us, and the glowing dot still visible at its
tip. "Now?"
He turned and glanced at it, turned back to me. "It's over," he said, as one
stating the obvious.
"Over?" I scroaned. "Are you out of your fucking mind? The SRBs are still
firing! It was later in the flight than this when the . .
superstitiously unwilling to speak the Challenger's name while there was a bird
in the air.
Zoey tugged 'my arm. "Jake-"
"For Chrissake," I told the kid, "they haven't even reached the first abort
point: at this point we don't know if they're going to Low Orbit or Portugal-"
"Thirty seconds to SRB separation," the speakers brayed.
"-you see? It'll be at least five more minutes before MECO-before we'll know
whether those five poor bastards are gonna live through the next four days or
not." I pointed to the nearest speaker tower. "When we do, we'll know it before
anybody else in the country. How can you possibly leave?"
He looked at me as if I were a penguin at a zoo, with mild interest and just a
trace of pity. "The show's over, Pop," he explained, and took off to catch up
with his friends, who had paused to see if he needed help kicking the old
hippie's ass.
"Jesus, what's wrong with that generation?" Long-Drink asked. "Do they think all
this is, like, a rock concert' One big spectacular special effect? And as soon
as it's off the screen it doesn't exist anymore? Is this what comes of putting
on Pink Floyd laser lightshows down at the Planetarium?"
"It's nothing to do with age," Tommy Janssen said. "Look around."
He was right. People of all ages were leaving. Even people who looked
intelligent, seemed educated. Everybody but me and my hundred-odd friends, most
of whom were looking just as baffled as I was.
"Screw 'em," Isham Latimer said. "Look up, quick."
Just as we did, the SRBs broke away.
I'd seen it many times, on film or on TV much more clearly through very good
telephoto lenses. No matter: the beauty of it struck me dumb.
The boosters pinwheeled away; the Shuttle kept climbing.
After a while my neck hurt, and there was no longer anything much to see, so I
looked down and divided my attention between the reference book I had fetched
along and the loudspeakers, translating their cryptic acronyms and following the
ffight in my imagination, as happy as I've ever been in my life.
Some indeterminate time later, I was rudely yanked back to the lower world by
the unmistakable smell of an approaching civil servant. Sure enough: a
twenty-something android with NASA patches on his shoulders. He looked harassed.
Somehow his bureaucratic intuition told him I was the closest thing to a leader
he was going to find in this group. He approached me, powered down, opened his
oral cavity, and played the prerecorded tape for this situation.
"Youpeoplewillhavetocleartheareanow."
I had been expecting him to say something stupid, but this seemed excessive. "I
beg your pardon," I said politely, "but are you on drugs?"
Confused, he replayed his tape, with an addition of his own that I took as a cry
for help. "Youpeoplewillhavetocleamtheareanowplease."
I pointed to the nearest of the loudspeaker towers. "It's almost four minutes to
MECO," I explained. The term baffled him; I paraphrased. "This launch is not
over yet. We can't possibly leave now."
Treating him like a rational being was poor tactics; the word "can't" triggered
him to go to DefCon Two. He lowered his brows the prescribed amount, swelled his
shoulders, made his jaw muscles squirm, and said,
"SirI'mafraidl'mgoingtohavetohavethisareac
"Do you know who you're talking to, son?" Omar's deep voice rumbled from off to
my left.
It's one of the interrupt codes. The kid turned toward him and waited for a
password to be entered.
"That," Omar said, pointing solemnly at me, "is Neil Armstrong."
To my mild surprise, the kid recognized the name. His apprenticeship for that
job must have been giving tour spiels at the visitors' center. The password was
valid; he had to step back down to DefCon Three.
"Sorry, Mr. Armstrong," he said, relaxing his shoulders and jaw muscles.
He'd omitted my rank, but I let it pass. He'd also forgotten Armstrong never
wore a beard, long hair, or glasses. "That's all right, son. Now fuck off,
okay?"
His eyebrows remained lowered. "Uh..."
I sighed. "What is it, mister?"
"Well, sir. .
where a few other androids were staring at us in bafflement. "We all been out
here all morning. You know, the crew. Is it okay if we-"
At last I understood. We were all at a holy event. He and his mates were at
work. And wanted to split. "Son," I said patiently, "I don't care what you do as
long as you leave us alone until MECO. That's when they turn off the big motor
in the sky-car up there."
"I mean, we're not supposed to remove the portable sanitation units until
everybody's-"
"I authorize you to leave," I told him. "If any of us shits after you go, I
promise we'll cover it up, okay?" I turned away, triggering his dismissal
protocols. He thought about saluting, couldn't decide, settled for a sketch of
one, and buggered off.
We went back to monitoring the flight. When they finally announced MECO, just
under nine minutes after takeoff, we all heaved a sigh of relief, gave each
other high fives, turned around-and found absolutely no visible sign of life but
our own vehicles, waiting in the parking lot below. Not even dust clouds
settling in the distance. We didn't see another human being until we reached the
visitors' center. There were dozens of them there, buying expensive souvenirs to
commemorate an event most of them had neglected to finish observing.
I'll never understand people. Even being one doesn't seem to help.
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