Month: May 2007

My introduction to the Bussard ramjet was Poul Anderson’s novel Tau Zero. Being an ignorant and unreflective sprat, it never occurred to me that the device wasn’t entirely fictional. I figured it was just another doubletalk drive, like “Ortega’s Torch”, or “Horst-Conrad Impellers”. Oops. When I found out that there really was a Dr. Robert…

From The Outline of History by H.G. Wells Volume I, p 367 In those days, it must be remembered, books were not in pages, but rolled like the music-rolls of the modern piano-player, and in order to refer to any particular passage, a reader had to roll back or roll forward very tediously, a process…

From Seeds of the Dusk by Raymond Z. Gallun Astounding Science Fiction, June 1938 In the distant future, in the remote desert, a highly evolved corvid confronts an unusual visitor. An invader from Mars. Unnerved, the plucky post-raven hunter-gatherer imagines the worst. But really, how dangerous could an intelligent and civilized plant be? It was…

Earlier this morning, a military helicopter flew so low over the nearby Saudi madrassa that my house shook. Dang! I wish that happened more often. The nice thing about having military helicopters flying over the madrassas is that the latter can’t sue the military because of sovereign immunity. Not so in the case of private…

From A Menace in Miniature by Raymond Z. Gallun, pulp science fiction writer, Astounding Stories, Oct.1937 The mechanism looked like a beetle made of metal. Its length was only about a quarter of an inch; but it had legs like a living beetle. It was provided with a tiny rocket, and a gravity screen, like…

An earlier post by M. Simon about the slowdown of the solar conveyor has generated an extended and ongoing debate. I’m hesitant to call it a scientific debate, because this is not a science blog, and unverified commenters are not scientists. (Why that post outranks the NASA report at Google is unclear, but hey, I’m…

I have been doing some electronic design work over the last few days in support of amateur fusion efforts. My focus was on how to make low cost High Voltage power supplies. While I was doing that I came across the really neat picture you see here. More pictures of a similar sort can be…

I found myself wondering earlier whatever had happened to former basketball star Magic Johnson (who contracted the HIV virus in 1991), as I hadn’t heard or read anything about him in quite some time. Naturally, I made certain assumptions, but then I Googled him, and saw no mention of his death. Quite the contrary. He…

It looks like some scientific disbelievers (who’ll probably be called “planet haters”) are starting to come out of the closet: Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to…

Is such a thing even possible? Well, yes, if you’re an attorney in Vietnam: A court in Hanoi Friday sentenced two attorneys to jail for spreading propaganda against the state after the court determined they had used their law offices to slander the government. Nguyen Van Dai and Le Thi Cong Nhan, both lawyers, were…

Thought is not democratic. That might look strange, but there it is. I say this because the opponents of free and independent thinking often utilize the trappings of democracy to stifle an individual’s thought. They forget that in a free society, authority — whether elected, appointed, or popularly acclaimed — does not convey authority over…

I’ve been watching as the results in the Philadelphia Mayor’s race trickle in and while Michael Nutter and Tom Knox were initially even, an early trend began to favor Nutter, and it escalated from there. Based on the results, at this point, I think it’s fair to call the race for Michael Nutter : Michael…

Fred Thompson is growing on me. Any politician fearless enough to show up for a video chomping a cigar is ceratinly worth a second look.

It looks like the biofuels guys have plans for our future. Biofuels are supposed to be he great panacea for the burning problem of the day – man made global warming. Hey not so fast. It turns out biofuels could cause food shortages. Climate Feedback tells us of the new threat. Warnings that switching to…

What is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) statement of purpose? Is the organization supposed to find the cause of global climate change and report on what can be done? Why no. The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information…

Via Pajamas Media, I just learned about a wonderful new product called “Thriving Office” which offers something for everybody: Thriving Office is a recording of office noises. The sales pitch says it all: Small businesses know they must seem successful to become successful. So they play Thriving Office while they’re on the phone. This valuable…

Glenn Reynolds linked a New York Times piece which tells me that scientists have now stopped worrying about something I had never bothered to worry about: Mainstream climatologists who have feared that global warming could have the paradoxical effect of cooling northwestern Europe or even plunging it into a small ice age have stopped worrying…

Anthropogenic global warming meet religious camp! I just received an amazing email from a friend who demonstrates that Vanity Fair magazine is busily promoting global warming with a religious theme. I thought I’d quote directly from the email (which amused me to no end), along with the pictures, in the order my friend commented on…

Last month I wrote three posts about the brutal double rape and murder in Tennessee. The crime was about as horrible a crime I’ve read about, except that there was no way to verify the most gruesome (and widely repeated) details of the case — said to involve pre mortem sexual mutilation. Naturally, when I…

Last night I read an interesting colloquy between Glenn Reynolds and a reader (prompted by a discussion of Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton dynasty politics): Reader Ben Borwick emails: “Almost all polls show Hillary losing to Giuliani so why perpetuate this hype?” But will the Republicans be smart enough to run Rudy? This depends on who and what “the…