Wow, I bet you believe your uploaded mind will be halfway to Alpha Centuri in your own personal picostarship by then too, right?
Nanotechnology might prove very useful for remediating certain kinds of pollution, making various types of industrial processes more efficient, etc., but counting on some kind of miraculous revolution to magically undue our mistakes is sheer chutzpah. No, it's stupidity. It's delusional.
Put away your Drexler books for a while and read Edward O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life, or Freeman Dyson's Imagined Worlds.
I was boggled to see, while paging through a booklet of grocery coupons in the Sunday paper, an advert for Huggies or some-such which were stamped with an image of a puffy, babyish Spidey.
Man, what a ignoble job for your friendly nieghborhood Spiderman! ("Bad boy Timothy! Peter Parker would never shit himself!")
. . . there was the aether ship expedition of 1897, but even Professor Challenger admits in the expedition log that the Explorer may actually have landed on Callisto. Sextants just don't work well more than fifty million leagues from the Sun.
What a shame that all of Nelly Bligh's photographic plates shattered when the Explorer crash-landed in Patagonia. With their lost the only physical evidence is the preserved Titanian owned by Mr. Barnum.
Years ago, I went to a panel discussion at an SF convention about how books are adapted to film. The authors on the panel had all had their works adapted.
First up was Barry Longyear, whose novel Enemy Mine was turned into a "B" movie. He rattled off a good-natured Hollywood horror story.
Next was Gary Wolf, whose book Who Censored Roger Rabbit was turned into what I recall was a rather popular movie a few years back. He was wearing the fancy jacket provided to the cast. He got to go to the Hollywood premiere and got very rich.
When he described getting to sit with Kathleen Turner at a celebratory banquet, Longyear got up and pretended to strangle him.
I last saw Pohl in '97: Wrinkled, moved slowly, bad spine, but still full of piss and vinegar. (We'd put him on a panel with Vinge about the Singularity. Pohl thought the idea was as dumb as a bag of hammers, although I believe he anticipated the idea in his 1966 short story "Day Million.")
Last saw Niven around 2000. (He was plugging _Ringworld Throne_, which would nail the date down.) Looked late middle age.
If Niven's later Ringworld stuff is crappy, it's perhaps because he's not all that interested in the setting any more. Just going through the motions to keep the franchise going.
Now, Niven and Pohl are pretty much on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Pohl was a boy communist (mostly for the dating opportunities) and a Democratic party worker. Niven . . . well, he's a Mulholland on his mother's side of the family. As in Mulholland Drive and old oil money. Niven's co-writer for many years was Jerry "Ghengis Khan was a damned liberal!" Pournelle.
At this last appearance I caught, someone in the audiance asked Niven what SF authors he think should be put on a Presidential advisory panel in the case of alien contact. Paraphrasing: "I'd have to think about it, but to begin with it sure as hell should include Frederick Pohl."
Around 1994, I wrote a little text adventure using BASICA.
It puts you in the role of a kid who has batted a baseball into an abandoned house. No combat, no way to die for that matter; you win by locating the ball and walking out the front gate with it.
I recently recreated it with INFORM, to get familiar with the system so I could do more elaborate games. You can smell and taste stuff, and there's a lot more detail in the room descriptions.
Here's the compiled file:
http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/Radley.z5
Stefan Jones
Captain Kangaroo explains it all
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 1
I was eight at the time. Grand high (vicarious) adventure for kids, yessir. I discovered an Estes catalog the next summer and haven't stopped since.
Captain Kangaroo did a live-at-a-simulator show to accompany Apollo 12. He gadded about a moonscape set in a helmetless moonsuit, showing how the astronauts would descend from the LEM.
I recall having to explain to my excited toddler brother than NO, the Captain was NOT on the moon, if he really were he'd DIE!
I don't remember much of 12's news coverage, although I recall the bit about the Surveyor, and the mention here of the fried camera stirs vague memories.
You were a good act, but the new management will not know how to make proper use of you.
I see great ugliness in your future. Bad songs, adorable kid side-kicks, B-list actors supplying your voices, and TOY STORY 2 1/2, in which your badly rendered future selves travel back in time and bastardize your second adventure in the interest of reviving flagging DVD sales.
We should have known the franchise was in trouble when Disney allowed images of the valiant space ranger to be stamped on disposable training pants.
The TVs my family had when I was a kid used tubes. So did my father's clunk old mono "HiFi" pre-amp/amp. They glowed and smelled neat and took forever to warm up.
When a tube went bad, we had to go to . . . the drug store.
There was a white-painted masonite kiosk there. It had a board on top where you could plug in a tube. There were a few different sockets. I forget how they indicated success or failure.
The kiosk had a locked cabinet where the spares were kept. I can't imagine there were more than a couple of dozen types there, and I suspect it was a lot less than that.
Daisy released a special collectors-edition Red Ryder BB gun to piggy-back on the Christmas Story fad.
My dad got one for me for my birthday. When I was like, 32.
He was still coming home drunk 5 days a week at this point. It wasn't as bizarre or outrageous a gift as the toddler's Mickey Mouse bowling set I got when I was 14, so I counted myself lucky.
Still, I had absolutely no interest in it, so I stuck it in a closet.
I imagine it might be worth money, someday, which could be handy paying for therapy.
Kids today are far too coddled. They need to play in weed-infested vacant lots where they can get a chance to play with rusty pieces of metal, weathered 2x4s with nails in them, and construction debris.
I remember dog crap playing a big part in street play in my childhood. No one picked up after their dogs back then, nor leashed them. Dog crap could be hurled at other kids, or rubbed into item which were then handed, all innocent-like, to other kids. At the Fourth of July, toys loaded with both fireworks and dog crap were a source of excitement and an incentive to great speed and agility.
To heck with your Gameboy Advances and LEGO Star Wars Episode VII sets. An old washing machine can with a little imagination serve as a time machine, and a discarded refrigerator makes a SWELL gas chamber for the final scene in Cops n' Robbers games and that actually kind of works for real!
Well, I built and flew both brands. But when it comes to cloning ancient out-of-production kits from my childhood, I build Centuri. The designs have a rakish retro charm.
Look at my recreations of an Aero-Dart, and a Hustler. These flew on honking big black-powder F motors that had to be delivered by Railway Express. I was about nine when these went out of production, and never thought I'd get 'em. As it was, I had to turn the balsa parts on a lathe and cut the decals from colored tape. (These flew on modern composite motors.)
StefanJ
Bahh, that's nothing! I get FutureFeedForward !
on
Museum of the Future
·
· Score: 1
I'm sending E*Trade a check for $10,000 this morning.
I'm planning on investing it in stocks in the gambling, liquor, and fast food sectors. (And, if I can identify any players, companies that make shit that you bolt or stick onto the cabs of pick-up trucks.)
I figure I can't go wrong with this position in a country full of people deluded enough to re-elect a fool like Bush.
You are seriously underestimating the administration's, and the members of the Bush personality cults', capacity for self-delusion, their talent for ignoring facts, and their ability to dismiss uncomfortable truths.
50 weeks out of the year they'll scratch you silly if you try to make a move on them, and when they *are* in heat you end up burned out and drooling while they go wandering around the neighborhood, yowling in frustration and dropping thong for anything with a Y chromosome.
Cleaning? Cooking?
Yeah, right.
Clean themselves, maybe, but you know who is going to be scraping the hair balls off the carpet, right?
And the way they run to your side and stare at you like you're God when you use the can opener, that's cute and gratifying at first, but after a few times you realize they're actually in awe of the can opener.
Well, before I started getting headaches and neck pain after each ride.
Anyway.
Any of you out there living in Pittsburgh owe yourselves a trip to Kennywood, an old-fashioned amusement park on the Mongahela (sp?) SE of downtown.
My grad program went there for a summer picnic about eight years back.
It has a modern necksnapper or two, plus some wonderful old-fashioned wooden coasters. Some of these are good for kids. Others are kind of exotic, like one that has tracks running in each direction that kind of cross over. Hard to describe, but fun.
Then there's . . . well, I forget the name, but it's a wooden coaster that delivered the roughest, most violent ride I've experienced. Ignoring a sign at the entrance, I sat to the left of a college friend who was bigger and heavier then me. The violent right turns repeatedly slammed Tobin against me. Real rib-crushing stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I bet you believe your uploaded mind will be halfway to Alpha Centuri in your own personal picostarship by then too, right?
Nanotechnology might prove very useful for remediating certain kinds of pollution, making various types of industrial processes more efficient, etc., but counting on some kind of miraculous revolution to magically undue our mistakes is sheer chutzpah. No, it's stupidity. It's delusional.
Put away your Drexler books for a while and read Edward O. Wilson's The Diversity of Life, or Freeman Dyson's Imagined Worlds.
Stefan Jones
Give me a break.
Here is an analysis of the "documentation" included with Crichton's novel.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=74
God damn. I forsee many months of lost productivity ahead.
Anyone in the Portland, OR area want to put together a Twelve Step group for Civilization addicts?
"Hello, my name is Bill."
"Hi Bill!"
"I would like to tell you about the time I wore Depends and stewed in my own filth for twelve hours while playing as the Mongols in King mode."
"We've all been there Bill! Go on!"
Stefan
I was boggled to see, while paging through a booklet of grocery coupons in the Sunday paper, an advert for Huggies or some-such which were stamped with an image of a puffy, babyish Spidey.
Man, what a ignoble job for your friendly nieghborhood Spiderman! ("Bad boy Timothy! Peter Parker would never shit himself!")
. . . there was the aether ship expedition of 1897, but even Professor Challenger admits in the expedition log that the Explorer may actually have landed on Callisto. Sextants just don't work well more than fifty million leagues from the Sun.
What a shame that all of Nelly Bligh's photographic plates shattered when the Explorer crash-landed in Patagonia. With their lost the only physical evidence is the preserved Titanian owned by Mr. Barnum.
Stefan Jones
Of all these pieces, I like Christian Waldvogel landscape the best:
i ta n_panorama_colored.jpg
http://www.lupomesky.cz/mirror/aliekens-titan/t
It's very evocative. Here's this probe from one world, landing on another, and what does it see?
A shoreline!
What a wonderful throwback to the age of exploration here on earth.
Stefan
Years ago, I went to a panel discussion at an SF convention about how books are adapted to film. The authors on the panel had all had their works adapted.
First up was Barry Longyear, whose novel Enemy Mine was turned into a "B" movie. He rattled off a good-natured Hollywood horror story.
Next was Gary Wolf, whose book Who Censored Roger Rabbit was turned into what I recall was a rather popular movie a few years back. He was wearing the fancy jacket provided to the cast. He got to go to the Hollywood premiere and got very rich.
When he described getting to sit with Kathleen Turner at a celebratory banquet, Longyear got up and pretended to strangle him.
Niven is about twenty years younger than Pohl.
I last saw Pohl in '97: Wrinkled, moved slowly, bad spine, but still full of piss and vinegar. (We'd put him on a panel with Vinge about the Singularity. Pohl thought the idea was as dumb as a bag of hammers, although I believe he anticipated the idea in his 1966 short story "Day Million.")
Last saw Niven around 2000. (He was plugging _Ringworld Throne_, which would nail the date down.) Looked late middle age.
If Niven's later Ringworld stuff is crappy, it's perhaps because he's not all that interested in the setting any more. Just going through the motions to keep the franchise going.
Now, Niven and Pohl are pretty much on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Pohl was a boy communist (mostly for the dating opportunities) and a Democratic party worker. Niven . . . well, he's a Mulholland on his mother's side of the family. As in Mulholland Drive and old oil money. Niven's co-writer for many years was Jerry "Ghengis Khan was a damned liberal!" Pournelle.
At this last appearance I caught, someone in the audiance asked Niven what SF authors he think should be put on a Presidential advisory panel in the case of alien contact. Paraphrasing: "I'd have to think about it, but to begin with it sure as hell should include Frederick Pohl."
I thought that was pretty neat.
Stefan
. . . how many of y'all saw the headline "Partner Robot" and assumed that you were going to read about the debut of a ErotoBot?
Stefan
Around 1994, I wrote a little text adventure using BASICA.
It puts you in the role of a kid who has batted a baseball into an abandoned house. No combat, no way to die for that matter; you win by locating the ball and walking out the front gate with it.
I recently recreated it with INFORM, to get familiar with the system so I could do more elaborate games. You can smell and taste stuff, and there's a lot more detail in the room descriptions.
Here's the compiled file:
http://home.comcast.net/~stefan_jones/Radley.z5
Stefan Jones
I was eight at the time. Grand high (vicarious) adventure for kids, yessir. I discovered an Estes catalog the next summer and haven't stopped since.
.
Captain Kangaroo did a live-at-a-simulator show to accompany Apollo 12. He gadded about a moonscape set in a helmetless moonsuit, showing how the astronauts would descend from the LEM.
I recall having to explain to my excited toddler brother than NO, the Captain was NOT on the moon, if he really were he'd DIE!
I don't remember much of 12's news coverage, although I recall the bit about the Surveyor, and the mention here of the fried camera stirs vague memories.
The real memorable flight was the next one . .
Stefan
You were a good act, but the new management will not know how to make proper use of you.
I see great ugliness in your future. Bad songs, adorable kid side-kicks, B-list actors supplying your voices, and TOY STORY 2 1/2, in which your badly rendered future selves travel back in time and bastardize your second adventure in the interest of reviving flagging DVD sales.
We should have known the franchise was in trouble when Disney allowed images of the valiant space ranger to be stamped on disposable training pants.
Farewell.
Stefan
The TVs my family had when I was a kid used tubes. So did my father's clunk old mono "HiFi" pre-amp/amp. They glowed and smelled neat and took forever to warm up.
When a tube went bad, we had to go to . . . the drug store.
There was a white-painted masonite kiosk there. It had a board on top where you could plug in a tube. There were a few different sockets. I forget how they indicated success or failure.
The kiosk had a locked cabinet where the spares were kept. I can't imagine there were more than a couple of dozen types there, and I suspect it was a lot less than that.
Stefan
Daisy released a special collectors-edition Red Ryder BB gun to piggy-back on the Christmas Story fad.
My dad got one for me for my birthday. When I was like, 32.
He was still coming home drunk 5 days a week at this point. It wasn't as bizarre or outrageous a gift as the toddler's Mickey Mouse bowling set I got when I was 14, so I counted myself lucky.
Still, I had absolutely no interest in it, so I stuck it in a closet.
I imagine it might be worth money, someday, which could be handy paying for therapy.
Kids today are far too coddled. They need to play in weed-infested vacant lots where they can get a chance to play with rusty pieces of metal, weathered 2x4s with nails in them, and construction debris.
I remember dog crap playing a big part in street play in my childhood. No one picked up after their dogs back then, nor leashed them. Dog crap could be hurled at other kids, or rubbed into item which were then handed, all innocent-like, to other kids. At the Fourth of July, toys loaded with both fireworks and dog crap were a source of excitement and an incentive to great speed and agility.
To heck with your Gameboy Advances and LEGO Star Wars Episode VII sets. An old washing machine can with a little imagination serve as a time machine, and a discarded refrigerator makes a SWELL gas chamber for the final scene in Cops n' Robbers games and that actually kind of works for real!
Stefan
Well, I built and flew both brands. But when it comes to cloning ancient out-of-production kits from my childhood, I build Centuri. The designs have a rakish retro charm.
Look at my recreations of an Aero-Dart, and a Hustler. These flew on honking big black-powder F motors that had to be delivered by Railway Express. I was about nine when these went out of production, and never thought I'd get 'em. As it was, I had to turn the balsa parts on a lathe and cut the decals from colored tape. (These flew on modern composite motors.)
StefanJ
It's a newsfeed from the future!
Really!
FutureFeedForward.
I'm sending E*Trade a check for $10,000 this morning.
I'm planning on investing it in stocks in the gambling, liquor, and fast food sectors. (And, if I can identify any players, companies that make shit that you bolt or stick onto the cabs of pick-up trucks.)
I figure I can't go wrong with this position in a country full of people deluded enough to re-elect a fool like Bush.
Stefan
Nah!
You are seriously underestimating the administration's, and the members of the Bush personality cults', capacity for self-delusion, their talent for ignoring facts, and their ability to dismiss uncomfortable truths.
Catgirls.
Fah.
50 weeks out of the year they'll scratch you silly if you try to make a move on them, and when they *are* in heat you end up burned out and drooling while they go wandering around the neighborhood, yowling in frustration and dropping thong for anything with a Y chromosome.
Cleaning? Cooking?
Yeah, right.
Clean themselves, maybe, but you know who is going to be scraping the hair balls off the carpet, right?
And the way they run to your side and stare at you like you're God when you use the can opener, that's cute and gratifying at first, but after a few times you realize they're actually in awe of the can opener.
They're quadrupeds. They can hover over the bowl.
Also, they're prehensile trunks can handle a toilet brush, so you know how they'll earn their hay and peanuts.
Making them bright enough to be toilet trained would be nice too.
I don't know about pets that literally remain puppies or kittens, though. They need to grow up a little to be trained.
Well, actually, I like modern coasters.
Well, before I started getting headaches and neck pain after each ride.
Anyway.
Any of you out there living in Pittsburgh owe yourselves a trip to Kennywood, an old-fashioned amusement park on the Mongahela (sp?) SE of downtown.
My grad program went there for a summer picnic about eight years back.
It has a modern necksnapper or two, plus some wonderful old-fashioned wooden coasters. Some of these are good for kids. Others are kind of exotic, like one that has tracks running in each direction that kind of cross over. Hard to describe, but fun.
Then there's . . . well, I forget the name, but it's a wooden coaster that delivered the roughest, most violent ride I've experienced. Ignoring a sign at the entrance, I sat to the left of a college friend who was bigger and heavier then me. The violent right turns repeatedly slammed Tobin against me. Real rib-crushing stuff.
Stefan
Kingda Ka is Hyperborean for "Spine snapper."
Or, if pronounced with emphasis on the "da," its Lemurean for "Flinger of Unrestrained Toddlers."
Estes is selling a line of X-Prize flying models:
http://www.rocketshoppe.com/images/scoop_1.jpg
http://www.rocketshoppe.com/images/scoop_2.jpg
They've since gotten rights for the SpaceShipOne design.