The Wrights first flew a controlled heavier-than-aircraft over a century ago, on this date in 1903. On the hundredth anniversary, I wrote three articles that are still worth reading if you haven’t, or rereading if you have. They contain a lot of lessons for spaceflight development.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I notice that the TCS Daily link from the old Instapundit post is busted. Here‘s another one.
I’ve got a bunch of five-and-a-quarter floppies from the eighties that I’ve been hanging on to. Even if I could muster up an old drive, with a mobo with an interface and a cable, what are the chances that they’re still readable? I hate to throw potential data (and personal history) away. I’d love to be able to hoover them up on a hard drive.
From an email list:
A guy cruises through a stop sign and gets pulled over by a local policeman.
He hands the cop his driver’s license, insurance verification, plus his concealed carry permit.
“Okay, Mr. Smith,” the cop says, “I see your CHL permit. Are you carrying today?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well then, better tell me what you got.”
Smith says, “Well, I got a .357 revolver in my inside coat pocket. There’s a 9mm semi-auto in the glove box.
And, I’ve got a .22 magnum derringer in my right boot.
“Okay,” the cop says. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, back in the trunk, there’s an AR15 and a shotgun.
That’s about it.”
“Mr. Smith, are you on your way to or from a gun range…?”
“Nope.”
“Well then, what are you afraid of…?”
“Not a damn thing…”
Often, when I mistype, unless I’m in a huge hurry and just sit on the backspace, I’ll be careful to not delete letters I’ve already typed, but move the cursor around them if they’ll be useful in the fix, because I don’t like to waste them.
Just so you know. I’m a child of parents who were children of the Depression. What can I say? I’m just frugal, if not always rational.
I’m surprised it’s that high, actually. It’s probably because I have a lot of friends, and I check several times a day. I almost never manually update my status, and the answers to most of the other questions were “no.”
By the way, vanilla friend requests from people I don’t know are generally ignored. If you want to be my Facebook friend, tell me who you are and why.
All it takes is to be a Type VI civilization.
These are pretty funny. It’s actually pretty amusing that there’s a whole site devoted to this.
[Via Geek Press]
…belong to corporations?
Jonah Goldberg points out the absurdity of it. Here’s a similar piece I wrote a couple years ago on the thirty-ninth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, on why solving the energy problem is completely unlike going to the moon.