Amazon is having a power tool sale. Stock up now, before the apocalypse.
Not that great for a survivalist, though, unless you can generate a lot of power. Let’s hope we’re not going back to hand tools soon.
Actually, I already have most of this stuff. I continue to be amazed at the cost, quality and innovativeness of tools since I was a kid. It has to have been a great contributor to national productivity, both professionally, and for the DIYers. And it wouldn’t have happened without China. Another reason to hope that the (newly isolationist) Dems don’t get full control of the government.
As Glenn says, we’re going to see more people living to be this old. And as a commenter notes, there aren’t very many people left who were born in the nineteenth century. My maternal grandmother would have been two years older, had she lived, but she died at the ripe young age of ninety eight, fourteen years ago (whereupon I became a full orphan, and next in line, having no longer any living ancestors).
Of course, I take these folks’ recommendations for a long life with a healthy bag of salt. Particularly when they recommend a life of celibacy. I think that it’s good genes, and good luck, more than anything else.
There’s a reason that the flight attendant warns you to stay in your seat with belt fastened.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) today said an “irregularity” in one of the plane’s computers caused the dramatic altitude change yesterday that hurled passengers around the cabin.
I would have been all right, because I rarely get up during a flight. I probably would have had to change my undies, though.
But that’s also a reason that I’m always a little nervous on Airbuses. When you have a fly-by-wire system, you’re essentially putting control of the airplane in the hands (so to speak) of a machine.
I’ve long thought that people who don’t read, or haven’t read science fiction are much more ill-prepared for the future. Well, in the near future, we have a presidential election coming up. Here are some suggestions for SF to read in preparation from some notable web pundits.
Apparently not yet, but as far as my usage of it is concerned, it’s on life support. As the article points out, it doesn’t help that ISPs don’t support it properly. I gave up on AT&T once I realized that they’d outsourced it, and basically didn’t care whether it worked for their customers or not, and use GigaNews now.
Anyway, my biggest use of Usenet is sci.space.*, but I’ve cut way back on my participation there, because the signal/noise ratio has gotten so low, with many of the best long-time members of the newsgroups having gone to greener pastures (for example, Henry Spencer hasn’t posted there in many moons, which is a little ironic, considering that whenever I used to point out that Usenet was dying, he would reply that people have been predicting the death of Usenet for decades). It’s mostly loonytunes now, like Brad Guth and Ian Parker, and the Elifritz troll, with little substantive space policy discussion. I do think that the center of gravity of serious space discussion has shifted to the web, regardless of whatever else is still happening with NNTP.
We’re going to be hit by an asteroid tonight. The angle is such that it will just be a spectacular fireball. But it’s nice that we’re finally getting to a position from which we can predict these things. The next step is to be able to prevent them, if necessary. Too bad that almost nothing that NASA is doing is contributing to that, at least with the manned spaceflight program.
This sort of thing provides support for the politically naive argument for more money for one’s pet project, e.g., “we could do seven Apollos for the cost of one Iraq war–surely we can afford at least one.” But federal budget dollars aren’t fungible, and the political importance of various choices isn’t necessarily consistent, either, due to the vagaries of how these decisions are made. Note also that, at the time, getting to the moon in a hurry was important for reasons having little or nothing do to with space. It’s unreasonable to expect those particular political stars to align again.
Not to mention the fact that because we were in a hurry, we chose an architecture and path that was economically and politically unsustainable. Just as NASA’s current path is, which is no surprise, considering that they chose to recapitulate Apollo, rather than building an incremental affordable infrastructure that would provide the basis for true spacefaring.
My smart, funny (and only slightly crazy) buddy from engineering school, Lynne Wainfan, has decided to torment the world with a new blog. The current top post relates her adventures in wing walking. She also has an iPhone review. But read all.
