Science fiction has always entertained the idea that travel between the stars would be no more arduous than travel between countries around the world today. Because science fiction is basically adventure fiction, rocketing between Star A and Star B isn’t very exciting plotwise, so writers long ago imagined theoretical faster-than-light drives. Anyone who has studied [...]
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Over at Discover Magazine they have an article “How Big Is Discover’s Carbon Footprint?” that is a perfect justification for going paperless. At the end of the essay they campaign for the reader to recycle her issue of Discover Magazine, but I can’t help but wonder why they aren’t promoting electronic editions of their magazine. [...]
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Posted in Science Fiction on April 20, 2008 | 11 Comments »
What I’m really asking: Is it time to make another movie version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Blade Runner was a masterpiece film adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s masterpiece novel, but it was just one interpretation of a very complex story. I first read the novel in 1968 when I discovered it on [...]
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I’m going to kill two birds with one stone in this post. I started out researching electric cars and quickly discovered one of the best sources of information on them is Wikipedia. Since this came just after seeing a major attack on Wikipedia the contrast of the two stories is too hard to ignore. If [...]
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Posted in Retirement on April 17, 2008 | 5 Comments »
Daydreaming about retirement makes me wonder just what I would do if all my days were free from the 9 to 5 job. My biggest fear is I would become a couch potato and die soon after retiring because I’d let myself go. What I need is a good routine, a way to pace myself [...]
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Posted in Astronomy on April 16, 2008 | No Comments »
A couple weeks ago at a meeting of my local astronomy club I heard a talk about the upcoming International Year of Astronomy 2009. This reminds me of the famous International Geophysical Year when the U.S. and Russia first launched satellites into orbit back in 1957-1958 and brought about the Space Age and the amazing [...]
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Posted in Blogging, Retirement on April 13, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The title above comes from the Dylan Thomas poem and I encourage you to take a moment and follow the link and listen to it. It’s about death and dying, not a particularly popular topic for the young, but the ghost that haunts anyone past fifty. I am only fifty-six but thoughts of Social Security, [...]
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Posted in Astronomy on April 12, 2008 | 2 Comments »
There are few things in this world that has more sense-of-wonder impact than standing out in the dark nighttime and seeing the Milky Way. Now, the key word here is dark. You can’t do this from the city, so that means most people have never experienced this wonderful view of the night sky. One of [...]
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Posted in Retirement, tagged Retirement on April 9, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Remember the 1970s? You personally might have been discoing, but the economy had a heart attack. Two oil shortages. Inflation. Stagflation. Recession. Investments took a dive way before the fifteenth round. Luckily the rise in oil prices were artificial due to political influence, and they settled down to allow us to have two decades of [...]
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Posted in Least Popular on April 6, 2008 | 1 Comment »
As anyone who regularly reads my posts knows, I have an obsession about memories. This post is about remembering a NPR radio show about remembering. It’s even more complicated than that, because it’s about finding that radio show from This American Life for a second time. My friend Connell called me up a few weeks [...]
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